James Chamberlin

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with computer mice for as long as I remember. My favorite mice were of the trackball variety. I loved those. I liked not having to move the mouse all over the desk, just moving my fingers to control the mouse pointer.

After a few of them died after just a short life, I moved back to the more common style of mice, minus the old-school the ball in the mouse. Optical mice have worked well, but the Microsoft Intellimice I bought didn’t last as long as I had hoped. I went through two of them in a year.

Now that I’m on a new round of mice, I elected to get a new mousepad. For some reason, the old pads weren’t tracking very well anymore.

After some searching on NewEgg, I elected for the uber-popular XTRAC PADS Ripper Optical Mouse pad. So far, so good. The mouse pointer moves much better, but I didn’t take into consideration the size of this beast. The mousepad is 11″x17″, 3-4 times the size of my previous one.

I have to tuck one edge of it underneath my keyboard. It’s that friggin’ big!

One nice touch I felt NewEgg could have promoted a little more was the fact the pad was Made in the USA. I can’t remember the last time I bought something for the computer that wasn’t made thousands of miles away in a sweatshop somewhere.

Despite Intel’s botched Sandy Bridge release, I’m still excited about them. I know the SATA problems are well documented at this point, but there’s no question that those new CPUs are great. Intel’s public reputation will be restored to a degree after those faulty motherboards are recalled in full and new ones are released.

It does have me wondering what AMD thinks of Intel’s recent problem. I’m sure they’re taking notes so that they don’t encounter similar quality issues when their new Bulldozer chipsets come out. It would have been great timing if AMD had that chipset ready to go right as Intel has announced the SATA problem and then the recall. I would imagine AMD could have gotten a few people who were on the fence about the Sandy Bridge chips to buy their Bulldozer.

I don’t claim to be a fanboy of either Intel or AMD. Truth be told, I would like to see AMD doing a better job of keeping up. During the megahertz wars, AMD caught up, but quickly lost ground when it came to what’s been referred to the core wars, where the number of cores is now one of the big differences.

AMD’s upcoming Bulldozer chipsets have garnered a fair amount of buzz on some of the tech forums, but until I’ve seen them get tested, I’m going to remain extremely skeptical of some of those claims which state it’s 50% faster than the existing chips (presumably prior to Sandy Bridge’s release). 50%’s a big jump. I’m just not sure AMD will be able to deliver on that kind of hype.

If I had the money, I’d go with the Sandy Bridge system after the motherboard SATA problem gets ironed out and new mobos are shipped in a few weeks.

But if I had my chance at a dream system, I wouldn’t go with either. If someone at Intel has a spare i7 970 or i7 980x lying around, I would love to get my hands on one of those. 🙂 They’re not Sandy Bridge processors, but they’ll still blow the doors off anything AMD has available right now and for the near future.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the fact that Intel had me drooling over the new Sandy Bridge chipset. The CPUs are incredibly fast and are priced fairly well. Today, the Sandy Bridge came crashing down due to a huge design flaw. It’s related to the SATA controller, making anything connected to it vulnerable to data corruption by the looks of it.

Apparently not being able to afford a new PC proved handy this time around. I’d hate to have to send my motherboard back because of the recall. It’s going to be a huge financial hit for Intel, an estimated $300 million to $1 billion. Eeks.

If you talk to a hundred computer users what they use for antivirus, you’ll get dozens of answers. I’ve tried my share of A/V programs over the many years and have been very happy with the free version of Avast for the last three years. It works. It doesn’t bog down my system. Did I mention it works?

One of the things I didn’t like about Avast v4 was the expiration notice. Specifically, it was a warning that covered more than 50% of my screen, warning me to upgrade to v5 because v4 was nearly obsolete.

I can take a hint, Avast. Throw up a little balloon tip in Windows and I’ll take care of it. I don’t need those big windows to pop up four or five times a day alerting me of the need to upgrade.

The best feature with v5 of Avast is the user interface. It’s a lot more convenient. Everything is slimlined. Registration can be done within the GUI and not through a web browser. I really like what they did with the interfact.

My two computers are showing their age. While they both run reliably, neither one of them is considered fast by today’s standards. Intel’s new Sandy Bridge technology frankly has me drooling, even more after seeing Anandtech’s video encoding tests.

The Intel i7 2600k was able to outpace almost all other CPUs except for the i7 980x, which is three-times the price of the 2600k. That’s awfully impressive.

I just wish I could afford it. *Sigh*

At least Intel’s got me interested in CPUs again. It’s been a while since I could say someone made a new PC component for a reasonable price that I really wanted.

Just to see what the old Ensemble guys were up to nowadays I decided to check out Bonfire Studios and Robot Entertainment and I was surprised to learn that Age of Empires Online was announced just this past week.

I’m definitely intrigued. I miss the ’90s. There were some great strategy games. Whatever happened to them? Sigh…

I’ve been using TeamViewer to connect to a friend’s PC and all of a sudden it doesn’t work. We’ve both updated our versions to the latest and still I can’t connect to him. He can connect to me. It’s inconvenient that I have to wait for him to be online at the same time because our schedules are completely different.

I wasn’t able to find much info on the web as far as support goes. The WaitforConnectFailed message doesn’t generate very many results on Google and the official TeamViewer site doesn’t have any help on it whatsoever.

After hurting my back a few weeks ago, I decided to return to the gym and see how things would go. It turned out to be one of the hottest days thus far this summer. Even though the gym has air conditioning, the owner doesn’t seem to have it turned up very high… or low, depending on how you want to look at it. The humidity and temperature were only slightly below what it was outside.

I pushed myself a little harder than I intended and I’m paying for it the day after. My chest and triceps are sore today, but I don’t regret hitting the gym like I did.

I need to get back to going regularly, however. I have done a poor job with my attendance. I haven’t lost any weight this year because of it. My time on the treadmill yesterday was miserable. I didn’t go nearly as far as I used to be able to and I have to stop every few minutes to catch my breath and take a drink. Part of that was the heat, but I’d chalk it up mostly to my poor conditioning. I’m determined to get back to my old routine and get things going in a positive direction again.

The last couple of days has been miserable. It’s been unseasonably warm for May. It’s been 93 degrees most of the afternoon and I’m absolutely tired of it. It sucks the life right out of you.

The rest of the week is going to be anywhere from 79 degrees to 88 degrees. It’s somewhat of a relief, but it’s not much.

The job market’s rough. There are a lot of people out of work and a lot of competition for every opening out there. I’ve had four job interviews and I’d have to say the last was the worst. Well, it wasn’t really the interview that went poorly, it was something that happened at the end.

I went in for a position with Sears. I’ve always loved Sears and I thought the entry level job was a good way to get into a brand I’ve always liked. The interview went okay, but at the end, the woman interviewing me said I’d be told at the end of the week or the beginning of the following week if I got the job or not. She was going to present my resume and the notes she took during the interview to the other staff members in the end-of-the-week staff meeting.

I said “okay, thank you” and left.

When I got home, I received a rejection email. What?! Not 15 minutes after I left Sears I was rejected! What happened to consulting with her fellow staff members?

My previously high opinion of Sears took a bit hit last week. I don’t know why they would hire someone who would lie straight to a potential employee’s face like that. I wish the people at Sears would do a review of the local Sears human resource office.