Aliens made me do IT

As reported by Flying Singer.

Made me do what?

Order a new Alienware Aurora R11 PC from Dell.

I got it bad and that ain’t good!

Highlights…

10th Gen Intel Core i7 10700F (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 2.9GHz to 4.8GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX2070 SUPER 8GB GDDR6 (OC Ready)
32GB Dual Channel HyperX(FM) FURY DDR4 XMP at 3200MHz
Dark Side of the Moon chassis with High-Performance CPU Liquid Cooling and 550W Power Supply
1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD

It was a bit pricey but I found a 17% coupon that helped bring it down to USD 1650. All sorts of rationalizations around that. At first I thought I could pull 16 GB out of my current PC but that’s DDR3 and this is faster DDR4 so I went for 32 GB directly. I haven’t told the Mrs. yet. She will understand.

I hope.

MiGMan: Don't tell her! A computer is a computer, surely? Tell her you put some nice lights on it for... Xmas!

The good/bad news is that it won’t arrive until Oct. 13 (maybe sooner, that’s worst case). Why that’s good is that I have several music projects I need to finish.

Knowing that I will have High to Ultra graphics in a few weeks, I think I can convince myself to fire up Studio One instead of MSFS2020 most mornings.

This morning a did some practice flights out of Sterling in a C152, working on the rust. I can sort of land now though when it gets to 30ish FPS it’s hard to stay lined up and flare smoothly.

I also installed the new 15 GB patch which seems to help load times even on my PC. I don’t know if they fixed the Harbour Bridge yet.

I will also probably watch some more training videos. I really like Squirrel as my YouTube CFI (791K subscribers seem to agree he’s pretty good at this gig).

I want to also bone up on the Garmin G1000 system in the C172S and the Diamond DA30. It’s maybe in others too. I love that geeky avionics stuff.

I don’t know why but that last comment just reminded me that I met a retired USAF electronic warfare officer some years ago at a Solar System Ambassador gig. He flew in a windowless compartment in the B-1B and he said he puked on every flight, but it was STILL awesome.

He also told me they have a toilet on the “Bone” and since the retirement of the Concorde, it’s the world’s only “supersonic shitter.” He said the crew tries hard NOT to use if for that since the ventilation system is not that great.

That same day I met retired astronaut William Oefelein who played the male role in the infamous “astronaut diaper love triangle” story you may recall from 2007 (astronaut Lisa Nowak drove 900 miles in a diaper to attack Oefelein’s new girlfriend – not exactly the Right Stuff). Both were kicked out of NASA.

BTW spreadsheets will probably run great on this but I only do those on my work laptop anyway!