Gaming laptops...

 I now have more experience than I would have thought I have on this topic. Basically these laptops have actually gotten better over time as consumers vote with the wallet. The result? They are more DIY friendly offering modular upgrades for SSD (or m.2 ssd), memory, and the gpu.

What this means is that if you have an older but still strong chipset you can upgrade the gpu and still get very nice performance. 

These days I do not understand some gamers. They get annoyed by sound of fans in their gaming laptops.  For me fans means the gpu will not throttle itself. Basically, when a gpu or cpu throttles they slow down due to heat build up. The best case is to have your gpu running at full speed, even boosting when needed. 

If you are in the market for a gaming laptop get a thicker heavy model. You will thank me 5 years later when you are still using it. Thinner models will have a higher fail rate. Models that have poor heat management will fail due to plastic cases warping, capacitors bursting on the motherboard, and burning out gpus. 

DO NOT GO CHEAP ON GAMING LAPTOPS. Thicker models with robust cooling, and add a cooling pad of your own. When you need a boost and want to use a cheaper but more powerful desktop graphics card get a gpu booster. That is a whole new topic though. 

So I am in the market for a replacement for the beast, I am looking at second hand models in the 1200-1600 dollar range, that I will upgrade later. Gotta love amazon!

/tata

Stock Market oddities.

 This is such an unfair world full of inequality. You see big hedge funds have been manipulating markets for ages. Yet it is ok for them to do to so. They even get government bail outs when they make mistakes. I suggest watching the film "The big short". It helps to understand exactly what shorting a company means. 

This video can help explain things a bit more (8) The Internet vs. Wall Street: GameStop short squeeze explained 🚀 - YouTube

So when large firms make a bet against a stock the end goal is to devalue it then when the stock improves make a killing. So what a large group of people on redit decided they would go in the opposite direction. You see Gamestop is by no means a failing company. I remember taking my own business there for video games. Now they serve console gamers, pc gamers, online mmos, even mobile gamers can use Gamestop to get things they need for gaming. 

So it is not a dying business, perhaps stagnant. 

So basically when firms make bets against a stock they are in turn manipulating that stock.  Here is where it gets very unfair. A large hedge fund when they make a bad bet they turn to governments to bail them out with tax payer dollars. 

So now you have a large number of people who are not a part of the institutions or rather the little guy if they get stuck with billions in margin debt what will happen to them? Yeah they will commit suicide, or end up paying for this for the rest of their life. While governments will just look at them and say "You should not have done that tisk tisk tisk bad children!". Totally unfair. 

The big American auto makers should have been allowed to fail. If they had, new players could have entered the market and we would have a more competitive market with likely more jobs. 

My take is this, if you are going to bail out large firms when they fail, bail out everyone then. This is why I have NO faith in governments. Insider trading, lobbying, manipulating stocks, voter fraud, unfair taxation its just nuts! 

I put my faith in the bible, and of course many will say I am nuts for doing that. 

walking went ok this week. I should have stuck to my guns but rested and had a few drinks after work on Wednesday. So this means walking today is a must! Must keep the burn going! Besides it is really nice where we walk and we discuss all kinds of issues. It does great things mental health. 

/tata 

Korean dramas pretty awesome!

 I used to get bored watching Korean movies from years ago. The plot was very predictable, and even if the story was serious there were odd moments with comedic scenes. So basically I steered clear of films. However, recently after watching our favorite content on Netflix and YouTube Korean dramas were popping on on my feed. 

Also my students kept mentioning them, my friends did as well. We had to investigate. We were blown away. Each episode was like a full movie. Each season was like reading a long interesting series, and it was not as predictable as what I have watched in the past. There were moments where I was in tears, very angry, or we were pausing the drama to discuss things. 

Itaewon class is a very good one. Actually, there are so many good ones. The characters are flawed in a real way. It really shows the realities of South Korean society. The positives and the negatives. 

So happy watching!

Waking started off strong yesterday we walked about 6kms. 

/tata

Something I crave...

Living overseas for so many years has changed me a lot. It has affected the way that I look at food. Here we do not have the deli meats and sandwiches that I was used to. Here you get rice that is accompanied by soup. Or rice that is mixed with other ingredients. The range to different foods I have tasted could fill a book. However, there is one that during this lockdown I have fallen in love with. Normally, I would not even eat this dish as at local restaurants in my area I am more inclined to eat other things. 

First I will just post a picture of the dish here.

This is just heaven in a bowl. Usually this is served with rice under the veggies, You can see a bit of beer tartare on top. It is seasoned so nicely with a creamy raw egg. Another thing you can not see in this image is that there is a tablespoon on two of a spicy paste. This paste is mixed with the veggies meat egg and rice. It doesn't look so nice when you are done but it tastes wonderful.

Usually, I eat this perhaps once or twice a year. There are other things I enjoyed eating more. Then the lockdowns came and we started eating more delivered food. On the app that we use Yogita recommended a restaurant that served this. I fell in love again. They give generous portions of beef. I will be having this today.

/tata

Why kill small businesses?

 It is so strange these days. Here in Korea the numbers of new positive corona viruses cases are dropping. They having dropped by roughly 50%. So this means that the community spread has been contained. It is time to learn to live with this thing rather than shut down peoples ability to earn money. Koreans really do follow the social distancing rules really well. 

However, extending this lockdown is going to kill small businesses. People just want to live a normal life. I guess I can understand more how Americans in the States feel. Korea has more aid given to people during lockdowns (more is needed for small businesses).  

In the large metro areas of South Korea many people in my line of work have been left out in the cold. It sucks. Also the reports of this variant strain and needless lockdowns is matching the memo I posted last week. Knock out small businesses and it will affect larger populations. 

As of today if you look back 3 weeks in our area we have had maybe 5 new cases all of them linked the larger clusters from last month. 

The thing about viruses is that some of them spread very fast. I told my boss last week that we all have already been exposed to it. Even he had to admit that here was a time last year when he felt mild flu like symptoms. Another friend of mine saw his business fail as the outbreak started. 

I think we need lower the social distancing level back to 1 or 1.5. Level 2 as it is right now is hurting people needlessly. Lockdown effected areas for 2 weeks at time. I would even go so far as to limit movement in and out of those areas. Anyways just my 2 cents. 

Walking was nice this week averaged about 6 kms a day during the workweek. 

/tata

The Beast still lives!

 I have a strange habit when it comes to my computers. I name them. Every single one has a name. Usually the name has some back story or reasoning behind the name. One laptop a gaming laptop I purchased back in 2018 from a friend of mine. We both named it "THE BEAST". 

The specs were top of the line back in 2012. It can run dual GPUs in sli mode. It can have 3 hhds or ssds in it. The screen is 18 inches. It is massive. The CPU is of course an i7 3rd gen. I love this machine. I can clean it, trouble shoot it, and upgrade it so easily. 

So here I am in 2021 running a system that is 9 years old and it runs like a champ! It runs Archeage, and EVE online very well. However, more demanding games from say 2016 and on would cause THE BEAST to throttle the GPU. Actually this GPU is really nice as well. It is a GTX 680m with 4 gigs of vram. I have a slot where I can put another one in but I do not want to have to deal with the heat issues it would have. 

It is so funny reading posts on the internet today about using 9th or 10th gen cpus for gaming when all you really need is an older 3rd gen i7 CPU with the fastest ddr3 ram, and a GTX 1060, 1070, or 1080 GPU, and you will get very performance at full HD (1080p). Now if you want to game at resolutions higher than that, then you need ddr4 with RTX GPUs and the newer CPUs. Actually, new CPUs are nicer as they use less power. 

Ok I have to go!

Walking has been slower this week. I am at about 2100 calories burned. I hope to get that to about 2600 today. We will see.

/tata

A friend of mine found something...strange...

 A friend of mine who is a professor at a local university in our town has found a memo that basically lays out how 2021 will unfold. 

Basically, we will undergo a reset on a global scale. I know of the evidence that was leaked last year in which the lab in Wuhan was looking for scientists to work on coronaviruses. It seems that with lockdowns you will weaken people. How? Well, eventually global fiat currencies will take a major hit. They have already lost value due to last year's massive cash outs all over the globe. In this document, I am ignoring the dates. I am looking at the events and how they will roll out. We already have a mutated strain of the virus which is said to be more communicable. It seems if we follow the plans on this we can see that we will lose even more privacy than we already have. The State will have even more biodata on us. This makes me think of the mark of the beast as mentioned in the bible. Well, this leads to a question. What can we do? I think making small decisions in our daily life, watching, and staying awake can help us deal with these difficult times which are coming. Materialism will blind us. Politics will blind us. Fear of something that is not really something to fear will blind us. Fear really brings out the worst in people.

I am not saying do no wear a mask. I am saying we need to be cautious, as wolves are among the sheep disguised to appear as something benign. I am hoping this memo does NOT achieve what it sets out to do. I am keeping my eyes open. Wearing masks, washing hands works! It works too well, which is why they are pushing more lockdowns. Lockdowns are going to destroy the current fiat currency system by dumping so much newly printed money that its value will drop. Money equals power in this system of things. 

The walking went ok this week. Despite the really cold weather we walked about 30kms this week!

/tata

First Day back...

 It feels good to be back in a routine that I am familiar with. There have been some changes to classes this is normal. However, this year I feel that things went more smoothly. This is just my point of view. 

Students seemed fine although I think some parents sent their kids early. 

Today Yogita and I are going to change up our walking routes. This keeps things interesting. Last week I think I broke a personal record. I walked for nearly 10 hours, burning an estimated 4000 calories. This week or rather this month I am aiming for 3.5k calories burned a week. 

If we have another lockdown I will do the same. Exercise more and keep moving. It is easy to get bored, and that can lead to other negatives. 

So my work day is at the middle point and so far so good! I hope we have no more lockdowns until April. April is visa extension time, and you never know what could go wrong. So I hope everything runs smoothly until then. If I sign another 1 year contract or even if I do not there will be some changes! More on that later this week, or month. 

/tata

Hoping for a normal week...

 So the vacation is over and Monday I should be going back to work. Lets hope everything goes well and according to plan. I met with friends after a LONG time. We made a few new friends as well. The new cases in Iksan keep going up but it is really slow like 1 or 2 new cases a day. Other areas are worse. 

I have had to keep plans on hold because of this pandemic. Of course it is  2021 but with no vaccinations in site the situation will remain the same. I am monitoring news sites to see how vaccine works, and if there are adverse reactions. 

It is a bit nippy today at -3 C. We have had a bit of snow but nothing like Gunsan. I am craving bibimbap.

    

That picture does not really do it justice. I will take a picture when we order this later today.

I enjoyed my holiday basically relaxing at home and walking...a lot! I hope to get some more walking in today but it is cold and my legs could do with a rest. According to my health app I burned 4000 calories walking this week. My average is 3000. So we will see.

/tata

walking averaged perhaps 7-8kms a day this week.