The last time(2 weeks ago) I went out with my former teammates, Simon has with him a camera he was reviewing. It was a Kodak V610. It is a 10x camera in a small package.

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The only thing I don’t like with my current digital camera(Canon S1 IS) is the size. It is powerful alright(10X optical zoom) but the size prevents me from bringing it along(I used to have a slim laptop bag).

I finally bought my copy of Guild Wars Faction today! I will probably build a Ritualist for a (slight) change. I usually play mages(or any variants thereof). 

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 The MacBook was just released. I still prefer the MacBook Pro(kala mo may pambili). It has an X1600 videocard versus the integrated video card of the MacBook plus it looks better. 

Nintendo Wii

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don't listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal–they blog a lot–but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] was unimaginable for them," Iwata says. "And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.

And here's the second notion: Cutting-edge design has become more important than cutting-edge technology. There is a persistent belief among engineers that consumers want more power and more features. That is incorrect. Look at Apple's iPod, a device that didn't and doesn't do much more than the competition. It won because it's easier, and sexier, to use. In many ways, Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and it's betting its future on the same wisdom. The race is not to him who hulas fastest, it's to him who looks hottest doing it.

Got this from this TIME article.

Aaargh!

I bought 1GB of DDR 400 Kingston RAM and it won't work with my 512MB of DDR333 RAM. I just hope that this setup would be stable.

Lesson learned: upgrade your processor, motherboard and RAM at the same time. 

 The only good thing is that Super Pi now finishes at 51 second. Three seconds faster compared when using my old RAM. Sweet!

The Great Upgrade Ordeal

I've been trying to upgrade my PC for the last few days. I bought my a new proc(Sempron 3000+) and a new motherboard. The first ordeal was installing the cooler of the CPU. When I installed it, the brackets are a bit skewed. 

 

 I took it off and the CPU went with it. The pins are bent. Fortunately I was able to straightened them out and insert it again on the socket.

Afraid that it might be broken I took it back to the store and fortunately it was not. When I try to boot it at home it would not boot. So I took it back again with my memory and it booted. I don't know what happened there. Might be I inserted the RAMs too lightly.

 When I tried to install Windows some weird errors occured. The error said that ntoskrnl.exe was missing or corrupted. I did some repair and it worked. I was able to finally install Windows XP. 

When I ran Super Pi and Prime95 they both reported an error. I took my other RAM and now both worked. 

 The other problem that I encountered is that sometimes ntoskrnl.exe is reported missing or corrupted. I noticed that when the case is standing upright there would be an error but if I place it horizontally it is usually fine. I noticed that the 12V cable for the CPU is near my RAM so I placed it far. After that I could boot to Windows XP normally.

I would install the rest of my applications today and do some load testing. Hopefully there would be no problems.

Now I need to buy a stick of RAM since 512MB of RAM is not enough for me.  

Results of Super Pi:

Athlon xP 1600+: 1m 38s

Sempron 3000+: 54s