The other morning I was listening to the Adam Carolla show (which has definitely grown on me), and coming out of commercials, they did a little announcement called "What NOT to watch on TV tonight". They listed some deep cable shows that sounded really boring and dumb. One of them, however, was the World Series of Video Games, where they'd be playing Counterstrike 1.6. I thought that might be a lot of fun to see, actually.

I forgot about it by the time I got home from work, but luckily Diana was scanning the guide and saw it was just about to start. Bonus! So I sat down and gave that a good watch. This should be right up my alley, right?

Well, it turns out that, even if you're a huge CS fan, it's really not that fun to watch. They don't actually show that much game footage, and the stuff that they do show is really awkward. CS is such a fast paced game that it's pretty tough to capture it adequately. Most of the show is filler interviews with players and coaches, and a lot of glitz and glam to make it seem like I'm watching a Real Sporting Event.

I was disappointed. And I don't think that bodes too well.

Speaking of computers, I built my new hot-rod machine last night. I've been wanted to start from scratch and build a whole new system for quite a while now, and recently was helped out by the fact that my old computer died (power supply). So, being a true computer nerd I bought a bunch of individual pieces from NewEgg.com (motherboard, CPU, RAM, CPU fan, video card, case, power supply) and put it all together last night. It was a little tricky here and there, but actually went remarkably smoothly.

I powered up with my existing hard drive for the first time, and Windows was pretty pissed. But after I got all the new drivers installed, everything seems good. The hard drive is definitely the slowest link of the chain, in terms of loading up Windows and running applications. But I did some speed tests in graphic heavy games (notably in Company of Heroes), and it kicked ass.

It's, um, also good for like, programming and word processing and stuff too.

I've read a bit about 10,000 RPM hard drives, and apparently they make such a big difference that once you use one, you never go back. Definitely the hard drive access is the slowest link in the chain at this point, so if I were truly making a dream system, I'd get one of those. And a nice big flat panel monitor. Maybe I'll ask Santa.