Home again, home again…
Well, back from my weekend trip. I did post a criticism / flame of the show elsewhere, but I want to keep that post specific to the actual computer show (and that site seems to index faster). While the show itself was a disappointment, the trip wasn’t. I’ll make another post soon with all the food I ate. Y’all know how I love my food, and have taken to blogging about it.
In any event, the show was held at The College of New Jersey, which is just outside of Trenton. I’m about 60 miles north of Trenton. I didn’t attend this college, but I knew someone who did. It’s a nice campus. Here is where the bus dropped us off, just outside the main show entrance (not the main college entrance).
If you’re not familiar with computer shows, it’s basically an event where lots of vendors sell stuff, usually at reasonable prices. They used good places to go if you want to upgrade, buy new hardware, software, whatever. But since you can get the same stuff, for the same (or even better) price off the internet, there’s not much of a reason to go to shows anymore. They’re kind of a dying breed.
But TCF is (or was) different. It had not only a vendor area, but a flea market. TCF was more geared towards the hobbyist market, so people would show up with moving vans full of nifty neat hardware and you could haggle / trade, just like at a “real” flea market. And not just computer stuff, but almost anything electronic. Here is a shot of the flea market. Much smaller than in previous years.
TCF had a deal where if you showed up with a robot, you could get in for free. Well, I’m not a robot builder, although I find it fascinating, and I do have this one idea brewing in my head. But at least one person showed up with a robot.
It was pretty hot this weekend. They were originally saying it was supposed to be in the low-80s, but it was about 95 on Saturday. Whew. Considering Monday it was 45 degrees, and Friday it was 65 degrees, that is quite a big temperature increase. But it is still spring, and all the trees and flowers are starting to bloom.
Oh, once we left this show, we ran up north to another computer show. It was odd that there were two this weekend, but from what I could tell, the two are sort of in a feud with each other, and this was their way of “getting even”.
Anyways, the only thing I wanted to buy was a new MP3 player. My phone is a Palm Centro, and if you’ve ever used a Palm phone, it’s kind of a pain to load MP3s on it. I love PalmOS, and I hate the way they manage MP3s. You don’t just copy it over USB. I also wanted to plug it into my car.
I ended up buying a cheap iPod Touch knock-off.
Also. A couple of weeks before the show, my friend’s computer basically blew the video card. When I pulled the video card out, it appears that the fan siezed and the heat fried the video card. Almost all the caps popped. It’s hard to tell in the picture. But you can also see some heat damage near the coil to the left of the blown caps.
