The Spring '08 semester has finally drawn to a close. I'm so glad I'll be able to go back to getting reasonable amounts of sleep, and not going to school for several hours a day, then working close to 40 hours a week as well. I'll be much happier being able to split my time between BIOSLEVEL.com and Buffalo Wild Wings.

For BIOSLEVEL, Sapphire recently sent us new AMD 780G chipset motherboard, Radeon HD3450, and an overclocked Radeon HD3870. Between the motherboard and Radeon HD3870, there's a pretty powerful machine just waiting to be powered. Several companies sent us additional parts for the review, which included 2GB of RAM, a quad-core Phenom CPU, and a slew of heatsinks. The reviews of the motherboard and videocard have been posted, and I've got several reviews lined up for the donated components as well. I'm just amazed at the piled of stuff that was shipped to us to power the motherboard.

Simply put, I'm surprised at how well the motherboard's ATI-based integrated graphics performed in Linux. This won't be a motherboard I let out of my sight anytime soon. Since my last final on Wednesday, I've completed an entire two reviews in a single 24-hour period. It's so ridiculously nice to have time away from school again.

Maybe this'll finally be that summer I do something truly productive (and profitable). I've got all the ideas lined up, but do I have the time or motivation to do it? Time will tell.

For the uninitiated, I work at a Buffalo Wild Wings as a Shift Leader, Bar Tender, Server, and Cook. Depending on the day, you may find me doing everything at once. Regardless, I never stop being surprised at some of the folk I meet.

I've been the regular bartender Sunday mornings for the last year. In that time, I've gotten to know a lot of regulars that I may not see around other days. Despite the usual chats about sports and local events, I only know what a handful of these people do for a living. This past Sunday, I discovered one of them to be a recruiter for none other than Microsoft.

Mind you, the guy isn't a programmer. He's a people person that typically recruits from the industry. He moved to the Pittsburgh area only a year ago to be a little closer to his wife's family, but now he's looking to move back to his hometown, Atlanta. He wasn't sure when he was moving back, but he made sure I had his phone number and the like.

While talking about my own interests and aspirations, I was careful not to bring up Linux or the like of open source software. I don't necessarily want to work for Microsoft once I graduate, but I also don't care to hurt my chances with a potential employer.

I don't see myself ever working for Microsoft.

It's been a few weeks since I last wrote anything, and I do apologize. Life's been really busy lately, but I think I'm finally getting things under control again. This semester at school has been unreasonably busy, despite dropping my 6th class at the beginning of the semester. I can only imagine what things would have been like if I haven't done that.

Pittco was held on March 15th and 16th. The last few weeks leading up to the event were spent busily working out the last few kinks. Naturally, there were plenty of kinks to work out at the event itself. We changed our registration systems, but never realized that we'd have to change our check-in script as well. I wrote a brand new script 15 minutes before we began letting attendees in to the hall (actually, we had to delay check-in by about 10 minutes =P). You can read my full review of Iron Storm 8 at BIOSLEVEL.

BIOSLEVEL is what sucks up the most of my free time. I'm behind on some of my reviews, and others are just waiting for someone to edit them. I have some cool, new products coming in the next few weeks, and I'm just glad that Colin's going to be taking care of at least one of these (even if it is frickin' sweet, and I wish I was able to review it).

I'm going to try and find the time to write in here more, but there's so much going on in terms of my personal projects and school, that I can't find the time anymore.

I was installing a new motherboard in to my desktop today, and I was excited. I'd finally be able to utilize 4GB of RAM, removing any issues I'd previously had. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite expecting the issues I was going to run into, but I should have.

After putting the machine back together, the only thing left to do was turn the machine back on and make sure everything still worked. I made some changes in the BIOS, then proceeded to boot to Vista. Enter the wonderful blue screen of death.

So, after trying the repair utilities on the Vista DVD with no result, I made more changes in the BIOS. I finally managed to get Vista to boot after I changed the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE. AHCI allows me to hotplug drives, which is important for the eSATA port on the back of the PC. Additionally, I discovered that the motherboard didn't support the full range of SATA/II features unless the drives were running in either RAID or AHCI mode, and yet Vista would only boot in IDE mode. This is unacceptable.

I've switched motherboards with Vista once before with no issue, so I was assuming this change would go smoothly as well. I guess I was wrong, falling into the gambler's fallacy. This time pissed me off a little more, making me look into certain motherboard features more. I'm not getting my performance from the hardware I use by leaving Vista the way it is, as I have things such as AHCI disabled.

In the next week or so, I'm going to install Linux on my desktop after I've backed up all the content of my Vista install. I've come to the decision that I'm finished using Vista as my primary platform. The two games I play the most, World of Warcraft and Unreal Tournament 2004, both play in Linux without much hassle. Unreal Tournament 3 should be released for Linux in the near future as well, so I don't think I will have much issue migrating to Linux once again. I'll keep around at least one machine that still runs on Windows, just for review purposes. For me, however, Linux it is.

That's right, I've got one more week of class before spring break. With my Thursday class canceled, it's not even a full week! I've had so little free time since this semester started, and that which I did have has mostly been taken up by writing reviews for BIOSLEVEL.

Speaking of BIOSLEVEL, the site has definitely come a long way. Earlier this week, I had a whopping 6 products arrive at my door on the same day to review. This is one of the many reasons I can't wait for Spring break. I need more time to benchmark products and an equal amount of time to write the review.

Linux!

I've also been in a Linux slump, as I've been without a dedicated Linux machine for a little over a month. Whenever the need to use Linux for a review has come up, I've had to rely on using an Ubuntu LiveCD. This isn't the best option for testing performance, and I'd be in for some trouble if I had to test any software in-depth.

I plan to correct this "issue" by replacing OS X on my MacBook with Gentoo, and also re-assembling my server. It's kind of exciting to think I'll have a working Linux box again. Hopefully I'll finally get around to re-installing MythTV for the machine as well, so I'll have a media center to record my shows when I'm out.

Blog!

Of course, I'll also try to post more entries over spring break. My readership has dropped to almost nothing compared to what it used to get. It's just really hard to find the time to sit and write an entry right now. I promise I'll fix it. =D