I was in Las Vegas last week with my dad and sister. My dad took me there as part of a graduation present for completing my Electrical Engineering undergrad degree this April. We had a ton of fun. Seen a lot of things. Bought a lot of stuff.

Obligatory picture of Las Vegas sign.

Monday – May 1
Arrived in Vegas. Went to The Strip. Seen Mystère, a Cirque du Soleil show at the Treasure Island Hotel. As expected, that was incredible. Did not understand the story at all.

The view from our room in the Rio hotel. Pretty clear side view of the Strip.

Tuesday – May 2
Went shopping at the South Las Vegas Premium Outlet Mall – my dad bought me a suit from Van Heusen and I bought some new golf attire from the Nike store. Ate at the largest buffet in Vegas (which was in the Rio). Went to Penn and Teller illusion/comedy show – both my dad and I were called on stage on separate occasions! After the show, my sister and I went up to the Voodoo rooftop nightclub on the 51st floor of the Rio; coincidentally there was a huge group of Albertan’s there.

Me and my sister at the largest buffet in Vegas. I'm om-nomming some crab legs.

Getting our picture with Teller. The paper is the punchline to a joke used in the skit with my dad.

And a picture with Penn.

Wednesday – May 3
Went on an all day bus tour to the Grand Canyon. Our bus driver, Mike, made the 3.5 hour drive to the canyon a blast; he was hilarious the whole way. Checked out Hoover Dam. Went on the Skywalk. The Grand Canyon was amazing. The Skywalk, however, was just silly. I heard it was a 4000 ft vertical drop through the glass – turns out it’s between 500 to 800 ft. Felt like 50 with the glass as scratched as it was. Got back and went to the Strip again; can’t understate how incredibly massive and glamorous it is. I don’t normally like drinking, but I had a Havana and Banana colada from Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville and that thing was tasty.

View of Hoover Dam from the new bypass bridge.

Me, lookin' good on the bridge.

Me, checkin' out the uhh... the canyons.

Back in Vegas on the Strip with my sister and some parrots.

A nice picture of the Strip that my sister took.

Thursday – May 4
Went shopping at the same outlet mall again – my dad bought a suit for himself. Later at night we went to Freemont street. It’s kinda neat with the roof being a gigantic screen. I put $20 into a slot machine and lost it. Felt bad. Watched my dad win in Blackjack. Felt good.

Freemont street.

Friday – May 5
Went shopping at the North Las Vegas Premium Outlet Mall. It was all outdoors – a very cool place actually. I ended up buying more golf apparel. Went to the Strip again. Afterwords my sister and I went to Absinthe, a small show at Caesars Palace. It was hysterically vulgar and featured impressive acrobatics. We got bumped up to front row seats which was awesome – one of the actresses gave me a little more than I was expecting…
Saturday – May 6
Started the long 18 hour drive back home. Got home on Sunday. What a great week.

Here’s the poster for our capstone design project.

Click for larger version.

Here are a few of the woodworking projects I’ve done in the past. Felt like sharing.

Chess Board

Dining Room Table

Dresser

Nightstand

Alcohol Cabinet

Here’s a short vid of the progress I’ve made in the last few weeks for my design project.

[Back when I was 16, I guess I had nothing better to do than modify how my computer case looked. Here is a forum post I made.]

In the past 2 weeks or so,  I’ve been messing around modding my computer case and improving the things that I just didnt like. 

My case is (was?) an Aspire X-plorer ATX mid tower case. Here are pics with possible brief descriptions of what I’ve done.

First, here are some pics of my case before I did any modding to it:

Now here are quite a few shots of what it looks like now after many hours in the garage =P:

Here you can see how I stealthed the DVD drive. (among other things)

This pic shows the switches (in the 3.25" bay) I put in to turn off certain fans and the cathode lights so I can actually sleep at night. Also seen here is the 120mm fan I cut in (with a wholesaw, of course...) and the new mesh i made because the old thing was just fugly, IMO.

Another shot of the custom mesh cover I made, with the fans and light switches off ('Cause c'mon, I gotta show off the craftmanship here =P)

To make the mesh into the exact spot it belongs it took several steps. First i traced the outline of the old mesh with a pencil. Then i scanned the piece of paper to my computer. After a half hour of work, I finished the template. I took a peice of wax paper, taped wide masking tape to it, cut it to 8.5x11, put it in the printer, and printed off a template. I pasted it to the new mesh I needed to cut out. The black outside edge is what I needed to cut, and the red line was where i needed to meticulously bend the mesh.

Onto the side panel: I cut a much larger window out as you can see. For window trim i took 14awg wire and stripped the insulation off in a clean motion, and put it on the edges. It worked out quite nicely. It is held on just by the pressure of the screws holding the window on. In the inside I put a case temp display in the top right corner. I painted the chassis white to glow nicely and contrast the black case. I added a Zalmon CPU cooler. I painted the handle (w/e it is?) of the door white to add contrast.

I cut the top window out to match the side panel (notice the side window near the handle and the top window near the fan). You can see how I also windowed my dvd drive and I also took my Aspire PSU (I know you guys hate these PSU’s – jeez they’re fine IMO…) and slightly modified it so i could make it face up, so that you can see its clear case through the top window. The 80 mm fan I cut in couldnt have fit any better since there is little room between the PSU and DVD drive to fit a fan.

Here's a better picture of the top.

[Sidestepping a bit,  here is a different post I made about the DVD drive]

To the right is a picture of my DVD drive. This morning I woke up with ambitions. I decided to hack up my drive, wire some LEDs into it, window it, paint it, and hope it still works.

This is a blurry pic of my wiring for the LEDs, seen from the underside of the drive (without the cover on).

From the top view, you can see how I arranged the LEDs.

For the covers, I cut the inside cover (underneath the very outer top cover) to a allow for a lot of exposure of the disc. I cut the outer cover to a large rectangular shape.

I then cut, placed, and riveted some acrylic plexiglass to to the top. I painted all the covers white (my case chassis is white)

 [Now back to the original post...]

Here are a few before and after GIFs of my case.

A shot of the inside of the case.

Another shot of the inside.

Some mods worth mentioning that I never explained:

•  removed the four lit corners on the front of the case and painted the clear plastic they were black.
•  painted the power and reset buttons white to match the theme
•  cut out the rear fan mesh and put a 120mm fan in

And finally… A shot of the entire finished product:

Suggestions, questions, and comments are extremely appreciated!

[The end. I was really proud of what I made and had a lot of fun. The computer is still being used today.]

I built my computer a little over two years ago. At the time, NVIDIA (a GPU manufacturer) and Intel (a CPU manufacturer) were at odds with their licensing agreements, and I ended up being stuck with a Crossfire-only motherboard. If I wanted to use multiple graphics cards in parallel, they had to be ATI cards. Nevertheless, I purchased an NVIDIA GTX280 card because it seemed like the best card for the price. Lo and behold, earlier this year I completely forgot my motherboard was Crossfire-only and I bought a second GTX280 in anticipation for new games such as Battlefield 3. That was basically a $200 mistake. Playing the latest games is almost too damn expensive, I should just learn how to play poker or start a stamp collection. Anyway, I felt pretty stupid when I realized my mistake.

Fortunately, a lot of other people also wanted SLI on their Crossfire-only boards, and someone created SLIpatch.  SLIpatch is great, but it has a few shortcomings such as requiring modified NVIDIA drivers for each driver revision. A few days ago the developer released a new tool called HyperSLI, which greatly simplifies the process and doesn’t require modified drivers. HyperSLI currently only works for motherboards with Intel processors, so if you have an AMD processor, you’ll have to stick with SLIpatch [Edit: Now works with AMD chipsets] . But if you do meet the requirements, here’s how to make it work:

1. Install the latest NVIDIA drivers for your card.
2. If you’re upgrading from SLIpatch to HyperSLI, just run the HyperSLI installer and click “Update”. If otherwise, just click “Install”. Simple.
3. When the computer is rebooting, open up the BIOS. Most computers use either F1, F2, or DEL to access the BIOS. Look for something called “Virtualization Technology” and make sure it is enabled.
4. When the computer boots back up, open up the NVIDIA Control Panel and enable SLI.

Completely renovated my mom’s bathroom. Took me ~100 hrs. Here is pictures from beginning to end. Click on the images for larger uncropped versions and short descriptions.

Built this for my mom’s bathroom I am renovating right now.

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