GoneWacko’s Blog

First driving lesson and Phase 3

February 13, 2007 on 9:56 pm | In Computing, Life |

My first driving lesson

was today. I was pretty nervous before the ride, I was somewhat nervous during the ride, and, ironically, I was pretty nervous again after the ride.

I personally was pretty negative about my driving in the sense that things went quite differently from how I expected them to go.
However, the instructor seemed pretty positive about my performance, especially because I had zilch previous experience.

Things to not do while driving:

• Put the brakepedal to the metal when the instructor says ‘brake very lightly’
• Look at your shiftstick when you’re shifting gears, resulting in you nearly driving into parked cars constantly
• Forget to considering anyone coming from your right

Amongst various other things.

It’s also quite embarrassing when you’re in the middle of a busy road and you don’t have any gear selected.
Furthermore, this was a potentially dangerous situation for *someone*:
A car is parked on the side of a busy road, with the driver standing on the road at the driver’s side of the car. A bus is parked at the bus stop on the other side of the road.
I try to overtake the parked car, nearly drive into him because I’m not used to the car’s dimensions, and then the bus starts driving away.
Safe to say it was a tight fit and the instructor had to help me steer that one. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had only been driving for 5 minutes at the time. I was happy I was even moving at all :O.

Phase 3 of operation “New Computer”

So I changed some minor stuff.
Basically I decided to hold off on two of the hard drives for now. The money I save by doing so I shall use for two important components for a good gaming machine, or in fact any PC:

• The power supply unit. I chose the Zalman ZM600-HP, mainly because it was the most popular item on tweakers.net for the ‘PSU’ category
• The operating system. I’ve decided to go with Windows Vista Ultimate, UK, 64-bit. The OEM version costs a mere *cough* 160 euros. I would actually have most of the stuff I’d need if I went with Vista Home Premium (who wouldn’t?), but I’ve been using vista ultimate on my laptop for quite a while now and I would probably get annoyed if anything I was used to was missing on my PC.

When I have money again, I’ll buy two more hard drives together with a proper RAID card, the on board RAID is sufficient (for now?), but a separate RAID card with separate RAM should in theory boost it all up a bit more.