For a variety of reasons I'm buying my first gaming PC in a long, long time.  I've been doing some research and I'm somewhat settled on what I want but I'm throwing it up here for some random feedback first.  Here's an approximation of my criteria:

• Really good but not top-of-the-line

I want fast gear that'll do the trick for some time but I won't pay the price premium for the absolute latest-and-greatest.

• This will be going in my A/V rack in my living room

If you've been to my house you know that everything happens in that room.  If I put it anywhere else in the house it'll sit idle.  Therefore it'll be connected to my big screen and I'll be using a wireless keyboard and mouse.  It doesn't have to be silent - the room also holds a DVR, laptops, dogs, and cats - but it can't be a screamer.

• There are brands I like and brands I don't

I've been using Asus since the early '90s they get the benefit of the doubt from me.  There are many brands - which I won't name - that I won't ever buy.  I prefer to pay for quality.

The List:

MB:  Asus P5E3 Deluxe/Wi-Fi AP

I don't need the wi-fi functionality but I love this board otherwise.

CPU:  Intel Core 2 Duo E8600

Yes, I know that I could get a Quad w/ 1333FSB for the same price.  I'm currently swayed by the much lower power draw (65W vs. 95W) but I still might get a Q9400 instead.

RAM:  4GB DDR3-1333

Video Card:  Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB

I already have this so just tell me how great it is, please.

HD:  WD Caviar Black 1TB

No need for RAID, everything important will be backed up on my WHS.

DVD:  Lite-On Black SATA, 2MB Cache, Lightscribe, blahblahblah

Case:  Silverstone GD01-B

PS:  Enermax Pro82+

Thoughts, comments, questions?

Having an impromptu meeting in my office while I fire up my laptop and 360.

Put on some good Friday morning music – Tesla’s The Great Radio Controversy.

Fire up Geometry Wars 2 to get that blasted Treaty achievement that’s been avoiding me.

Get to 29/30 zones.

Have to go halfway across the screen to get to the 30^th.

Have a couple of baddies spawn and swerve to block my entrance and kill me less than an inch from the achievement.

Scream.  Throw controller.  Kick box under desk.

Everyone leaves my office.

Sit disconsolately in office.

Have someone walk by and ask if anyone died.

(from gizmodo)

I've never decided if the hamster wheel is a cruel or kind invention. On one hand, it keeps the otherwise inert hamster in shape. On the other, that hamster getting nowhere quickly. This LEGO elevator leaves me, again, floating in moral ambiguity. One one hand, it's LEGO and a convenient elevator. On the other...well, just watch the clip. Poor little guy. [via Neatorama]

I Can Has Cheezburger CEO allergic to cats

Consider this: Ben Huh runs a site that takes submissions of stupid cat pictures with pidgin English captions written across them. That site, I Can Has Cheezburger, pulls about 2.2 million pageviews a day. Like the HotOrNot guys — who sold their site for $10 million earlier this year — Huh is a lucky guy who's making bank off an obnoxiously simple idea. The delicious irony: According to the above excerpt from an interview Huh gave with Internet Superstar, he's completely allergic to cats. "If I pet a cat, which I can't resist, I immediately start crying. I get itchy in the face. I look like a diseased cheeseburger guy." Ben, we're oh so sorry to hear that. The full interview is embedded below.

Some people come in for trouble with Internet porn. But the computer gamers tend to be harder to treat. People feel a lot of shame around computer games. Whereas, it's socially acceptable to have a porn problem.

From an interview in the Boston Globe courtesy of the Gamerscore Blog.

Sedona's favorite new oral fixation isn't mine.  It's not Chloe's.  It's not Tyler's.  Is it yours?

Tuesday night dinner made from what was lying around.  Scrambled eggs, cilantro sausage, sharp cheddar, chipotle hot sauce, pepper, and salt on tortillas.

I made it to work in 18 minutes today.  That's unreal considering I didn't leave the house until about 8:30 and was slightly stuck behind a school bus.

<hugs new GPS>

Having a Dash Express GPS is changing the way I drive.  Yes, yes, I know I need to find a time to write a full review.  Just go buy one now and you can thank me later, k?  Anyways - today I took a route to work that I knew was several minutes slower than my normal one, but I did it specifically to populate some traffic data for a road I don't normally take.  This way the route generation algorithm will be more accurate for myself and others in the future.  LOL.

Stalkers are weird.  Some of the messages I get over Live... yeah.

I just discovered that there's a short on Xbox Live Video Marketplace called "Battle Star Galactica in 8 Minutes" that recaps the first three seasons of the show.  It's under TV Shows -> Shorts.  It's pretty sweet, actually.

Soda company to put LOLcats on bottle labels

Posted by Daniel Terdiman | 1 comment

Jones Soda is teaming with Icanhascheezburger.com to put LOLcats on bottle labels.

(Credit: Jones Soda/Icanhascheezburger.com)

I can has a break?

OK. I love Icanhascheezburger.com, and LOLcats in general, as much as the next guy. Truly. I have spent hours, in aggregate, laughing myself to tears on the site.

But when I ran across an item on the site on Tuesday morning announcing that it is teaming up with the trendy micro-soda company Jones Soda to run a contest to put LOLcats on root beer--and other flavor--bottle labels, I had to ask myself if someone was maybe huffing a little too much catnip.

LOLcats, of course, are the whimsical combinations of silly pidgin English phrases and funny pictures of cats or other animals. And Icanhascheezburger.com is the lion in the LOLcat kingdom. And I even think Jones soda can be pretty good.

The two outfits are teaming to find the highest vote-getting LOLcats in a special contest, the top five of which will adorn special bottles of the soda.

But I just don't quite see the connection between LOLcats and the soda buying community. It's not that I don't think that a lot of people who buy Jones soda also enjoy LOLcats. It's just that I'm not sure how well they translate onto a soda label. It would be one thing if the LOLcat choices were specifically about soda in some way, but because they're going to be the top-five vote-getting choices from Icanhascheezburger.com's contest, they will likely be about walruses without buckets, or tigers pretending to be monorails. There's just likely to be a disconnect.

On the other hand, maybe I'm overthinking this. I suppose it's possible that people will be walking down the aisle in their local supermarket, see the strange labels on the soda and laugh themselves into buying a few bottles.

And people do love custom labels, or magazine covers, things that bring a little social context to their everyday products. Just look at Reason magazine and the personalized satellite images of each subscriber's address that it put on the cover a few years ago.

This won't be quite so personalized, however. And that's probably good, since LOLcats definitely follow the 80/20 rule.

So will this sell more soda or raise the profile of LOLcats? I have no idea. I just wish instead of partnering with a soda company, Icanhascheezburger was teaming up with politicians to make campaign posters. Now that would be a mashup I'd like to see.

While sitting in a long meeting - the kind that comes with food and beer, thankfully - I got the following text messages from TK:

OMG first song on expert 98%

song2 99% song3 98% song4 99% song 5 97% WOOT

Does he rock or what? :P

Geek Love

Sam Potts

• By ADAM ROGERS

Published: March 9, 2008

San Francisco

Skip to next paragraph

Related

Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69 (March 5, 2008)

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.

You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.

Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of “Star Wars” from memory.

Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.

We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.

Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.

Mr. Gygax’s game allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.

Dungeons & Dragons begat one of the first computer games, a swords-and-sorcery dungeon crawl called Adventure. In the late 1970s, the two games provided the narrative framework for the first fantasy-based computer worlds played by multiple, remotely connected users. They were called multi-user dungeons back then, and they were mostly the province of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But they required the same careful construction of virtual identities that Mr. Gygax had introduced to gaming.

Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)

But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.

That was a reference to “Star Wars.” Cool, right?

Adam Rogers is a senior editor at Wired.

I was rummaging through some old memories tonight and decided to take a few pics to share.  These are some of the ones I remembering enjoying the most... more at Flickr.

Network is an all-black rescue and the most amazing dog I've ever known.  What's wrong with you people?

Black pups face doggie discrimination

Dark-coated pooches tend to linger in shelters the longest

Big, black dogs are often the last to be adopted from animal shelters — a phenomenon known in pet rescue circles as "black dog syndrome."

By Melissa Dahl

Health writer

MSNBC

updated 5:34 a.m. PT, Wed., March. 5, 2008

Melissa Dahl

Health writer

---

• E-mail

It's not like Pamela Gregg was a stranger to helping out the underdog. She thought she knew what kinds of pooches linger the longest in animal shelters: Older dogs, abused dogs, sick or injured dogs — dogs like George Bailey, the hound mix she'd rescued after he'd been struck by a car.

But black dogs? While searching for a companion for George Bailey, Gregg was shocked to see a banner on an Ohio animal shelter's Web site that detailed how tough it is for big dogs with black coats to find homes.

"It said something like, 'We know that you people prefer colors, but we've got wonderful black dogs here, won't you please consider them?'" recalls Gregg, who's 49 and lives in Xenia, Ohio. "I was shocked, because I think that black dogs are beautiful — and I couldn't believe people would not get a dog based on its color."

Aside from the fact that he's amazing, all I have to say is that my 10-year-old now has a mountain bike with a bigger frame than mine.  Gack.