Ben’s Blog

Just found this- you must watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmQoiuH4sqE

My birthday is coming up in a few months, and my computer is due a soup up. I last upgraded it in July 2007, to have 2GB of RAM, a high quality PSU and a GeForce 7600GT. The 7600GT is actually an amazing card for the price - you can get them for about £40 - £50, and the play modern ish games on low/medium settings with very little hassle. Older games, like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Battlefield 2142 they run with no problem.

I am looking at buying a new CPU, probably a Core 2 Duo E8400. To do this, I need a new motherboard, as my current one is AM2. I also want a full size ATX motherboard, which means I need a new case. A bit of high quality RAM would be nice too. From the cases point of view, at various times over the last few weeks I have drooled over the Coolermaster Cosmos, Cosmos S, Stacker 830, Stacker 832 and the Antec Twelve Hundred. All of these cases, however, carry a price tag of £100 to £150 - more than I am prepared to spend. Because of this, I think I will buy a Coolermaster CM690 - it has all of the nice features, like tool less drives, cable management and lots of fans, is high quality but only about £50.

PSU wise, I am completely certain that I want a Corsair HX620 - no competition. In the general opinion of the internet, one of the best PSUs out there at the moment. About £85.

That brings it up to about £135, which leaves a lot left over for me if I save up until July. I would get some RAM, but have just realised that my motherboard only supports up to 667MHz - which is no good. Scratch that.

Getting a new motherboard will cost about £135 - I want an Asus Striker Extreme. Nice motherboard. With an E8400, and a copy of Vista Home Premium for games, that will be about £350 - VERY big ouch. I have been thinking about getting an Intel chipset though, maybe an X38 or P35. /me researches. This looks good: ASUS P5K-E

In RE today, we were split into groups and given topics to present a debate on to the class. Most of these topics were things like euthanasia (Or children in Pakistan: Youth-in-asia, hahaha). Most of these debates were absolute rubbish, with neither side managing to bring up even slightly convincing arguments, and most got stuck on one single point. However, Joe, Pete and I decided to debate whether China should be allowed to hold the Olympics. Joe, who feels very strongly about this decided to argue against China holding the Olympics. Pete and I were for it. Pete and I prepared, but Joe thought that he could hold us off. Because of this, we shot him down in flames.

After the lesson, I thought I’d have a look at some information about this on the internet. China’s government really isn’t very nice, and although in the debate I almost ended up convincing myself that they should be held there, My mind changed pretty quickly.

You’ll know about all of the Human Rights issues in China, and there is far too much to talk about here. However, here are some interesting facts:

• It is estimated, that since 1949, the party controlling China has been responsible for between fifty and one hundred million deaths.
• It is also estimated that they are responsible for the torture of tens of millions

If the Olympics were in Husseins Iraq, then what do you think what would happen? There is lots of information about China and Human Rights on the internet. A good place to look would be Human Rights Watch.

Did you know, that in fairly recent days, a ship from China, carry millions of rounds of ammunition, destined for Robert Mugabe docked in a harbour in Duban? Plenty about that here.

When the IOC gave China the Olympics in 2001, it was under the grounds that China would improve their human rights. Like that happened. It just got worse. Why did China get them in the first place? That’s what I wonder. It’s not like there was much different in 2001.

I decided that I was going to start doing IRC properly this evening. After browsing all over the internet, and finding many free shell hosting sites, almost none of them actually worked. I found one called Netburst (http://netburst.zenknight.org), and decided to give it a go. After sitting in their IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#netburst) for about an hour, some nice person started a private message with me, and within about five minutes, I had a shell. I’m now running irssi on that shell, which is a server in Norway running Debian. Hopefully, I’ll now be on IRC more often.

I have installed Wordpress on my website. MGBS was fun, but it isn’t nearly as powerful as Wordpress. I am now going to try and get all of my own posts into this blog, which will be fun. Links to all my other pages should be appearing hear at some point, too.