Today was the first day of class. We largely focused on reading over the syllabus and getting NEWBS up to date with getting onto Lab46, and understanding the general philosophy of the LAIR.

1. went over work expectations
2. went over what constitutes a legitimate absence
3. don't copy shit

This is a sample format for a dated entry. Please substitute the actual date for “Month Day, Year”, and duplicate the level 4 heading to make additional entries.

As an aid, feel free to use the following questions to help you generate content for your entries:

• What action or concept of significance, as related to the course, did you experience on this date?
• Why was this significant?
• What concepts are you dealing with that may not make perfect sense?
• What challenges are you facing with respect to the course?

This is a sample format for a dated entry. Please substitute the actual date for “Month Day, Year”, and duplicate the level 4 heading to make additional entries.

As an aid, feel free to use the following questions to help you generate content for your entries:

• What action or concept of significance, as related to the course, did you experience on this date?
• Why was this significant?
• What concepts are you dealing with that may not make perfect sense?
• What challenges are you facing with respect to the course?

-I chose this project essentially because I wanted a computer, but also because I had really no concept on what was on the inside and how computers work. Throughout the year, I endeavored to get all of the parts required for it, and build it, recording the process. For this, I needed:

• a case
• a motherboard
• a processor
• some sticks of RAM
• SATA cables
• a power supply
• a graphics card

• this thing is essentially the thing that connects everything in the computer. If the processor is the HQ building in the city of the computer, the mpotherboard is like the highway system that connects all of the other components. The RAM is directly connected to the motherboard, and the hard drive (depending on how old the motherboard and hard drive are) is connected to it via SATA cables. In the upper right of the board you can see the cooling fan which is located directly above the processor and its heat sink, which is connected to the fan and has to have some thermal paste applied to the bottom where it touches the processor, to more effectively conduct the heat away from the processor. Apparently mayonaisse is a decent substitute for a temporary fix if you need it (or so I've heard), but I imagine it would get kinda smelly after a while. In the bottom left you can see a bit of the power supply, which has a large fan on it, and provides the whole system with power. The wires sticking out on the side that I'm holding back in this picture connect to the board and other various parts of the system, giving them juice.

• This was the first graphics card I tried using just to get the machine running! it didn't really work out for me, but it's nice because it shows some of the components and stuff. This is a pretty basic one with VERY little power, but it can get your graphical interface running so hey! In the first picture you can see the cooling fan (graphics cards can get notoriously hot, so pretty much any one you see will have some form of cooling system, including on higher-end models liquid cooling systems so large they are caRRIED SEPERATELY IN A BRIEFCASE. JESUS. GLAD YOUR CRYSIS 2 RUNS AT 32 FPS. GOOD FOR YOU.). In the lower picture you can see the edge that is mounted to point outside of the computer. It has two ports, meaning that it can support up to two monitors at once. Purty kewl.

This is the card that's currently in my machine. It is property of the LAIR that I intend to return as soon as I get a better card.

It also apparently has a picture of a sullen Jake Gyllenhal in armor on the side.

So very sullen.

This card is substantially more powerful than the last. Combined with the intel core i5-2405s processor I've got in the system, it's powerful enough to run some games at a much better pace than my laptop (that could be to my laptop being full of shit that i've downloaded, but heyyyyy).

• This isn't the power supply I stuck with, but it's the one I started with and it's a pretty decent example. In the top picture you can see the vent for the fan. The lower picture displays the wires that provide power to the system. The bunch on the right provide power to various accessories, like the hard drive, optical drive, etc.

• These are SATA cables. They connect various accessories to the motherboard so they can get information from the processor, such as the hard drive. These ones are orange. So there's that.

This is thecomputer's more permanent storage. This is where non-active programs and files are stored. This one's older, so I think it only hold like 80 gigs or something, but a lot of newer ones can hold like 500 gigs up to a terabyte of storage. This is a magnetic disk hard drive, with spinning disks that rotate at extremely high speeds and little reader heads that are exceedingly sensitive that whip back and forth across the disk at blurring speeds. The space between the reader head and the disk is less than the width of a human hair, so just a speck of dust falling on these systems when they are exposed is enough to ruin a hard drive. This is why they are securely encased in metal and plastic. Some newer hard srtive are actually Solid State drives, which means they have no moving bits. They are basically really big flash drives. Because of this, they are very fast storage and are more duarble (no reader heads to fuck up). They do however have a limited amount of times you can write over them, so they are nice for putting your OS on because OS's don't take up as much room as, say, your torreents library, so you can buy a small one to put it on, ad it won't be constantly rewritten by your downloads.

Here's your friendly neighborhood optical drive! it allows you to play CD's and shit. Yeeahhahhahh

And a floppy drive! You never know when you'll need one of these! I sure don't! But Hey! Gotta have it! Or ya die! The computer gods are merciless!!