Teen Tech

OK, everyone gets overworked about stuff at least once in a while. Right now, I feel spread a little thin, but I can pull through. My first project is to maintain my network at Vo-Tech (http://www.lisd.us/votech/). There, I am in the Computer Information Services program, and maintaining that network is an all day job. Sometimes, I’ve brought stuff home and worked on it for hours, days at a time. In May, I will be doing a segment in one of my former teacher’s classes (Web Design II). This segment will be all about programming. I am going to have the class make a 3D game where I do a lot of the work, but they still learn the basics. That in itself is a lot of work where I am converting from one programming language to another by hand. (For those wondering, I’m porting C# to VB.NET). On top of this, I have to keep my grades up. On the side, I manage tecumsehneckandback.com and backalleycycles.net and tech-works.info (my un-finished personal site). So, I’m like a busy, busy bee, jumping from project to project sometimes not finishing what I’ve started, but that’s life as a Teen Tech for you.

OK, so about two months ago, I attempted to upgrade the graphics card in my stepmom’s computer.  Things went wrong very quickly.  First, the computer would run, but the graphics stuff was extremely fast.  That was relatively fine for about two weeks.  Then when trying to install a game, the computer kept restarting, and eventually wouldn’t start back up again.  At first, the computer just didn’t see that Windows was installed.  Then after a while,  it would just beep for a bit then shut down.  I tried everything I knew of to try to fix it, short of taking everything out of the case.  Well, this weekend after about a month and a half of it not working, I did just that.  I opened up the computer case laying everything out in the living room.  The case was completely empty except for the power supply.  I cleaned in it where necessary because dust can be a big factor in a computer overheating and not functioning.  After that, I proceeded to put everything back in, double checking all the connections as I went.  After that was done, I plugged everything back into the back of the computer (stuff like the mouse, keyboard, and monitor), and I fired it up.  The darn thing worked the first time.  I installed the wireless network, and people were playing Age Of Empires (Microsoft Corporation) within an hour of having it in a perfect working condition.  Well, that’s my success story for the weekend.

Not much has been happening lately in technology.  Tomorrow, I will post the upcoming game releases for February.  SO, today at Vo-Tech, some kid wanted a program that would search a list of words from the dictionary to help him with hangman.  It can search the list for words with a specific number of letters, what it starts with, ends with, what letters the word contains, and what letters you know are wrong (it omits those from the list).  It’s really a simple program that is good at cheating at a hangman game :D.  The link is here.

Oh and a couple of days ago, the new version of Windows (Vista) was released.  I’ll write about that tomorrow.

Hello and welcome to my Teen-Tech blog.  This blog will be about the latest technology stuff, but all oriented towards teens.  Within this blog, I will discuss Video Games, movies, and gadgetry. 

Well enough about what this is going to be about.

 In recent events, World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) released a new expansion pack for the game that has captivated many, many, many people, both young and old.  The expansion pack, named Burning Crusades, was released January 16, 2007.  Four people in my computers class at school went to the 12:01 AM release to get it as soon as humanly possible.  This release brought almost as many people camping out at stores as did the new Star Wars films.  I, personally was amazed.  The base of the game costs around 30$ and the expansion was about 50$, and on top of that there is a 15$ a month fee for playing this game.  Blizzard (the makers of “WoW”) boasts about 7,000,000 players world wide.  Let’s do the math.  7,000,000 * 15 = 105,000,000 dollars a month intake off of this game.  Don’t get me wrong.  If I had the money, I too would be a player of this graphically beautiful and amazingly well done game.  Kudos to Blizzard.