I have thought about building a dedicated computer for gaming ever since 11th grade. Last week, I pulled the trigger and built one.

The specs:

• Antec Nine Hundred SE Case link
• Antec Truepower 650W Power Supply link
• Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4 Motherboard link
• AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Quad-Core Processor link
• two 2GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600MHz RAM link
• PNY GeForce 9800 GTX+ Graphics Card link
• two 500GB Hitachi Deskstar HD in RAID 1 link

As you can see above, the case has a massive 200mm fan, USB ports, Firewire port, 3.5mm audio jacks and a rubber lined shelf thing for keeping USB drives and stuff in.

In addition to the 200mm fan, there are two 120mm fans up front, one 120mm in the back and one 120mm on the side. They all have LEDs that make them light up blue! ^^

Above is the current peripherals setup. I have my almost 6 year old Logitech G5 mouse, cheap Dell keyboard, Playstation Eye (for webcam and microphone) and a 1600 x 900 LCD monitor that my parents weren’t using.

I ended up naming it Anduril. I was going to install Linux too and give it two different hostnames based on OS, but I was too lazy. In a few months, I’ll probably install an after market cooler and try to overclock from 3.4GHz to 3.8Ghz and maybe add 4GB more RAM. And maybe upgrade to a baddass graphics card.

I probably had the worst luck possible yesterday. First, I grossly underestimated the time it would take to pack and move all my stuff from Schapiro Hall at 115th street between Riverside and Broadway to Manhattan Mini Storage at 107th street between Amsterdam and Columbus. After spending the better part of the day moving, I was finally ready to leave.

I finally get my suitcases and head out to find a taxi. Then I realize that it is going to be extremely difficult to find one since the Law School graduation ceremony just finished around that time. So, Caroline (who is helping me with my bags) and I head down to 110 street to find a taxi. I finally find one, but he says that he won’t drive me to LaGuardia. After a few more taxi drivers said no, I finally found one that agreed to take me to LGA. I guess I should try to avoid flights that require me getting a taxi around rush hour.

When I arrive at the airport, I find out that my 7:50 flight is now rescheduled for 9:30. Fortunately, since I now how some sort of elite status on American Airlines, I was able to skip the massive line and talk to one of the first class agents. She tells me that my flight is cancelled and that I have to take the 1:30pm flight the next day and asked me why I didn’t get a notification from them. I ask her if they can pay for my transportation or accommodation, but she tells me that they don’t do that for weather cancellations. Great, I came all the way to Queens with three bags, they didn’t tell me that my flight was cancelled, and now they won’t even compensate me?

I was too tired to really have any emotions at that point. So, I call Caroline and tell her that I’ll have to stay at her place for the night. She tells me that she is actually at home and can meet me in Flushing for a late dinner on the way back. I say okay and take the Q48 bus to Flushing instead of the M60 bus back to campus. The bus almost reaches Main St when the bus driver stops and tells us that we’ll all have to get out. I get out to find out that most of Flushing has been closed down because of a “suspicious package.” Do they really think that terrorists want to blow up a bunch of asian people?

After taking the 7 train, missing my transfer from the 2 to the 1, and hauling my bags up and down stairs, I finally got back to Columbia. What was the only good thing that came out of yesterday? These pictures I took on the taxi ride:

Last weekend was my fraternity’s Annual Installs Banquet. It was also the first time in a while that I brought along my 30D and 30mm f/1.4 to shoot some casual candids. Here are a few shots:

Caroline and I took an impromptu trip downtown for dinner.  I tried finding Two Boots, but somehow walked the wrong way. We decided to choose between mexican at Caliente Cab Co and vegetarian pan-asian at Soy and Sake.

We weren’t really in the mood for mexican. So, we walked into Soy and Sake. The place has pretty good ambiance. One side of the restaurant is lined with floor to ceiling windows and partial glass roof, that allow for a pretty good view of the street. The other side has a huge fish tank. The one catch is that every ten twenty minutes or so, the whole place would vibrate due to being right on top of the subway.

We ordered Roti Canai with mock chicken curry, summer roll, and Thai grilled mock chicken. The food was really good. My mouth is watering just from thinking about it.

A funny thing happened while we were eating. A chinese guy in his late 20s was sitting at a table, waiting for someone. Then, an older man, who I presume is his father, walks in. He looks at the menu. This is the dialogue (that I translated from chinese) that happens between him and the waiter:

Old guy: Vegetarian?! This is a vegetarian restaurant? Do you have meat?

Waiter: Sorry. We only have vegetarian food.

Old guy: [sounding agitated] I can’t eat at a vegetarian restaurant. Sorry. We have to go. Are there any chinese restaurants with meat around here?

It was so hard to not laugh out loud.

After dinner we went to Fat Cat, which is only a short walk away. Fat Cat is a place with a bar, live jazz, and games like ping pong, shuffle board, foosball, pool and chess. While Caroline and I were playing shuffle board, Ian, a classmate of ours walked in. We asked him what he was doing there, and he said he came to play foosball. Apparently, really good foosball players go to play every Tuesday and Friday. We ended up watching foosball for an hour or so and meeting an asian girl who is the amateur world champion. The amateur world champion! I didn’t even know that there is competitive foosball.

A couple weeks ago, Vinny and I made and calibrated a circuit during Mechatronics lab that controls an electromagnet to levitate a ball it in the air. Here is a video of it in action:

Every year, CSC (Chinese Students Club) holds a culture show to celebrate Chinese culture. This year’s was last week. I have to say that it was the best Lunar Gala I have seen to date. Transitions between acts were great and each act was very well executed.

The first act was traditional chinese music.

Then it was followed by a dance group.

My favorite act was the Chinese Yo-Yo performance. Vinny and all the guys did a great job. They have a tough job in front of them if they want to top this years performance.

Lion dance was pretty entertaining too. I really liked the glowing eyes.

Of course, there was a fair amount of singers.

Lunar Gala really set the bar high this year. I can’t wait to see how Tamasha, KSA Culture Show, Varsity Show, etc. will be like this year.

I thought  that my last post was funny enough that I would post it up on Reddit last night. Little did I know that people would actually read the whole thing and upvote it. This is what I saw when I checked Reddit today.

I quickly checked my site’s stats and there was a massive spike in my daily hits.

Not only did the today’s hits eclipse that of any other day. They also increased the total hits to my site by 50%. I never would have believed that my site would ever get that kind of traffic. Now to just maintain that… just kidding. Since this is my personal blog, I prefer the 30-100 hits per day I was getting before.

Yesterday, Sean and I made a short excursion downtown. We left around noon and got lunch at Teriyaki Boy near Times Square. The place has some decent curry and always plays J-Pop. The weather was surprisingly good yesterday. The skies were clear and my down coat was almost making me sweat. I snapped the following picture sometime after lunch. A hotdog cart was producing a lot of smoke that caught the light quite well.

Sean and I walked over to the New York Times building to check on the line for tickets to the taping of the Engadget Show, the main thing we were downtown for. It didn’t seem bad. Since we already had reserved tickets, we decided to spend the 3 hourse we had before the show to take a walk around midtown. We headed southeast. Along the way, I snapped quite a few shots of famous midtown buildings. Here is the Empire State Building:

The Chrysler Building:

The GE Building AKA 30 Rock:

The Pan Am Building. Now called the MetLife Building:

The Empire State Building again:

One First Avenue I saw a new Audi A4 and commented how the headlights look just like the ones on the R8 supercar. Right at that moment guess what Sean notices a few cars behind the Audi A4. An Audi R8.

On 1st Ave and 35th St. there was an interesting dive bar called the Pine Tree Lodge. I haven’t been there, but it has great reviews on Yelp. Maybe I’ll check it out sometime this year.

The Williamsburg Bridge from the north.

Interesting advice scribbled on a barrier in front of the construction site of the new buildings in the UN complex.

Protestors in front of the UN calling for democracy in Belarus.

An statue in front of the new UN building. Does anyone know what it is supposed to represent?

There was a huge flock of pigeons and seagulls above a parking lot on 1st ave. Weird.

A white bicycle marking where a cyclist died. It is pretty sad. Cyclists have to fight to survive in New York even though bicycles are the most practical transportation.

There is another Pinnacle in midtown! It seemed a little more run-down than the one near campus. A sad fact considering that our Pinnacle isn’t that great.

We even passed by the Harvard Club and Penn Club. They are places for alumni to hang out and stay when they are in New York. We went to see the Columbia Club, but sadly Columbia shares Princeton’s crappy club. Columbia actually used to have its own club, but sold it in the 70s for financial reasons.

Then finally we arrived back at the New York Times building around 4:00pm for the show. It turned out that there were still many tickets left. So, our guaranteed tickets didn’t matter.

Sean and I got free Engadget CES shirts while waiting in line. I don’t think Vinny got one because he came later and was further back in line.

We sat at the absolute front of the show. Here is the editor in chief of Engadget, Joshua Topolsky interviewing Erick Tseng from Google about Android.

This is from later in the show, when Nilay Patel and Paul Miller came to demo some of the gadgets from CES.

They showed the Plastic Logic QUE ebook reader. I really wanted this ebook reader for a while, but after hearing that it cost more than three times as much as my Kindle, I was no longer interested.

The best part of the show was the demo of the AR Drone quadricopter. It is controlled by tilting an iPhone and has onboard cameras so you can see where it is going. The cool thing is that it looks at the ground below it to sense the terrain and is able to hover by itself and balance on its own.

I took a video of the first part of the demo.

Here is another video from later in the demo that Vinny took. Skip to the 50 second mark if you want to see me almost get killed by the Drone.

At the end of the show the guys from Engadget gave away two Nexus Ones and a bunch of official CES bags full of free stuff they picked up. Sean and I didn’t win anything, but Vinny did. Too bad the bag was full of iPhone accessories since Vinny doesn’t have an iPhone.

Finally, at the end of the day, we headed over to Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for dinner.

For those of you who don’t know, some people think that Shake Shack is the best burger place in New York or even in all of America. I’m not too sure if it is the best, but the food is definitely delicious. I had cheese fries and a “Shroom Burger” which they describe as

crisp-fried portobello filled with melted cheese and onions, topped with lettuce, tomato and shack sauce

Sounds delicious right?

Last Thursday was the first Thanksgiving I spent in New York. Since I was in the city, I obviously had to go see the Macy’s Parade. Sean and I got to Columbus Circle pretty early, but I guess we weren’t early enough. Most of the streets were pretty crowded. Since many of the streets were blocked off by NYPD, we had a hard time getting around.

We finally found a decent place around 57th street. Unfortunately there were trees and street signs in the way. Sean ended up using his camera as a periscope. I raised my camera above my head to take shots, something that is pretty hard with an SLR lacking live view. Here is how much space I had.

I couldn’t get good pictures of the floats, bands, etc. but I could get some decent shots of the huge balloons.

You can see below how most people were taking photos.

Finally after what seemed like an eternity, Santa Clause arrived with his reindeer. It was definitely an experience. I would probably go again if I could get there earlier or get tickets.

I feel a little guilty. This is my first post in a few months. Hopefully I’ll have a post done this week about my adventures with manual lenses on DSLRs. And I have a slideshow below of the few pictures I uploaded.

Finally here is the second post about my trip to India. First is a picture of a gate in front of one of the government buildings in New Delhi.

Next is a sunset I captured while on the way to Jaipur from Delhi.

This is the resort we stayed at in Jaipur. It is made to be just like a traditional Rajesthani village. It is called Chouki Dhani. I highly recommend staying at it if you are in Jaipur. The atmosphere peaceful and there are plenty of fun things to do around the resort.

This is the Wind Palace in Jaipur. Jaipur is known as the “Pink City” because the whole city was painted pink to honor the Prince of Wales on his visit to Jaipur.

This is a facade with beautiful inlay work in the Jaipur fort. In Jaipur, people were required to (and still are required to in the ancient part of the city) to paint all their buildings pink. Yellow was considered a royal color. Thus, all palaces, royal forts, etc. were painted yellow.

This is the water palace in Jaipur. It was the summer residence for the king of Jaipur. I think it is now being converted into a luxury hotel.

Below is a huge sundial type thing that helps predict the appearance of constellations and such. It is part of a collection of celestial instruments called Jantar Mantar that includes the world’s largest sundial.

The Taj Mahal, a deifinite must for all visitors to northern India:

The Taj Mahal from the fort Shah Jahan was imprisoned in by his son. Shah Jahan was actually planning on building a black Taj Mahal across the river from the white one, but never had the chance since his son imprisoned him until he died.

Finally, below is the Bahá’í Faith Lotus Temple in Delhi. It was constructed in the 80s almost entirely of concrete. The building uses ventilation and pools around the structure to keep the temperatures quite low in comparison to outside.

If you haven’t seen all my photos, here is a link to the flickr set and a slideshow below.