I just thought to write this to celebrate my parting from my longest material possession, my PC. It has been a good 10 years. It’s closing time, finally.
Modifications done on this rig
- 2012 – Start of service. Bought a BIG chassis to support whatever fantastic thing I can think of. Machine learning, dual boot Ubuntu, personal home server, huge hard drive space, gaming all-nighters — all shall be supported!
- 2015 – Major improvements. To support my graduate research, I bought an NVIDIA GTX 960 4GB GPU, a 256 GB SSD, and a power supply unit upgrade. The graphics card was NOT used for gaming… when in the middle of deep learning training runs. 🙂
- 2016 – Bought a larger monitor to… better monitor my research results. Definitely need a larger screen to look at loss values.
- 2017 – Bought a power supply unit upgrade again.
- 2018 to 2022 – No hardware improvements at all. I was torn between buying a new one immediately, or just waiting until we move to the other side of the globe.
Productive and non-productive achievements
- First thesis attempt – to advance computer vision by tackling diabetic retinopathy. It didn’t work out well.
- Second thesis attempt – to advance recommender system research on cold start problems. PRTNets became my ticket to a master’s degree!
- A personal server on Ubuntu. I studied how to SSH and do Linux stuff remotely.
- Some Photoshop memes.
- Game of Thrones when it was still good.
- When I first ran Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim on high graphics, I was absolutely floored.
- 2000+ hours on DOTA 2 and many nights experiencing the highs and lows of the SEA server.
- 1000+ combined hours on various RPG titles. (Divinity, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder, Mass Effect)
- 500+ combined hours on the Total War Franchise.
- Tons of family pictures up to the time of writing. Baby photos are so cute!
Cheers mate.
It is the REAL DYL 