Warning: the latter half of this entry is full of consumerism, a disgusting amount of attention to detail to cheesy consumerism.

Well, with the help of some helpful articles like the one on techPowerUp!and CoolTechZone, I’ve gained a better understanding of my system’s memory timings. Feeling more comfortable tweaking such things, I ducked under the hood of my BlackBird 002 eVGA 780i BIOS performed a little optimization. I altered the “optimal” timings detected (4-4-4-12) and changed them to what appears to be timings that Corsair intended for their Dominator DDR2 memory (3-4-3-9).

I was feeling lazy and didn’t feel like running a real memory benchmarker tool, especially since I didn’t want to reboot and reset the timings to the old ones. Instead, I just used Vista’s built-in Performance and Information Tools. According to Vista, my memory rating has improved by .3, going from 5.3 to 5.6.

All this tweaking and all made me want to get a solid state disk, but the costs are prohibitive, and I really can’t afford to buy any new…well, any new anything. I just got a nice casual coat that goes equally well with jeans and pants, plus a leather bag from Fossil to go with it. Prior to these new purchases, I was stuck with a very professional looking leather briefcase bag and a long dressy London Fog coat. The thing with my old bag is that it’s structured. It has a frame. Because of the frame, I was unable to really stuff things into it. It wasn’t very flexible, and I really couldn’t manage to put anything but flat objects in it.Take for example, my Nissan Thermos.It’s a real high performance piece of equipment. The damn thing keeps my coffee so piping hot that I still can’t drink it when I get to work. I have to pour it out into the cap that doubles as a cup to let it cool down. Even at the end of a work day it was still pleasantly hot enough to drink.I was inspired by this month’s issue of Wired, where they had a drawing for a bag full of high end electronics. The whole thing was worth like, over $8,000. The bag itself was worth $1,600, seemingly only available at Neiman Marcus. The consumer in me (Tyler Durden wouldn’t approve) was triggered, tasked with finding a new bag to replace my Rothco canvas messenger bag for slightly dressier occasions. Not only that, but the Rothco just wasn’t very volimnous. It also had a habit of jumbling the contents around.

I’ve stuffed my much more affordable Fossil Mason bag (which right now is tasked as my writing bag) with much humbler contents: my MacBook, a yellow legal pad, a Parker Jotter ballpoint pen, a Pilot V5 pen, my two Moleskines (one lined, one unlined), and various books. At the moment, it’s Anti-Hero, The Catcher in the Rye, The Fuck-Up, and Fight Club: my library of inspiration. Rather hefty, but it sits well on my shoulder thanks to the wide nylon strap. The strap is also longer, allowing me to adjust it more comforably when wearing the strap across the chest to the opposite shoulder. I usually prefer a single shoulder carry, but the load bearing advantages of cross shoulder carry is easily felt when carrying more weight.

Now, with all that detail, you can tell I’m a really cool guy. And since I’m such a cool guy, you can copy me and be cool too, just like me.