AlexHopmann.com

I’m working on building a few new computers over the summer and will try to chronicle some of the planning process here. Ideally I want to build a new PC for my car (to act as a music player replacing my existing HD player that has been broken for 2 years), a new main desktop for my office and a new Media Center. For the desktop (which will actually go under the desk or maybe in a cabinet) and Media Center I’m planning to wait for the 45nm new Intel chips to come out so it will be at least a few months.

For the media center I’ve got a few goals-

• Nice form-factor case. My existing Dell in a traditional large size Dell box doesn’t fit where I need it. Any of the somewhat small-form-factor or media-equipment cases should work. I don’t care about fancy media displays on the front of the case, I’d ideally like the minimum size and easy to hide out of the way.
• Quiet. Its going in my bedroom so as quiet as possible is a high priority.
• Decent graphics performance. I probably don’t need top of the line, but I’ve got a 24″ LCD hooked up so I need something that can drive high resolution at HD-DVD quality. And that isn’t loud and fits in my case. I’m hoping one of the new NVidia 8600s that are rumored to be coming out in a few weeks might fit the bill. The NVidia 7600 I have now is not quite fast enough to do HD-DVD without flaws.
• I’m assuming that 2GB RAM should be plenty. I’m not planning on running virtualization, but it does need to be able to handle recording two shows at once, playing back locally and remoting to 1-2 X-Box 360s.
• I expect a quad-core 2.66ghz should do the trick on the CPU front. See above why I need plenty of CPU (especially given that remoting to XBoxes sometimes requires real-time transcoding).
• For hard-disk I assume I’ll have 1 1TB drive, 2 if I happen to have room.
• I wish something like cable-card were an option but it doesn’t look like it is, and from what I hear it barely works even when it is an option (its OEM-machine only at the moment).

Selecting the right case seems like a key first step and its a giant pain. I really haven’t seen many options out there that are reasonably small, very quiet, have enough room for an OK video card + a tuner or two (possibly analog + digital), etc. There are small and loud boxes. There are big and quiet ones. Few that combine both qualities. Another advantage of keeping the box small is that its easier to reuse it somewhere else in the house in 3 years once this machine is obsolete.

I thought my talk at Ignite 3 went really well. It was really nice of Sasha to say that my talk had the most interesting content. I’ve seen several posts that echoed my thoughts that Jordan Schwartz’s talk on bees was very entertaining and there were several other really cool talks. I was a bit disappointed by a few talks that were too straight forward pitches for peoples companies/products. Sure I suppose I could have gotten up and talked about the latest in software development and Launch21 but it didn’t seem like the right thing for the audience.

Bruce’s talk on prison was also interesting, although it suffered just a tiny bit from expectation-setting. The title/topic was so attention getting that his talk (on teaching CS classes in a couple of prisons in Massachusetts) was, while very interesting, a slight let-down.

The logistics were overall way better. It was crowded but there was a good set of chairs and it was well organized. There was some last minute complication getting the video projector working right but Jesse and the other folks running the show did a great job pulling it all together.

I also like the format of the talks. It is pretty frustrating trying to design a talk that works in 5 minutes, but the results can be pretty cool. A couple of tips-

1. Focus. 5 minutes is enough time to almost get across 1 point, maybe 2 if you stretch it. This focus can be a good thing if you embrace it. I wanted to talk about engine timing, magnetos, more about prop speed controls, and a bunch of other things, but frankly if I had it probably would have quickly bored people who don’t actually deal with the details of flying airplanes.
2. No text. Or almost no text on your slides. At 15 seconds per slide no one has time to read them anyway, and they limit your flexibility as a presenter. Show some engaging pictures / graphs / graphics for each slide and focus on using your talking to make your verbal points.
3. Practice. You don’t need to over practice, but it probably needs more practice than the typical 30 minute talk does. Most of us can give a 30 minute presentation on a topic we know well pretty cold. To get it into 5 minutes and get the transitions from slide to slide right you probably need to go through it 5-20 times.
4. Think about the audience. This applies to any talk, but for this venue, consider that no topic will be directly meaningful to everyone (unlike a talk at the Exchange conference where I bet the entire audience cares about Exchange). So keep it entertaining and try to relate it something that a broad group of geeks will be interested in. Your topic might not be directly relevant to them, but they typically care about knowing interesting stuff about how just about anything works.