YANT (Yet Another New Toy), Citibank Hatred Clarification, And We're All Sheep

I'm in quite the foul mood today, so hopefully I can finish this blog entry pretty quickly. I'm sick, I'm tired, and I'm surrounded by (some) stupid people.

- So I got a new (to me) toy today: an Asus K8N-E motherboard and a AMD Athlon64 3200+ CPU.

(Tangent: I also got a ton of other toys, including yet another Logitech keyboard/mouse combo. Perhaps, in the near future, I will give a mini-review of some of these new toys.)

(Tangent #2: Yeah, I realize this setup is quite old, but it was dirt cheap, and was bought as an upgrade for my secondary computer, powered by an Athlon XP 2000+ CPU).

It took a bit to actually hook up the "new" parts--I had to fish out a new PSU, due to some stupidity on my part (no, I did not blow up a PSU!)--and for some reason, I had trouble screwing in the PSU to my chassis. After finally getting everything hooked up, I fired up the new computer, and got some strange error.

Long story short, it was simply user error (yes, 10,000 Stupid Points), and after a WindowsXP repair, the new computer was up and running. I tested out the computer by ripping a movie DVD; on the XP2000+ system, DVD Shrink reported a ripping speed somewhere in the 2.5-3MB/s range. With the new parts, I achieved speeds somewhere in the 7.5-8.5MB/s range, surpassing the ripping speeds on my P4 2.4Ghz system.

Yeah, I realize I'm jumping to conclusions just because one test says that this system is blazingly fast compared to the XP2000+ system. Let me enjoy my new toy!

(And yes, I'm VERY happy to also get rid of that ECS board; the fact that it lasted nearly four years is a minor miracle in itself.)

- It seems there was a little confusion yesterday regarding Citibank screwing me over yet again. First of all, I had a Citibank Dividend Platinum Select card. It was recently converted into this new World MasterCard, that I only received last week.

Because this new card no longer reports a credit limit to the three bureaus, my debt/credit utilization ratio will decrease, assuming I have any credit card debt to begin with (which I do). Fortunately for me, this card has a rather low limit, compared to the other cards I own, so hopefully the credit score impact won't be that great.

- BTW, I got an interesting comment about this World Mastercard yesterday. Read the comment, then read the blog, and then check out this "story" linked from that blog entry:

They’ll know where you go, where you drive, where you shop, what you buy, where you run, where you hide–and they’ll be able to turn you off specifically at any time.

We are no longer human—think animal tags for people—we are now officially SHEEPLE.

Um...

I guess I'm getting Extended Warranty Protection, among other features, in exchange for Big Brother being able to pinpoint exactly where I am via the RFID tag in my credit card.

Fair deal, IMO.

That's all I have for now. I'll deal with the whole NBA "scandal" another time.