This is a cool product. Well not really. I grabbed one because I need it to mount an SSD in a hot swap bay. It’s a useful product though, I’ll give it that.

Today I unbox… A disc!

But it’s an important disc. Today was my first encounter with a retail copy of Windows 7.

One of the users on the NCIX Gaming Steam group has been talking about his ongoing NES PC build for quite some time and I promised him that if it was cool enough I’d post it up on my blog.

After many weeks of “should I order this” and “this piece is coming” he finally sent me a few (30MB… Ever heard of resizing, dude?) pictures of his build so here they are.

He went with an nVidia ION platform because this is intended to be HD ready and able to playback Blu-Ray movies (hence the blu-ray drive). It’s a ghetto mod, but a very cool little project. He (and I) hopes you like it.

I can’t actually decide how useful this is. 2 monitors is phenomenal for work because you can have what you’re working on on the main screen and then something that you’re referencing on the secondary one. My old setup was 1×24″ and 1×17″. I noticed after the computer workshop that a couple of the monitors that I had found lying around matched the other 17″ I had, so I grabbed them temporarily to try out a 4 monitor setup. It’s pretty sweet, but my neck is a little sore by the end of the day!

Well I think it’s safe to call the event a success. Everyone had a really good time, and despite the fact that it made me tired, we managed to get the PCs built, got Windows installed, and we even found time to eat the pizza. Here are some pics from the event. We’ve got another tentatively planned for August 8th (and moving forward we’ll have a schedule of the second Saturday of each month).

Not sure if anyone hasn’t heard about this already, but Hardware Canucks is holding a “post your dream $2000 shopping spree” contest that is sponsored by NCIX. Check it out here:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/dreamit_winit/

From what I hear there aren’t too many people in the contest yet, so your odds of winning that $2000 worth of stuff are pretty good…

It’s been a heck of a day. Got up early and picked up the Cameraman, then I headed to our Vancouver store to get some last minute hardware that he didn’t have in stock at our warehouse for one of the customers, set everything up (10 build stations), then people started arriving, we built some PCs, ate some pizza, then we packed up and left.

I make it sound really simple… It wasn’t. A couple people weren’t able to make it on time so we had to rush those ones a little bit and I felt bad about that, but what can you do? We had two random guys show up and take pizza and SWAG then leave after I gave them some T-shirts… That was pretty annoying. Next time security will have to be tighter. We encountered a couple of random issues like not having a USB keyboard for the guy with no legacy ports on his board and we had a guy who’s pins were bent on this motherboard, but I used my mad ninja skills to fix it and his computer was ready to go before the end!

Overall it was the longest, most stressful work day ever (and I said the same thing yesterday after preparing for this thing), I’m exhausted, but it was totally worth it because it seemed like everyone had a good time.

It turns out trying to fit such a large van in a normal sized garage is harder than you’d think. I had to fold back both mirrors and push up against the box containing a clothesdryer, then apply to e-brake to avoid lurching backwards too far and causing the garage door to open. Even then I had to hold down the shiny insulation while the door was closing to keep it from getting snagged on the rear bumper.

I actually had to remove hardware from the garage door opener because I needed that extra 2″ of clearance. Here’s some pics, haha.

I think we can all agree that as far as good quality fan manufacturers go, Noctua is in a league of their own in terms of ugliness. I made a discovery when I was trying to equip a PC with some Noctua fans that I’ve accumulated over the last couple of years though… There are at least 3 different colour schemes for them! All hideous, mind you, but all different.

The crazy thing about this is that I only OWN three Noctua fans. They were purchased at least a few months apart each, but you can clearly see that one has a white frame while the others have beige frames, and one has maroon blades while the other two have brown blades.

I realize this isn’t a car blog, and it’s not the first time I’ve posted about the ub3r Civic, but I was pretty annoyed by the situation I found myself in fairly recently. I woke up in the morning to go to work and found my passenger side window smashed in. The theif took a 5+ year old bottom of the barrel JVC deck faceplate (not even the whole thing) and left everything else including the video card, wireless card, Sony deck in my trunk, change in my ashtray, etc. I mean, seriously! It’s like breaking into someone’s house just to steal the right foot of all of their flipflops. They’re not valuable. They’re not useful to you, and now they’re not useful to me.

Fortunately the total cost was $200 for the window and labour from Boyd (thanks guys) and $50 to install the Sony deck I’ve been meaning to put in FOREVER because I’m a lazy SOB… It just grinds my gears when stuff like this happens. Especially to me!