Alston Grove

Several years ago, with the encouragement and help of friends, I built a PC from component parts for the first time. The fastest processor at that time was outside of my budget, so I bought the notorious Celeron 300A — loved by many for its ability to be dramatically overclocked. To make the feat even easier, I coupled it with one of the first “jumperless” motherboards. I was trying to avoid junky parts and high prices from PC manufacturers, and maybe learn something about this mysterious hardware.

Fast forward to today, where a vibrant market now caters to overclockers, modders, and LAN party gamers. In the age of the iMac, style matters as much as performance. Seeing mostly flashy, glowing, see-through cases littering online stores, I decided they were gaudy, and I set out to build a vanilla PC with conservative components. But something unintended and unexplainable happened along the way.

Keep reading for highlights, photos, and the parts list.
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Have you ever dropped an upside-down cat to watch it land on its feet? Apparently, they land on their feet in zero gravity also, as shown by the Air Force with a video on their website. The video quickly disappeared after BoingBoing got word of it, but it’s been mirrored here, and I have a local copy of it here. The cat really starts freaking out, doing barrel rolls.

Volkswagen sent me their latest marketing campaign. Flush from success of using a German word, Fahrvergnugen (meaning “driving pleasure”), in American ads, they decided to try another foreign word… Auffahrt.

When you just now read that word to yourself, did you think it sounded kind of funny? Using a word that means “driveway”, “ascend to”, or “approach road” seems like a great idea for an automobile brochure. But when the word is pronounced, it sounds roughly equivalent to the English phrase, “oh fart”. Yep, brilliant bit of marketing there. Maybe instead of putting “enter” in parenthesis at the bottom of the ad, they should replace it with “exit”.