We’re reaching multimedia, baby!

After being away in beautiful France for nearly two and recharging my batteries and simply staying away from everything that looks like complex work on a machine simply called computer I built up my new media center after getting back home. And of course catching enough sleep. The hardware moved from my old ‘I-don’t-know-the-exact-name’ case to a Thermaltake Element S VK60001W2Z case which is much quieter than the one before and can hold much more hard drives. On the final stage the case will hold nine hard drives with an overall capacity of something around 4 – 5 TB.

The media center was built for two things. First it’s a simple media center for listening to music, watching movies and pictures or simply surfing the web. Got it? Yap… Secondly does this PC replace a game console. Thanks to the fact that Xbox 360 controllers also work on Windows very well I can play a lot of games while lying on the couch. Well, of course I will I use other game controllers as well because I’m gaming nerd I have special controllers for every game genre.

For gaming I use Windows 7 Pro 64bit as operating system and for the whole multimedia thing my choice fell on Linux Mint because it’s pretty lightweight, got a great multimedia performance and I just like the overall file handling under linux because I can arrange a variety of disks much more comfortable.

The hardware itself is not very luxurious but will fit the matters. It’s an AMD 9550 CPU built on a Gigabyte DDR2 motherboard stuffed with 4GB RAM. The graphics accelerator is a Gainward 9800GT and the sound will be put out through a cool SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium. By now there’s only stereo output because I don’t have a surround speaker system but this will follow within the next two or three month. I am going to stuff the machine with multimedia content within the next days and then I will finally see how it works and give it a review right here in this blog.

Straight edge 2.0

I am sorry that I didn’t wrote for such a long time and that I did not spread out any news considering my straight edge project and how it will continue. First things first, I was on vacation in France for the last two weaks, while being there I decided to continue living with my straight edge rules that exist till now. I don’t want to make any bigger changes because I think that the rules are good in the way they are now. Maybe I will change some things in the future and I’m still thinking about adding one or two new rules but it should not become too complex in the end.

I also have to admit that I was not following my rules as tightly as I have done it before I was on vacation. The reason for this is simple. When I am on vacation and when I have the rare opportunity to have some time on my own and with my beloved girl I don’t want to live like a monk. Well, of course I didn’t touch any alcohol or cigarettes and anything like that but when it comes to nutrition I had to try one or two desserts. But, hey dudes!!! I was in France and I had to experience the whole entired french cuisine.

But now straight edge continues for 12 month and and the weight I want to reach is now set to 90kg (198,41 lbs). Today I have something around 98kg so my weight did not increase drastically while being away. The deadline for 90kg is 1. October 2010, so there’s a lot of sports to do and to chose food wisely. There will be no exceptions in food like I mentioned them in a post a while ago. Everything will stay like it is now. Seven simple rules to follow and nothing else.