[Rant] JLPT N2 was so hard!!!

Today I went for the JLPT N2 exam. The examination center was Keio University in Hiyoshi. That's a short distance from my work place. So it didn't take a long time for me to get there from home.

Entrance of the Keio University in Hiyoshi. Nice autumn leaves.

The exam was much harder than I thought. Maybe I didn't put enough effort on to it. I'm sure I'm going to fail. I felt that the moment I tried the first 5 questions. The Kanji characters in the first 5 questions were ones I've never even seen before. In the end I didn't have time to answer the last two questions either. They are all MCQs but I didn't want to test the examiner by coloring them after we were asked to stop coloring. Unfortunately, she didn't announce that there was only so and so minutes remaining. I felt she stopped the test earlier than she should have. It read 14:28 on my watch even though the test should have gone till 14:30. Sucks! Otherwise I could have just arbitrarily colored two numbers. To be honest, that's what I did for most questions though.

[Rant] Saw a 4k display for the first time

A 4K TV, to be precise.

This happened a while back and I forgot to tell about it. We saw a 84inch 4K TV made by Toshiba at Costco the last time we went there. The image looked impeccable! That made me realize what the hype about 4K displays was.

Look at the price of this TV. JPY 1,680,000. Man, that’s a lot of bonuses!

Hopefully the prices will drop to affordable range in a 3-4 years. We’ll probably have all the horsepower to run such a display with a single graphics card comfortably. Hey, I am just switching to 1440p.

[Rant] Finally it is time to move on. Bye bye 1080p. Hello 1440p.

I had been thinking of upgrading my PC’s display for a long time. I had been using a 27” 1080p display made by Iiyama (a Japanese brand) for few years. It is a TN panel and the pixel clock can only be overclocked to 69Hz. They say it has super fast response time, but I don’t know for sure.

1080p is the norm today. While 1080p is very easy for most of the midrange graphics card, the next step isn’t. The next step is 1440p or 2560x1440. Of course there is another notch above that – 4K or 3840x2160. But that is out of reach for most people. In fact, there are only a couple of displays made for the PC that uses 4K resolution.

I have a GTX670 graphics card. It only has 2GB video RAM. While it hardly chokes with 1080p, 1440p isn’t that easy for it. But since I am planning to upgrade the graphics card soon (waiting for the price drops in the holiday season), I thought 1440p is viable option. I’m thinking of getting GTX 780 or a R9 290. On the AMD side, I’m waiting for the cards based on 3rd party coolers. On the NVidia side, I’m waiting for the price drops. I can get a second GTX 670, but the video RAM issue would still be a problem. Even though the card will have 4GB video RAM in total, there will only be 2GB effectively because pretty much the same data needs to be copied across both cards.