As an early Christmas present to myself, I recently purchased an EVGA nVidia 8800GTS (G92), 2 more gigabytes of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 RAM, and an XCLIO Windtunnel ATX Full-tower case. Below is the story and opinions of my upgrades and purchases.

Graphics galore

The 8800GTS is the latest product from nVidia, featuring an cutting-edge G92 graphics processing unit, the card pushes the limits of modern graphics processing pontential. With 128 stream processors and 624 gigaflops of shader processing power, the new G92 exceeds the G80 core found in the $500 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra.

Room to breath

Will all that power in the house, I also decided to buy a new house for my parts. The XCLIO Windtunnel was the case I decided to go with, with an ATX Full-tower design and two gargantuan 25 centimeter fans on the side, it pumps through enough air to make "windtunnel" a very accurate description. Unfortunately the rear fan space is for a 120 mm fan and not an 80 mm fan. I have many high-quality 80 mm fans, but no 120 mm fans. The good thing is that the Zalman cooler for my CPU provides enough force to supplement the missing fan.

My latest book is "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, an interesting book that follows cryptography all the way from it's beginning to early 21st and late 20th century computer cryptography, including DES encryption and the powerful public and private key encryption scheme powered by the RSA algorithm. Also included is a short chapter about the mechanics of quantum cryptography and the power of quantum computers to break modern encryption systems. If you enjoy reading about security (Who doesn't? Sorry, bad question.) then you'll probably like this book.

When did this happen?

The people who remember esherido.com v1 might be surprised to find out that I did finally manage to redesign my site. Although it ended up being a 6+ month process to finally decide what I wanted to do with my site, I'm fairly happy about the outcome of my puny amount of effort. The following is a documentary of the process of redesigning the dead heap of randomness that this site used to be.

Discerning Direction (6+ Months)

Embarrassingly enough, it took me at least 6 months to actually decide if I wanted to make a multi-author blog, a community site, or what this is now, a developer's bored ramblings on intelligent user interface design, new technologies, why big social networking sites are horrible, and how to open cans of salsa.

Actually Making Something (1 Week)

Even more stupid is the fact that it took me approximately one week to design what I had been debating on designing/making for over a half of a year.

This just makes me wonder, how the heck did this happen?