Aikido = Da shiz!

I started taking an Aikido class at the campus a few weeks ago, and I'm having a blast. We have begun learning how to take a rolling fall, and we are learning to use Jo's (staves). We also recently learned a new "move" for dropping a person to their knees using a grapple on the arms. It's a fun way to keep in shape, and I'm learning really great stuff.

Dell PCs No Longer Worth a Damn

I've been a long time Dell user. I got my first Dell back in 1997, and up until recently I have stood by them as being a good solid PC. Certainly they were never the fastest or the prettiest, but you could rely on them. Flash ahead to last year when I purchased my nth Dell PC: A Pentium D, 3.00 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM, an nVidia GEForce 6800, and the rest of the usual stuff. Out of the box the PC is far prettier than any of the past incarnations that I had, but it is also a lot cheaper feeling: the case is entirely plastic as opposed to a metal frame. The clamshell design is nice, but because it's entirely plastic it can be a PITA getting the damn thing closed and locked again. That is not the worst of it though.

I updated a few things in the BIOS of the machine, including a setting that had to do with allowing boots from USB devices. Well the next thing I know the PC is not booting up any more: it's not even getting to the boot options screen. After a lot of system test and such (all of which the machine passed), I call Dell and have them ship me a new machine. It arrives, I make the same changes and lo, the exact same behaviour arises. I reset the BIOS settings and the thing starts booting up (somewhat) normally. It ended up being the allow bootup from USB option that was the problem. Okay, fine, don't ever bootup from USB: I still think that if the POS can't do it, don't make it an option in the BIOS.

That's not all, though! Shortly after that I discover that if I dare to leave a disc in either of my DVD drives, the system locks up as it did with that BIOS setting. Take the disc out, hard boot the thing a few times and eventually it boots up. Okay, fine. But, now the fucking thing is locking up on boot with no disc in the drive. I figure that I just have a POS DVD ROM, which fortunately is not that big a deal; it really chokes me that I have to get a replacement drive though. And I am not going to bother getting it under warranty, because the twats over at Dell will force me to run hours worth of diagnostics before they'll ship me a new drive, and well, I just have better things to do.

Further to all this is the new Dell that my brother bought. Pretty much the same system as mine, but with a GEForce 7800. He has had nothing but problems with that piece of cow turd. First the video card crapped out, and then the DVD ROM crapped out. I wonder how long it will be before my video card dies. I have concluded that Dell has fallen back to their old ways (circa the early 90s), in which they package such cheap crap parts in their machines that nobody wants them any more. Personally, my next PC will NOT be a Dell. I have had decenct luck with my Dell notebook so far (when it can actually maintain a wireless network connection), but I am just waiting for something to go wrong. In conclusion I just want to say, good work Dell, you have driven off another long time customer.