Sorry for the recent silence, but I was offline while I finished building my new computer. That’s right: building. Steve Jobs, Mikey Dell and Vladimir Compaq might be counting on getting their walking-around money from rubes like you, but some of us are serious people who need a project to keep us busy and distracted from a crippling hangover on a Saturday morning.
“But Rob,” I can hear you saying, “I didn’t know it was possible to build a computer in your own home! What does it take to do it?” That’s easy: hubris.
If you want to build your own computer, you start by going to someplace like Newegg or Tiger Direct and ordering a bunch of parts, but of course, if it were that simple, my dad would have a homemade flux capacitor on his workbench and no free time to call me and ask why in the world his computer would be so cruel as to threaten to “burn his CDs”.
There are six different types of motherboards, each which supports just a few of dozens of CPUs, with particulary memory types and speeds that are supported by the combination of the two, plus at least four different types of hard drives and six different types of video adapters. Getting the right parts can be a daunting task, which is why I do it when I’m completely shitfaced. Sure, I get the occassional surprise, like when I open a box labelled “video card” and remove something that looks like Angelina Jolie’s “Goin’ Out-A-Courtin'” vibrator, but for the most part I’ve lucked out okay.
Even though a single misconnected part or wire can mean you short the motherboard, fry the chip and kill the computer, the actual building process is straightforward: attach a part, have a cigarette and worry you attached it wrong. Attach a wire, have a cigarette and worry you attached it wrong. Repeat for roughly 20 connections, four and a half hours, or until a stress-related infarction, whichever takes longest.
Despite the anxiety, there was nothing like the feeling when, after I made the final connection, plugged the box and pressed power, and saw… nothing. No lights, no fans, nothing. When that happens, you start disconnecting a piece, having a cigarette, and pressing the power button to see… nothing. The power LED started at me, as dark, empty and pitiless to my failure as Angelina Jolie, right before she takes out her vibrator.
It turns out that the one part I cannibalized from an older, dead computer to save some money was the one part that had killed it. It was like losing Shirley Jackson’s Lottery, only before the townsfolk kill you they clean out your bank account.
I’m just kidding; I actually cannibalized the part because I forgot to order it when I was hammered. A quick trip to Staples and another three anxiety-filled hours and all was right with the world.
I can picture my mom reading this (Hi, Mom! Welcome to the site, and please don’t click through to the piece about stabbing children with lit cigarettes, okay?) and saying, “Well, at least he was able to put together a prudent machine that was reasonably priced.” Like hell. My day job is in computers, working with Russian hackers who were welcomed as family at the Black Hat Convention a couple weeks back. If you tell these guys you got a new computer, they smirk, put on their best southern-hick-filtered-through-Ukrainian accent and say, “That thing got a hemi?”
Fuck hemi; this thing’s got a cock. This thing is all cock.
My computer has a 2.66 gigahertz quad core – that’s right: four processors. What do I want them for? For the same reason the guidos on Revere Beach want four balls: because it makes me feel like a big man. I only wished it scared as many children, but I digress.
It’s got 4 gigabytes of memory, 750 gig of hard drive, a half gig of video processing memory, all powered by 64 bit Ubuntu Linux. That’s right: Linux, because Microsoft Vista will never darken a computer in my home. I have no use for an operating system that treats me like an idiot or a criminal. I have a mother for that, thank you very much (Hi, Mom! Skip the Retard post too, okay?).
And I know that Microsoft’s trying to rehab Vista’s image by bringing people in to try the “new” MS operating system before revealing that they’re actually using Vista, but that instills less confidence than creepyness in me; I understand they they’re going for a whole Folgers Crystals kind of vibe, but all I’m picking up is Lost Boys: “You’re eating maggots, Michael; how do they taste?”
You might be saying to yourself: “That computer sounds impressive Rob, but to my understanding, you use it to write dick jokes and look at pornography. Why do you need that much machine?” Because I am an American. I want, and feel that I deserve, horsepower. I want to step on the gas and feel like I can kick ass, even if I’m just going to work.
And being an American in an economy with four dollar gas, this is the only kind of horsepower I can have and still afford to get to work.
[tags]home rolled computers, Microsoft Vista, Ubuntu Linux, dark humor, satire[/tags]
