Pumpkin Carving

Sunday, October 31st, 2010 @ 9:04pm

I’ve never carved a pumpkin before, so I wanted to give it a shot this year.

The Carving Begins!

And the result!

The Result

A little messy, but I’m pretty pleased with my first attempt. I wanted to go with something simple, and figured that this would fit the bill.

New Rig

Thursday, October 21st, 2010 @ 10:10pm

It’s that time again, time for my 3 year upgrade! My computer performance has been a little more sluggish than I would like, so I’ve been watching NewEgg for some deals for a little while and finally bit the bullet.

  • AMD Phenom II X2 3.3GHz
  • MSI NVidia 460 GTX 1GB
  • ASUS M4A79XTD AM3

Shown below is the motherboard that I picked up.

ASUS M4A79XTD

I had a socket AM2 board, but unfortunately my old board did not have a bios update that was compatible with a newer AM3 chip. Unfortunately in addition to the board that meant I had to upgrade from DDR2 to DDR3.

One thing that I really liked are these extension modules that go between the board and various wires. I know you only have to connect wires only once or twice, but it’s nice to have some space to work.

Chips

Thankfully, having this on the board will make my return trip slightly easier. My room eerily glows blue as if orcs draw near at night, so I definitely plan on removing whatever wire makes that happen.

I’ve only had a day or two to play around with it, but I do plan on attempting to unlock the other two cores at some point and test for stability. I’ll be pretty pleased with my purchase if I can manage to get at least 3 cores running stable with a slight overclock.

5 Years

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 @ 10:05pm

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve had this blog for 5 years now. Of course it’s gone from “Jason’s Thoughts” to “Let’s See Jason’s Photos!”, but I guess that’s okay. What are some of these things that have happened in these past 5 years?

  • 274 blog posts
  • 253 photos posted to flickr
  • Graduated from college
  • Ran over by a car
  • Learned many new instruments
  • Almost 80,000 page views since Jan. 2009
  • (finally) visited the pacific ocean
  • Hit a hole-in-one
  • Bought a motorcycle
  • Bought a house

I still have a lot of goals in life to accomplish, a lot of things unfinished – but with whatever happens I’ll be sure to post it here. I’ve laughed, loved, and have been broken. I’ve tried to experience life to its fullest and want to say, give it your best shot; I can take it! I’m not done yet and I don’t plan on giving up. Thanks for putting up with me for 5 years, and here’s for more to come!