Building Computers

For several years, I have found myself very interested in computer hardware. I lack this interest in computer software and programming; perhaps because I tend to be drawn towards the more more physical, tangible side of many things. A couple years back, I became interested in building myself a computer. Although many people call it "building" a more accurate term might be "assembling." When I heard people talking about building computers, I originally thought they were making the small chips and circuitry. What most people mean by "building" computers is purchasing the various components and then putting them together and wiring everything up.

Building computers is becoming more and more popular. Many of my friends have built their computers, and they highly recommended it over simply buying a pc. It is usually much cheaper than buying a pre-made computer, and it is becoming a lot easier over the years. A completely inexperienced individual should technically be able to build their own computer simply by following video tutorials on YouTube. Even though it is getting easier, it is still a very delicate task, involving rather expensive parts. Therefore, I thought it was a bit too risky to proceed on my own and enlisted the help of a couple friends, Neil and Kavi, who were more than willing to build my computer with me. They had helped each other build their computers and had studied the proper techniques to install several parts, so I felt like my computer was in pretty good hands. 

One of the things I like the best about building a personal computer is the ability to choose exactly what components go into it. When I built my computer, I set myself a budget of $750. I selected some parts that would put myself just under budget. Fortunately, I was buying parts just around Black Friday and cyber Monday, and I found some superb deals. I ended up upgrading almost all aspects of my computer for very little extra. In fact, most of my parts were 15-20% discounted. The building itself went smoothly, and it was finished after several hours. At the end, I had spent $870 building a computer composed of ~$1,100 of raw parts. A pc of comparable performance would probably have cost ~$1,500 in a store, and a mac of comparable performance did not exist, still does not exist and (sorry apple fans) will probably not exist for at least five years. In my opinion, my computer looks pretty bad-ass , but I'll admit that Macintosh computers may give it serious competition (but for 3 times as much).

I am glad that Neil and Kavi were helping me though, because there were some things that I felt nervous doing or was doing wrong. For example, I was really scared to drop the CPU onto the motherboard, because If I did it wrong, it was a guaranteed non-repairable 200$ breakage. I was also scared to apply too much pressure to some things, but I was surprised to learn that certain parts require some force to put together, like pushing the RAM into the RAM slots on the motherboard. They also caught me trying to put in parts when I wasn't touching some metal object to remove static that could potentially harm sensitive electronics.

One other thing that is nice about knowing how to assemble computers is being able to add or replace extra components when the need arises. For example, when I purchased nice headphones, I needed an amp and a good Digital Analog Converter that wouldn't squander my headphones' quality. It was very convenient to know how to add in a sound card, and I fulfilled my own needs with some money and about 10 minutes time.

My computer has handled everything I have thrown at it so far, from CAD to the most graphically intense computer games in existence. Unfortunately, technology gets old fast, and I anticipate that I will build myself a new computer when I go to college (and perhaps give this one to my brother). Nonetheless, I am already looking forward to that time when I will get to lay my hands on some beautiful new parts and assemble myself one of the most useful tools of my everyday life.

Picture:

Also, in case any of you are interested in the components, I made a list of the major ones:

CPU:                 AMD FX-9370

Motherboard:      ASUS M5A99 FX PRO R2.0

Graphics Card:   Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB

RAM:                G,SKILL Ripjaws 8GB (2 x 4GB)

Power Supply:    Corsair CX600

Water Cooler:     Corsair H55

Hard Drive:         Western Digital 1TB 7200RPM 64 MB cache Internal HDD

SSD:                 Kinston V300 series 120 GB Internal SSD

Case:                Raidmax ATX295

Sound Card:      ASUS XONAR Essence STX

The Music Cycle

Today I will talk about something a little less important than usual: my music listening habits.

I listen to music 2-3 hours a day. Since I spend so much of my day listening to music, I often find myself seeking new music to keep up the variety. My opinions of songs almost always go through a recurring cycle. Typically, I strongly dislike certain aspects of a song during the first couple of times listening to them. Then, after several times listening to the song, I start to appreciate them. I become almost addicted to these songs for a couple of weeks until I can practically recite the entire song in my sleep. At this point, the song loses its novelty and I stop listening to it. I rarely listen to it for the next year or so, and then once I have sufficiently forgotten it, I rediscover it for perhaps a few days, until my brain starts to remember the whole thing again.

As far as I know, part of my little cycle is reasonably common. I often observe and hear from other people that they get addicted to songs and then after a while stop liking them (or at least lose some of their interest). Sometimes, the songs make a small comeback, sometimes not.

My music library has always seen a rotating type of pattern regarding the popularity of individual songs. When I am out of music to listen to, I go onto the internet to find some more. I will immediately take a strong disliking to most of these. I will be saddened and start to think that the world is out of good music for me. I will then reconsider some songs that I previously discarded as garbage. For many of those songs that I am listening to for the 3rd or 4th time (after discarding them as trash multiple times during previous internet searching sessions), I will start to develop an appreciation for it, eventually fall in love with the song, promptly download it, and finally, place it into my music library. I will listen to these dozen or so songs almost exclusively for about two weeks (perhaps 20 times through each song).  At the end of this period I will be entirely familiar with them and search for more music in my library. I will rediscover some of the older songs that I had started to forget and refresh them in my memory for a couple days. Then when I have them memorized again, I will be out of music and will sulkily search the internet once more.

The cycle is very self-regulating. Every few weeks, I add a dozen or so more songs, and my cycle encompasses nearly 500 songs. Logically, I should be rediscovering more and more songs each cycle (because there are more songs), but this is not the case. This is due to the fact that the songs that have gone through the cycle 4-5 times, the ones that I have re-memorized over and over, tend to stick in my memory a lot better than others.

I find it greatly amusing that my cycle greatly confuses my music library on my PC. It likes to rate my music for me based on how much I listen to it. New music always starts out with a low rating, but after the 2 weeks of heavy listening, it realizes that I have been listening to them disproportionately much and puts them above all the rest. At this time, however I grow tired of them and move on. After that, however, they drop down in the rankings until they are at the bottom. This is usually when I "rediscover" them. Thus, I am always listening to the very lowest rated songs on my computer, which I find rather funny.

History

Over the years, I have probably spent about 900 hours learning history in school, doing history homework, and studying for history tests. That is almost 40 days, over 10% of a year! I have never enjoyed history as a subject. Furthermore, I always have difficulty pinpointing the possible benefit of studying history. Perhaps this is the case because History class has often required mostly memorization, and I therefore conclude that we don't learn anything significant. But I suspect that I have a more rational reason for disliking History.

I see practical significance in almost all of my other classes. Mathematics is useful for many fields and basic arithmetic is essential to succeed in life. English is useful, because it teaches how to draw significance from literature, as well as how to convey ideas in writing. Health teaches how to live a healthy life. Computer Literacy teaches some basic useful skills for using technology. Classes in the fields of Art, Chemistry, Biology, and Drama may not be very useful for individuals interested in other fields, but they are not required beyond one year. They are meant to introduce students to the subjects. Further classes are available for them to follow up on these interests.

History, on the other hand, is mandatory for 4 years at Uni, as well as throughout most elementary and middle schools. thinking back, however, I struggle to remember anything useful that I have ever learned in history. Given that I don't plan on becoming a historian, these lessons have to be applicable to other parts of my life. The only significant activity that I remember doing in any history class was the research paper. I cannot deny that the ability to research and concisely summarize finding is very useful. Why, though can we not just have a research paper class for one semester, instead of spending year after year memorizing facts that students are bound to forget almost immediately?

Now that I question all of this, why do we even have historians? What have they ever done to improve the world, besides waste future generations' time teaching more and more useless history? Perhaps documenting failures can help us learn from our mistakes. Perhaps if our government had studied historical failures of wars, they wouldn't have decided to invade Iraq or Afghanistan. But if nobody actually learns from history, what is the point?

I understand that some people enjoy history and I am by no means intending to bash your interests. It is not for me to decide whether studying, researching, and documenting history should be a valid profession. If students enjoy the rote memorization of history class, they should be free to take elective history courses. But forcing every child brought up in the US to waste a significant portion of their lives studying history is completely unfair.