Just as with classical music, personal tastes go through phases or times of different emphasis. I find that personally, my YouTube watching habits shift every few years. In my later years of college and right after graduation, I watched a lot of Let's Plays and other video game videos. Then I shifted to cubing. And speedrunning. And somewhere in there, lots of cool video game covers. Metal versions of beloved chip tunes rock.
The latest addition to that smattering of topics is computer tech and news. In particular, the Canadian-based channel Linus Tech Tips. It's a bit of 'living vicariously through someone else' seeing some of their over-the-top, high-performance, high-price builds. So much technical language and part details get thrown around. Despite my ignorance of a lot of the things they talk about, I can still enjoy the videos and laugh at their shenanigans.
But that reminds me of how poor my computer knowledge has been (and still is, somewhat).
In high-school, I dared to teach a computer science class, despite my only experience being (1) time spent playing games, (2) maybe a little DOS and Windows 3.1 knowledge, and (3) currently enrolled (at that time) in the only college-level computer class I've taken.
Suffice to say, the class was mostly a disaster. I'd never attempted doing a class like that before, so the lesson plans were made fairly last-minute. And because I was also their contemporary, it was difficult for me to stay in charge of class, if at all. One thing I 'll grant myself was the hands-on that I did for the first class - bringing in an actual computer, and opening it up.
That is what really got me thinking about how little I knew or had done. I had a basic computer, so there was no talk of bigger, better power supplies. I hadn't done any serious gaming, so there wasn't any talk of different CPUs, GPUs, or overclocking. I didn't even know the name "PCIe" for the slots used to connect things to the motherboard until last year.
Watching the tech shows and putting together my desktop computer was a good learning experience. In addition to the usual adding of RAM, I finally got to install a graphics card into a computer, while being aware of what the thing does. I even ran a benchmark like a real techie!
Maybe I'll even get to overclock and/or liquid cool something one day!
Not any time soon though. It's too scary.
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