I've finally gotten my new PC set up and working reasonably well. I didn't really want to get a new PC, just to speed up my old one a bit. Unfortunately, with my last PC being over five years old at this point, I found myself in an upgrade cascade: the new CPU (Intel Quad Core, 2.4 MHz, $280) required a new motherboard (ASUS P5K-E Wifi, $140) which required a new type of memory (DDR2-800, 2GB, $50) and a new video card (ATI x300, $30) with a PCI-E rather than an AGP bus. I could have reused ... Read this and 3 comments.

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a young engineering major at one of the better universities in the area. She said that whenever she first meets another student and tells them that she plans on majoring in an engineering field, their usual reaction isn't "How interesting!", "Which field?", "How's that going for you?", or any of the other responses that would occur to me. Instead, the most common reaction is something along the lines of "Engineering? ... Read this and 3 comments.