not very many people know this. maybe in fact only some do, but over the years i have grown to despise using computers. there was a point in my life where computers was my life (and in many ways it still is today... hell there's no way i could do any part of my job without one) but there was a time when it was ALL that i did.
on a boring weekend afternoon when i would have absolutely nothing to do, i would sit in front of my computer and realize a slowdown here or there, something vibrating incorrectly within my rig, or a chance/opportunity to upgrade something that i've been wanting to upgrade. during these weekends what i would do is fire up the DVD player, throw on any movie that i could put on that will occupy me for the next 5 to 6 hours (usually Star Wars Trilogy, Back to the Future, LOTR, or Indiana Jones would do the trick) and begin to disassemble my computer piece by piece. tirelessly clean out each component and try and re-log what i have of each and determine which of the many different pieces i have would give me the quickest and easiest path to upgrade.
after determining so, then it was just a quick jump in the car, and 3 left turns later on the road i would find myself roaming through Fry's Electronics to try and determine what i could buy to achieve such a speedup in my system. Would a new hardrive work with a larger cache and a faster seek time? How about a specific type of RAM that I can tweak the read/write timings on to achieve better cycle-to-cycle memory transfers without sacrificing heat or lost data packets on my motherboard. would a new video card do the trick? how about a second one and just SLI the damn thing? maybe a new power supply will help clean up the rig and improve air-flow thus reducing the amount of heat in the computer and improving over-all performance on all parts due to a regulated temperature?
these are the dilemma's that used to envelope my life when i made this my hobby, my passion. then one day (i want to say it happened in 2008 or 2009) it all of a sudden just stopped. i no longer play games on my computer. i no longer find it necessary to upgrade my system. i have a bare-bones system now with one high end video card from 2008, and a first generation intel dual core processor that can be pretty much be put to shame by any laptop out on the market these days (maybe even the cheaper laptops at $300). I've somehow lost the passion, or rather, the wont or desire to push my system further and further down the technology train.
i think a lot of it has to do with the fact that i spend 8 to 10 hours a day in front of a computer at work. when i get home at the end of the day, looking at a computer is maybe the last thing that's on my mind. knowing that if i do open my computer my first inclination is to check my work emails or think about how i can improve something someway at work. now, does this mean that i never shut off? perhaps... but this is why i choose when i get home to not pick up a computer and do computer related tasks. i do break the mold every now and then, like when i'm managing my digital photos, or organizing my vast music library. but for the most part i stray from the temptations to turn on any computer at home and give my mind a rest from the calamities of work. that could be the one and perhaps the biggest reason why i no longer wish or desire to upgrade my system or keep up with the times and technology of today's ever-growing computer world.
secondly, and maybe just as big of a reason probably has to do with the cost it takes to continuously upgrade a computer. there is no such thing as a free lunch and every time i did upgrade a system it usually meant ebay-ing or craigslisting an item. my time, and more importantly, my money far outweighs the benefits of being able to turn on my computer each time 10 or 20 seconds faster than before. sure i'm saving 10 or 20 seconds which could add up, but if i come home and never turn on my computer, where does that actual "time saving" really come into play? time better spent reading a book, listening to music, watching a movie, playing with my dog, or doing one of my many other errands around the house seems like time better spent to me.
finally, my last reason of my growing disinterest in the computer world these days. nothing has really WOW'd me as of late. has anyone else realized that? what exactly HAS changed since we made the push to be able to fit two cpu cores onto one die? does anyone even realize what that really means? it's literally two computer chips fused together on one die with the right bridges and ports between one another to enable handshaking capabilities and share the workload between the two cores so two instructions can be processed at the same time so long as one instruction isn't highly dependent on the other. of course, it is much much more complex that what i just made it out to seem, but from a 10,000 feet perspective that is more or less what is going on. the algorithm and logic behind trying to decide what can be processed at the same time and what can't is beyond the scope of what i'm trying to achieve let alone these days with quad or 8-core cpu's which managing does start to become a difficult task. but other than multi-core chips, nothing has really pushed the envelope of innovation for me in terms of computers. where are the 3D stacked silicon wafers that will achieve faster instructions? imagine taking a city and folding it in half like in inception. All of a sudden a grocery store across the city is now sitting directly right on top of you. where is that in the computer world? when i was still neck deep into computers i remember when Intel and AMD were going toe-to-toe with one another. AMD releasing the devastating AMD64 chips that nearly crippled Intel until the Pentium-M processor came about and awoke the sleeping giant from their nest. It feels like we've hit that point again when both technology giants are sleeping. Intel has more or less crushed AMD to nothingness these days and because of that, the rate of innovation has since slumbered to the point where I have not been wow'd by anything released today. it just seems like it's taking the same product and making it faster or smaller, but at a snail's pace. where are the chips that can run at a incredibly high performance but for a fraction of the power necessary? why are power supplies increasing instead of decreasing?
i guess this whole rant has been pretty much my explanation as to why i'm an engineer who hates computers these days. i am asking, no rather, i am challenging the technology world to wow me. and don't just give me some snazzy gui interface and tell me that is "the next big thing" no offense to the innovative minds out there that make user interface and usability seamless. they have amazed me already and are also falling into the trap of rehashing. i want the next big thing to wow me and maybe.... just maybe.... we can finally have Jarvis
i know that if a genie were to ever appear and grant me 3 wishes, one wish would probably be able to have jarvis or the techno-know-how to create jarvis for my own personal home.... pretty much become Tony Stark.... now THAT.... would WOW me
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