The End Of An Era

I quit my job at CPUsed. Looks like it's back to sporadic consulting contracts and student life for me for the next little while!

I built a new PC for my friend Tim a number of years ago. It was an 800MHz AMD Athlon (100MHz FSB), an All-In-Wonder ATi Rage 128 Pro video card, and a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum sound card (with the original Live!Drive) all on an ASUS motherboard (VIA KT133-based). Over the years he upgraded the CPU (to a 900MHz Athlon), memory, hard drives, and video card (GeForce FX 5600), but plugged-along with more or less the same rig. The impresive thing is that he does professional 3D design and animation (I believe he works mostly in Maya). Now, he didn't use this machine for his heavy rendering, but he did do most of his work on it. Well, it's nothing too special, but I'm giving him a free upgrade this week. I was able to build him a 2.4GHz Pentium 4B system on an SiS 651-based ASUS board at very little cost to me. We'll transfer the hard drives and video card and such, and he'll have a nice little bump in speed.

I guess he was pretty excited when he heard this because when I visited him last week, he gave me a Turbo Grafx 16 with Keith Courage and Bonk's Adventure, a SEGA Master System two games built-in and a light gun, and a World Heroes 2 MVS cartridge! Fucking sweet deal :) Tim's good like that because he collects that kind of stuff to an obscene degree (because we all need 12 SEGA Dreamcasts each, right? ;) ), and he works with a local coin-op dealer. In other news, my older brother picked-up an old SNES at a garage sale for me the other day. w00t!

Oh, and I came across what I thought was a 128MB AGP8x GeForce FX 5200 card (model no. MS-8903) the other day, so I put it in my Linux box in order to take advantage of nVidia's drivers (the 128MB Radeon 8500LE I had in there was just performing painfully slow for a card that powerful; DirectX 8.1, pixel shader 1.4 support). Well, nVidia's drivers tell me that it was actually a 64MB AGP8x GeForce4 MX440... Quite the downgrade, considering the pathetic feature set of the MX440 (DirectX 7, no pixel shader support). Either there're two cards out there with with the model number 8903, or someone's lying.

Finally, I downloaded the Java Runtime Environment version 1.5.0 Update 8 the other day on one of my Windows PCs. I went back to download it again for my Linux machine as well as my other Windows machines, and all of the downloads had been changed to Update 6. I wonder why there was a two-version downgrade... Did I miss something?

Ooh! One more thing! I finally got around to picking-up the rest of the Jak & Daxter trilogy (Jak II and Jak 3... I'm not couting the PSP or racing games); expect impressions soon!