Nerd Cave and New Books

I spent most of the week setting up my new computer and rearranging the basement.

Here are some pictures of how I decided to lay out a study area/exercise/media room. My basement is unfinished for the most part but does have a rather large old dining room table in it, which makes a really good computer desk that gives me space for books and whatnot.

The new computer has been working really well.  I know all the techies will want the specs on it so here they are:

HP PAVILION M9200T ELITE SERIES

PROCESSOR
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz/64KB L1/8MB L2 Cache)
MEMORY
4GB (4x1024) DDR2 SDRAM (PC2 6400 / 800 MHz)
Total memory slots: 4 DIMM
HARD DRIVE
750GB SATA-3G 7200RPM Drive with 8MB Cache
PRIMARY MULTIMEDIA DRIVE
Lightscribe 16x/8x -DL DVD+/-RW 12x RAM SATA
SECONDARY MULTIMEDIA DRIVE
N/A
GRAPHICS CARD
512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT, TV-out, DVI-I, HDMI
TV TUNER
ViXS PureTVU 48B0 (NTSC/ATSC Combo)
SOUND CARD
Sound Blaster XFi Xtreme Audio (Vista) Sound Card
NETWORKING
Intel 82566DC 10/100/1000 Mb/s

I have an extra 250GB hard drive laying around that I would like to install in it when I have some ambition. I like the fact that this would bring up the total space available to a terabyte... pretty ridiculous. 10 years from now if I look back on this post I will laugh because they will have 10 Terabyte micro-SD cards and cell phones with 80 processors :-)

So far the media center aspects of Vista are pretty good. The computer came with a spiffy remote that lets me record and watch TV and control DVD menus and go through an included media guide for my cable service. All in all I was impressed with how seamless it just worked right out of the box... all I had to do was hook up the coax cable and go through a really simple wizard. It is nice to ride the exercise bike and be able to watch some TV or DVD.

Right now I am watching the show Weeds based on a recommendation. It is pretty good so far, but yeah it is a strange concept for a show to have a pot dealing mom living in a "stepford wives" kind of neighborhood (McMansion Communism, anyone?) where everyone seems to need to get a fix in order to deal with their incredibly boring lives.

Oh and speaking of fixes... I just my latest shipment from Amazon this week, which consisted of 3 books and 2 boxes of protein bars. The protein bars are really good, I guess I could talk more on those later... but here are the 3 books I ordered:

• .NET Domain-Driven Design with C#
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames
• The Kite Runner

So far I have only delved into the first 2 chapters of the .NET book. I like the concepts so far, but I think the author did a pretty poor job at writing the book in a manner suited to the reader (me) who is trying to follow the code and type is out as it is presented. He never explicitly states to add files to your solution in location "X"... fortunately he does use consistent namespace conventions. Sometimes the concepts are barely glossed over too and I don't fully understand what he is talking about. But overall, so far I do like the code concepts as a whole. All of the classes and interfaces are definitely geared towards being concise by existing to do one job and to do it well.  The author is a strong believer in  established patterns and principals like these:

• Factory
• Decorator
• Dependency Inversion through Interface-based programming
• Separation of Concern and the DRY principal (Don't Repeat Yourself)
• Model-View-ViewModel (apparently a spin-off of the classic Model-View-Presenter where I don't know the differences yet...)
• Layered Supertype
• Many more I am sure, I just finished chapter 2!

I would like to do a series of posts about most of these concepts in detail down the line as I get further along into this book. I am very interested in the whole "Inversion of Control" concept. It is a very unique approach to breaking down dependencies... 

For now, Walrus out!