Month: December 2016

On December 26 we went to a Chinese restaurant in Montreal. The meal was huge and I think everyone had a great night. It started around 5 pm, where Daddy drove Kalen, Mommy, some other uncles, other aunts, and I. The drive was long, about 45 min just to get to the restaurant. I even manage to take a nap on our way there. The reason it took so long was due to the freezing rain and slippery ice on the road.

When we finally arrived the restaurant, I went to go sit in a seat. After a few more minutes everyone arrived. I ended up sitting at the table in the corner. Kalen, Daddy, Mommy, Uncle Duge, Aunty Linda, Aunty Julie, and Uncle Joy also sat at the table. At the beginning of the meal, I had a lot of pop. For example Coka and Sprite so I didn’t eat as much amazing food as I wanted. Half way through Daddy made a speech thanking the elderly. Apparently, this meal was Daddy’s generation showing thanks to my grandparent’s generation. Usually, my grandparent’s generation pays. This time my dad’s generation pays. We also had this small bun with some kinda paste in it because it was someone’s birthday.

Overall, I enjoyed the meal and it was a lot of fun going out to eat with the family.

On Wednesday, December 21, Mommy, Daddy, Kalen, my grandma, my grandpa, and my aunt went out for dinner. The place we went for our dinner was Emperor. Emperor was a regular Dim Sum restaurant I’m very familiar with because we usually go there every other week.

It was around 6 pm, but by then it was already very dark because it was the winter solstice. Everybody arrived at different times. This time, everyone except my grandpa and aunt arrived first. The next to show up was my aunt, and my grandpa didn’t arrive until midway through the dinner. The meal was delicious. The first thing to arrive was some vegetables. I didn’t like that kind of vegetable, so I didn’t eat it. However, as the dinner went on, I needed to eat some sort of vegetable. Soon I reluctantly ate some broccoli. Along with the broccoli, I ate some pork, chicken, a half bowl of rice, some sauce, and scrambled egg. By that time my grandpa arrived. After the arrival, I had another half bowl of rice, some fish, and some tofu. At the end of dinner, we had some jello, cookies, red bean soup, and a special rice dumpling in the soup. Apparently, the dumpling represents the coming together of family. For that reason, I thought that the dumplings were neat. After the meal, everybody went home.

Overall, the meal was great. I got to hang out with family and eat some amazing food. My favorite food was the spicy tofu, which was delicious. In the end, the meal was great and I’ll get to see more family at the Chrismas party.

 

Today, I will talk about my experience so far with my new PC. I’ve only used the PC for two days, so my experience is low. However, I noticed right away one of the major advantages of owning a PC, is the ability to play new games. There is a lot of games that I never could play on the Mac. For example, games I couldn’t play were GTA, Skyrim, Watch_Dogs 2, The Witcher 3, DOOM, Fallout 4, Call of Duty: World at War, Left 4 Dead 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Assasins Creed IV Black Flag, Dark Soul III, Far Cry 4, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, Star Wars Battlefront II, Batman: Arkham Knight, and many more.

To test out the capabilities of my PC, I download three free PC exclusive games off Steam. The three games are Warframe, Maplestory, and TERA. All three of these game are very popular, have a huge community, and two of the games Maplestory and TERA just had major updates. TERA was alright, there wasn’t any lag and the game ran smoothly. One thing that did annoy me though was the graphics weren’t that great, but I did expect this since my PC was still missing a graphics card. Hopefully, the problem will stop once I get a graphics card. Warframe had the same problem as TERA and I still haven’t try Maplestory.

Overall, the experience of playing new games was fun. In the future, I hope to gain more experience with my new PC.

Today on Dec 11, daddy and I built a computer. I was really excited because I would have a good experience building my own computer. I would also be able to play games I never could on the mac.

We started by setting up a table. We then gathered the computer parts and tools. After that we got my motherboard and started the first steps of putting on the CPU fan on the motherboard, but before we finish adding the CPU fan we installed the CPU and RAM. After we installed the CPU and RAM, we finished installing the CPU fan. The CPU fan was larger than I expected. Once we did all that, we set aside the motherboard and started on the power supply. We started to install the power supply into the newly bought case. After that, we also installed the motherboard into the case as well. Once we knew how much space the CPU fan would take up, we installed the 3rd 120mm case fan at the top of the case. Now we entered the final few steps of building, we installed the SSD and the hard drive. Now that everything was in place we started cable management. The cable management actually took longer than expected. After cable management, we practically finish building the only things left to do is to move the PC upstairs and install windows 10.

Overall, building the PC was a fun experience. I learned about cable management, where to plug in certain things, and how the whole computer works. Hopefully, I have a chance to continue upgrading and improving my computer.

Last week I talked about why I chose my 600W Bronze power supply instead of Kalen’s 500W power supply, and this week I will be talking about hard drives.

A hard drive is a computer part that stores information. For example, my hard drive can store 1TB of information. A TB or terabyte is a number to measure how many bytes can be stored. The number of bytes that can be store is 1000,000,000,000. Think about it like this, one byte is one letter, 1,000 bytes or kilobytes is a word, 1,000,000 bytes or megabytes is a paragraph, 1,000,000,000 bytes or gigabyte is a book, and 1,000,000,000,000 or terabyte is a whole shelf of books. Now think about how many letters there are, that is how many bytes can be stored on my hard drive.

I’ve talked about the amazing storage of the hard drive but there are also downsides. One of the downsides of having just a hard drive is it takes a while for the computer to retrieve the information. One way many people fix this problem is to also get an SSD, also known as a Solid State Drive (I will talk about SSD in another blog).

The hard drive I got, is a mechanical Western Digital 1 TB 3.5-Inch 7200 RPM SATA III, while Kalen is inheriting daddy’s old 500GB hard drive. I don’t know the specs of Kalen’s hard drive, but I can tell you that my hard drive has double the storage. After I watched a few videos on YouTube, I discovered a few new things about my hard drive. For example, my hard drive might be a mechanical and SSD hybrid drive. I also learned the higher RPM the faster your computer will run (but this won’t really matter if you get an SSD), and depending on how much cache you have the more information you can have on standby making your computer run faster.

Overall I’m pretty happy with my buy because it was on sale. With 7200 RPM I won’t need an SSD right away and 64MB of cache seems alright. Hopefully, in the future I can get an SSD as well.