A Year and a Half Later and Finally Ready for Dual Core Processors

Three hundred dollar initial entry price tags along with zero support in the gaming world kept me from making the leap to joining the "two cores are better than one" ideology. Early justifications for the transition ranged from increasing the performance of your foreground programs while background tasks such as firewall and antivirus software ate up an entire additional core to promises of significant improvements to the very few multi-threaded programs available to the public for everyday tasks. Then along came Intel's Conroe core and "Core2Duo" became the buzzword of the next leap in computing. Though sold on the performance of the processor, the cost of ownership couldn't be justified due to expensive motherboards and the inclusion of DDR2 RAM which was very expensive at the time.

Fast-forward eighteen months and I can hardly find a reason not to shell out the less than $100 clams necessary to make my aging AMD socket 939 motherboard and RAM accept an additional physical core. As the popularity of the Core2Duo skyrocketed over a year earlier, I'd calculated the transition costing $600 easily between the new motherboard, still overpriced RAM, and willingness to finally pay more than $100 for a new cpu. Within the last few months, online vendors have really been pushing to offload their socket 939 stock, whereas not much before that point there was plenty of price gouging aimed at individuals attempting not to upgrade via complete system rebuilds. My new AMD64 X2 4200 would have cost me well over $400 when it debuted, but I paid less than $80 for it and still it continues to drop in price by tiny amounts.

Am I satisfied? Completely. Rather than running a second computer during cpu intensive tasks as I'd done in the past mostly during time consuming video or audio encoding, this new cpu does it all without breaking a sweat. As for real world performance improvements, what I see most everyday are much shorter times for virus scans and winrar decompressions. Plus, thanks to better utilization of current video game console hardware, PC games are finally taking advantage of dual core processors. On my now aging Nvidia 7800GT for which the current generation of graphics cards boast double the performance at my same price point, recent games such as Bioshock and Stranglehold run flawlessly thanks to their dual core optimizations.

The downside? All of this added capability for increased multitasking has pushed me into the world of widescreen monitors - an area I'd also previously shunned due to lack of support in PC games. There's a world of difference between a 17" LCD that's almost five years old and my brand new 24" LCD. My web browser or other current task takes up just over half the screen space leaving boundaries all around for keeping tabs on other tasks running in the background. Gaming at the native 1920x1200 resolution leaves something to desire since despite any slowdown that may occur at that resolution, I have yet to see a game that supports textures that size. Stretching a now very common widescreen resolution of 1680x1050 (the maximum for 22" LCD monitors) looks the same and plays much better than a native 1920x1200.

In conclusion, upgrading to a dual core cpu along with being forced into a widescreen monitor upgrade gives me more space in which to work and play whether its multitasking, comparing items side by side, actually involving myself with multi threaded activities, or just surfing and watching tv without the DVR program hiccuping from time to time due to overworking a single core processor

Galleon From Scratch 16 Months Later

Well it's been sixteen months since that first post, and my personal goal of quarterly contributions has long since expired. Over this hiatus I have moved all the way across the country from Atlanta, Georgia to Portland, Oregon with only the Harvey suffering damage despite all three models being packed in giant cardboard boxes filled with styrofoam popcorn. The Harvey's casualties I blame completely on myself, as the majority of the suffering was limited to loose cannons breaking free. Idioms and cliches existing on a relatively microscopic level. Only the helmsman's shelter above the fantail broke loose on my still unnamed English galleon, but thanks to rigging it took me awhile to even realize that a few millimeters now separated a few of the four support posts to the deck. The only real loss resulting from the move was two missing sails I'd sewn as an experiment and eventually approved for the actual model. Each had my trademark brass wire embedded into the hems along the sails to give the final installation the illusion of being full of wind. This is the reason that many modelers, including my late grandfather from whom I've gained appreciation for the craft of wooden model ships, leave the yards bare to avoid limp sails from hiding all of their rigging work. I presume my missing sails escaped lost in one of the giant popcorn boxes in our haste to make our new apartment livable.

In some regards I was dead on in assuming that the details would be my undoing in both completing this model in a timely fashion and not letting it drive me crazy. Other than bisecting an endless amount of toothpicks for added detail, using a shearing plate to reduce bamboo skewers to tiny oar handles, and trying to stick to my rule of no new wood leaving me literally saving centimeter long scraps knowing they would find use elsewhere while discarding them would leave me with many a gap, the detail that got to me the most was the ratline ladders. The Harvey was my first experience with them and boasted three lines from the main deck to both of the crow's nests with two additional lines from one of the crow's nests to the next highest level. All together that was sixteen lines to be connected by countless clovehitches. The English galleon's plans call for as many as eight lines going from the deck to a single mast on both sides with two of the four masts crow's nests continuing with fewer lines to the next level. My compromise was to reduce the number of lines at each location leaving me with only five instead of eight lines as the maximum width. This leaves me with 38 lines to connect rather than the 16 present on the Harvey. If that wasn't enough, I've also been tasked with doubling the amount of cross-ties due to the scale of the ship being half. This leaves me with four times as many tiny clovehitches to tie, but I'm almost there except for the lines extending beyond the two crow's nests.

The second area I previously overlooked was cost. Though certainly I've kept the budget well below the price of any other model I've purchased and it certainly has been no strain on the wallet, I knew from the start that I seriously lacked most non-wooden fixtures needed to complete the galleon to my liking. For a much less ambitious project I might have adequate pulley blocks, but that was really the only non-wooden item with which I'd found myself with any excess (and these parts were actually made from wood). Without any good supplies from any good hobby stores, I began to frequent the craft stores as I'd done in the past for fun buttons and beads that could substitute for the specialty brass fixtures one would find in a regular kit. Countless trips to Michaels with their weekly 40% off any single item coupon finally yielded the necessary components for the items which simply could not be made from wood at that scale. The final purchased item did come from a real hobby store: brass tubing for the cannons. From the beginning I cringed every time I considered using painted wood for the 42 cannon ports around the hull, and no craft store stocked any kind of bead that could simulate the appropriate dimensions of a cannon.

The last item for which I've actually searched for all my wooden ship models, even back when they were just made from cardboard, is a bowsprit. The production and popularity of pewter figurines has diminished with a Darwinian tendency leaving only Warhammer 40,000 as the remaining stock. Searching for a female warrior or wizard or a simple animal like a lion or horse has left me with only mecha-infantry toting chainguns and shoulder mounted rockets. My compromise has been to get as creative as possible with the bow with this project, so the bare balsa now visible still has a long way to go before my English galleon is christened. In other creative outlets, I've learned that back in the early 17th century from which this ship is derived, sails were still adorned with the ensigns and emblems of their monarch and country. Anything from red crosses to lions could be painted on the main sail or fore sail complete with the Union Jack rounding out the topmost portions of the mast.

Union Jack prior to 1801 - note the lack of red diagonals indicating the inclusion of Scotland but not yet that of Ireland