My digital camera also came again today.

Well my Creative Labs Video Blaster Webcam Go I ordered at the CES came on Friday, but alas I was still in my bed when they came at the ungodly hour of 8:30 in the morning. I'll have to stop by the Post Office on Monday in order to pick it up. I'll be sure to post a review and also some pictures of how good it works.

I'm also in the processes of setting up an order for the Video Card Cooling Kit from Mellenger.com. This awesome kit contains a Socket-7 cooler for the GPU and eight heatsinks for your memory. So far he's been able to overclock the card to 170/235 (default specs are 120/166). Not bad since with a clockrate that high the fillrate on the nVIDIA GeForce-256 comes very close to that of a 3dfx Voodoo 5. 

I'm not exactly certain if I'll get one or not, but I think I'm going to pick up one of those MC-1000 SE upgrade kits from SwifTech. I can fit the cooler on my motherboard now, but over the course of three weeks I've found that the vibration in the fans rattles the cooler apart since it is squished up against the ATX power connector. For anybody else whom has this problem, I would reccomend that you pick one of these kits up too.

As for the copper spacer news, the full-size copper has been ordered and it should be in by Monday. TigeR said that he'd have some finished spacers done ASAP. The core spacer costs $8 and the two cache spacers go for $4. I'll be sure to get mine in the next few weeks.

On the computer front it appears AMD will not be prosecuting the makers of the so-called goldfinger devices. I guess that means all of those who are making these nifty toys are in the clear. 

The copper core and cache spacers are comming along quite well--it and it looks like the current selling price will be $12 for the core and a set of cache spacers. Again, e-mail TigeR if you are interested--these will definately make your overclocking experience much more pleasurable.

Shhh!! Don't tell anybody that I got a black-market 650MHz bad-boy under my case's hood!

Now why would I want either of those you ask? This means cooling goes up since the entire core and the cache chips are making contact with the heat plate--which translates to a higher potential for you to overclock better! E-mail him if you are interested.

I've also updated the links page.

Man I got school tomorrow, I can't surf the net and play games all day anymore. I wish I was on vacation again.

Swiftech has also developed a new device called the MC-1000 SE Upgrade Kit. It repositions the place of where the fans mount to the cooler. They said that it doesn't really do much for the cooling, but the really cool part about it is that for those of you whom complain about having their ATX power connector close to the CPU, this new upgrade can bypass that problem. Another benefit is that it does not eat one of your memory slots anymore. You can bring one of these new toys home for $28, but take note that there is a four-week back order.

As for my college life, it's still pretty rainy here. You'd think you were living in Seattle with all the rain we get. It's pretty much a big mud pit down here since everything is soggy and wet. I did purchase my school books for my fourth semester today, but I was lucky to get them at a bargain this time--$239. I still think that's rather high for cost for purchasing just a bunch of books. I mean c'mon--how many of you spend $250 when you goto Amazon.com?

Which reminds me, I gotta go and see if I can sell back some of the books I used last semester. I hope I get more than the $8 back I got last time... :P 

• Computer Art: B+
• Computer Science: Visual Basic: A-
• Financial Accounting: C --well at least I passed :)
• Astronomy: A
• Calculus: B --this one was a miracle. After successfully running through the first half of this course with a dismal grade that borderlined passing, I finally got it together and pulled myself out of the rut that I had dug myself into. I got an 88 out of 100 for the final.

On the computer front I wish I still had some more free time off, but man is it ever refreshing to get back to using DSL instead of a regular analog 56K modem that I was stuck using when I was back home. I'm sure all of you whom lived in the dorm and went home for the holidays are probably glad too that you have T1 access again. 

I still haven't recieved my Liteon Case yet, but I should get it by Monday--or at least at my parents' house. I'm still going to have to wait another week for them to ship me the case since my dad is out of town. Looks like I'l be stuck on the ol' laptop again for a while.

My MC-1000 seems to be running quite well. Although I don't have any stats on how well it is cooling the core of the chip, the heatsink rarely gets above 34C--most of the time it hums along at 32C. I'm guessing the core is doing pretty good.

Here's my classes for next semester:

• Assembly Language Programming (CSCI-51A)
• Managerial Accounting (BADM-16)
• Corperate Information Technology (MINS-110)
• Intro to Athropology (ANTH-11)
• Small Group Communications (CMST-12)

I'll also post some info on decasing Athlons in a few days.

Here's a quick list of some of the coolest stuff I saw while at the show:

• LCD panels that were able to display 3D images without the use of special glasses: Very cool to see in person. Still needs a bit of work though, your eyeballs have to get adjusted before you can properly see the 3D images--otherwise it just looks really blurry...

• MP3 Players: Almost ever major electronics vendor was showing off their latest MP3 walkman. Most of the ones at the show that I saw had 64MB of solid-state flash memory and also had FM tuners built into them. Unfortunately I only saw very few MP3 players that were built to use USB as it's main mode for transfering songs. Looks like we'll be seeing parallel ports for a while longer... You can expect so see a flood of MP3 players come onto the market this year.

• Flash Memory: After waiting many, many years to see it in home electronics--here it is--solid state memory. I saw memory modules that were only the size of a stamp with memory sizes ranging from 16 to 320MB!! There were several different implementations of this fast and expensive memory--PCMCIA flash readers, MP3 Players, digital cameras and also all kinds of other computing devices. Another cool technology that I saw there too was the quarter-sized hard disks. These mini-storage devices were also competing with flash memory for use with many types of digital devices.

• LCD/Plasma Displays: These are the successor to the big fat CRT monitor you have on your desk and also the TV you have in your living room. High-defininition 1080 LCD/plasma HDTV's are the wave of the future. Watching these things in action are absolutely stunning!! The kind of video quality you get out of these things can rival photography.

• Home Audio: You've got your latest innoventions in acoustic technologies here. All kinds of speakers with cool looking designs (especially the large flat-panel speakers) populated the show floor with impressive audio output. Dolby AC-3 was a standard feature implemented in many of the displays. Also many systems were on display that were using the new Dolby 7.1 speaker standard. 

• 1394 "Fire-Wire" and USB Devices: All sorts of cool digital cameras, MP3 Players, hard disks, network devices and also computers were sporting connectivity to these new peripherals. My personal favorite was the MPEG-4 digital camcorders that automatically captured and encoded video into Microsoft's ASF video format. 

• CES Show Specials: These were one of my most favorite. Contradictory to what CNN said about the CES, things were on sale on the floor. Creative Labs was selling their introductory products at extreme discounts to those whom preordered them at the show. I picked up a digital camera for only $89! I also got the Cambridge Audio DTT 2500 5pc. speaker set for only $149!! That costs $300 at Fry's.

My only dissapointment was that AMD did not have a dedicated booth. However I did see the Compaq 1GHz Athlon-based tech demos. Those were blazing fast!

Sorry about the lack of updates for a long while but I've been on vacation for a while and I've been traveling down to my parents house and also to Disneyland for the past few weeks. I'll be back up to normal speed in the next few days...