I thought it was important to start this out with a bit of an introduction. I have a regular day-time job doing work of a statistical, mathematics, and computer science background (heavier on the math/stats than the CompSci). More recently, I have been moved into more of a middle management role at a financial services company. I have a wife, a 3 year-old son, and a daughter on the way.
For the most part, my life is already very full, but I spend most of my free time with my various hobbies. Predominantly, those are gaming, tech news, and I am a pretty avid follower of politics/public policy.
For the most part, my blog will focus on gaming and tech news, and will focus pretty heavily on my particular favorite brand of gaming – pc gaming.
Like most middle class people my age (30), my first exposure to video games was through arcades and a friend who had one of the first ataris. My first console was an NES, and I played the standard games (Mario, Duckhunt, Super Speed Bike). None of those I would say caught my interest, and it wasn’t until SimCity 2000 and Doom that I got my first taste of PC Gaming. The Doom/Wolfenstein games were fun, but SimCity 2000 was formative for me. As a child, I just couldn’t believe the opportunities and intricacies available in a game like that. No objectives? No problem! I still remember to this day when I first heard of the game and talking my poor childhood friend’s ear off about what amazing possibilities it presented (it wouldn’t be for a year or more longer until my family had a computer with high enough specs to play it (1 MB of RAM!)).
Over time, there would be other formative games. I have listed those in no particular order:
Final Fantasy III – the first game where I fell in love with the story.
SimCity 2000 – The open-endedness and endless possibilities were mesmerizing.
Civilization II – I spend hours playing this at my parent’s work computer because our home computer couldn’t handle it.
Final Fantasy VIII – Yes that one. The first game that I played through almost entirely start to finish (twice!).
World of Warcraft – The most addictive fun I’ve ever had – until it began to compete with my real life for time.
Nowadays, my more recent favorites are Civilization V, Defense Grid: The Awakening, The Witcher, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Company of Heroes, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Battlefield 3, and of course World of Warcraft, although I will not play that anymore so that I have time for other games.
As you can probably tell, I tend to play older games more recently for various reasons but the largest is that I spend a big part of the last decade engrossed in WoW. It was a great game, but I put it down because it began to feel too much like a grind to keep up with the Jones’. I will always have an unmatched love for my warrior tank (aka Dolor), but I had to put it down to see what else I was missing (and boy am I glad I did!).
My current rig is:
i7-2600K @ 4.4GHz
16 GB G.Skill 1866 MHz Memory
MSI NVidia 560 Ti 448 @ 900MHz
128 GB Crucial M4 SSD
2x 1.5 TB Hitachi 7200 RPM HDD in Raid 0
2x 2.0 TB Samsung 5400 RPM HDD in Raid 0
Corsair H80 Liquid Cooler
Corsair 650D Case
I built my first rig in 2010, and my only regret is that it took me so long. Up until then, I had been gaming on prebuilt desktops/laptops which worked fine, but were nothing compared to enjoyment and satisfaction of building my own. There is some difficult to define satisfaction I got from building my own computer. Gaming on hardware I put together and am responsible for is very refreshing in a world where everything is becoming so specialized. It’s a very beautiful thing, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t already.
As you might be able to tell, I tend to spend more money on my hardware than on my software J.
I think that’s about all you need to know about me to know where I am coming from. For those of you interested (brave?) enough to read this far, I appreciate the courtesy and hope that this gives you some insight into who I am and where this blog will be going.
No comments:
Post a Comment