Off to CES

I had a wonderful winter break but the break came to an abrupt end as the usual work schedule has started to pick up. Vinney left for New Haven on the 4th, we had the 3400+ launch on the 6th and now Derek and I are getting ready to head off to CES in Las Vegas. It looks like CES will be our only trip to Vegas every year since Comdex last year was a complete and total disappointment. I have never been to a bigger waste of time in my AnandTech life, especially considering that all of the 'interesting' information is stuff I can't talk about for at least a few more months.

So I have this unwritten and unspoken (until now obviously) policy about hardware I recommend. Whenever I recommend something, or around the time that I'm starting to recommend something, I build a computer with that product in it and use it as my main system for a while. When decent motherboards came out for the original K7 Athlon I built me an Athlon system, when we started recommending the Pentium 4, I built a P4 system. The same applies for video cards; once we started recommending ATI cards I started using them in my systems. I figure that if I'm going to recommend someone else spend money on a product, I had better be damn sure that it's something I'd have in my machine. To make a long story short, I just recently put together an Athlon 64 machine that will become my PC of choice for the next short while. It is replacing a Hyper-Threading Pentium 4 that I built (as you may be able to guess) when we started recommending Hyper-Threading P4s :) The system has been rock solid thus far, my only complaint being that a 2 double-sided DIMM limitation leaves me with 'only' 1GB of memory with the 512MB sticks I had laying around. 1GB sticks are a little too pricey at this point to justify picking a couple up, but other than that I'm happy with the system. AMD has done an excellent job with the heatsink/fan and retention mechanism for the Athlon 64; I do appreciate the fact that it doesn't cause the motherboard to bend as much as the retail Intel HSF solution.

Wedding planning has since commenced and if we could only find a location I'm fairly certain everything else would fall into place. The biggest issue we're having is that all of the locations we like, require you to use their own catering services which are rediculously priced and not necessarily great food. Considering we're going to be having a fairly large wedding, we'd rather not have rediculously overpriced catering :) I visited two more locations yesterday, one of which smelled like feces - note that I'm not too keen on holding the wedding at that location.

The Spring semester starts on the 12th and it's one that I'm definitely not looking forward to. On the up side I do get to take a couple of interesting classes that I may have mentioned before (compiler theory and a 2nd level verilog/VHDL design class), but at the same time I've got to finish up these silly graduation requirements - one of which being technical writing. Don't get me started on that one, I've tried fighting it already :)

It looks like Jason figured out the issues that are causing the front page to load so slowly, hopefully they will get taken care of in the next day or so. I apologize for the inconvenience, it's been annoying the hell out of us too. Jason is also working on a tweaked front page layout that should reduce loading times even further as it cuts the page down to about 1/4 it's current size.

Welp my luggage is calling me, away I go. We'll be bringing you the usual coverage from Vegas :)

Take care