You Have Chosen.Us

Over in my I have a new computer topic I mentioned I’d also ordered a UPS, and you’re about to find out why.

As I previously mentioned, I ordered a Promise SuperTrak EX16350 (16x SATA300 RAID, 128MB PCI-e x8) for my new PC, and I also mentioned the lack of a battery (or even the option to purchase one - that I could find). A simple solution is a UPS - Uninterruptible Power Supply. In simple terms, it’s a battery between your electric net and your device (in this case a PC and monitor). The autonomy is typically short - 10~60 minutes for your average consumer product - but then that’s all you’ll need really. It’s not meant as a device to allow you to game through a 3 day power outtage, just prevent you from losing data, allow you to shutdown your OS and - if you’re lucky (and/or have a more expensive UPS) - even allow you to finish what you were working on.
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Feel a bit like a worker orc after today. Anyhow, here’s a little list of what’s been acomplished:

• First, previous, next, last links have been coded (… but not tested so there’s an 80% chance there’s something wrong with ‘em).
• The layout has been poured into the code, formed around it. Basically I merged my static HTML layout into my php code, so from now on all my testing will be done in a pretty layout.
• Semi-decided on the 3 cylinder menu.
• Made the flash logo’s background transparent.
• Added a little Published/Added box for the current comic.
• Gave all navigation (menu, comic top/bottom) the same font face (and coincidentally, font size).
• Minor layout tweaking.
• Finished comic #4 last night.

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I’ve been working on this project for a few weeks now, but here’s a status report.

The website layout is mostly done, pending peer review. I still need to choose the fonts for the navigation (both comic and main navigation, thinking of using the same font). See the layout and some fonts I’m considering. Everything above the top comic nav bar/tower ad is still unfinished. Basically it’s displaying 3 options for my main menu (3 cylinders, boxes, 1 cylinder), and in orange a reminder (for me) of my (current) main menu links. I’m leaning towards 3 cylinder option… It has room to expand, still leaves room for a second logo to the right of it (with the name GameSphere Comic), and doesn’t leave me with ~600pixels to fill for a 2nd logo. The main logo is still incomplete. It will be flash with an animation (slightly fading halo) with an easter egg - a funny when you click it. Right now it might as well be an image though…
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That’s right, I could wait no longer. I’ve been looking around for about a month now, dreaming of what I’d do if I had the money, so I just cut the knot and went for it. There’s a few things I kept in mind: it had to be cheap (obviously some parts are expensive, but most of them are the cheapest of their kind and/or middle segment of the market), and it had to last.

So first, I started with hard drives. I ended up picking a Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS, 1TB. It’s the cheapest (along with the Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1TB drive), but unlike it’s Samsung counterpart it’s slower and/but/therefor more power efficient (hence the ‘Green’ marketing term). I’ll be cannibalising 4 320GB drives from my old PC for a 1+0 raid for my system drive, so speed is not an issue, just a lot of storage. I ended up ordering 6 WD drives for a raid 6, so I’ll have something like 3.8TB of storage.
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After much consideration, my perfect ‘next’ PC’s specifications have been decided for quite a while now:

• Quad-core CPU (or Octo-core if they’re decently priced by then)
• 16GB DDR3 memory (as I understand, DDR3 is slightly faster while requiring quite a bit less power - compared to DDR2)
• SSD hard drive (must be affordable, quick, and either ~120GB or more, or very affordable ($100 or so for 500GB))

The rest of the PC doesn’t really matter much… Gigabit onboard LAN is more than plenty, any internal 20x DVD-RW would do (or hell, I might just stick to my external 8x one - not much interest in blu-ray here to be honest), affordable (upgradable) graphics card or even my 8800GT if it’s still got decent performance (doubtful as I bought it to get 1080p (1920×1080 resolution) for current games), and on-board sound or perhaps a Creative X-Fi card for EAX…
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