posted Aug 25th 2011 2:00PM 
Growing up geek? I'm having trouble believing I did. In preparation for this piece I scoured all of my family's photo albums (these stop at around 2004 -- must've been that digital camera craze), and the pictorial evidence to support my geeky ways just doesn't seem to exist. Notably, I had to start wearing huge glasses in kindergarten, but to me that's merely a trapping of the stereotypical nerd aesthetic -- though I do fancy my current Rivers Cuomo-esque horn-rims. 
My father was -- and still is -- a city boy at heart with the skills to shred on his electric guitars and start his own jewelry business in Manhattan's diamond district. While he was off working, my mother studied computer science in college, took care of me and our condo and somehow still had enough time to play Nintendo. Basically, I was gaming and sitting in on her QBasic and COBOL programming courses when I was still in diapers. Suffice to say, I've known my way around gadgets since I was a toddler, but aside from being intrigued by Sega, computers and my dad's guitar licks, I wouldn't say I officially qualified as a geek until I was about 11. 
I was an outsider in Catholic grade school. By the sixth grade, things weren't going so swimmingly and my parents put me in a more artsy school in Hoboken, New Jersey called Steven's Co-op. Around this time, I had my first exposure to Macs, upgraded from a beeper to a Nokia cellphone, began learning how to play guitar and received my own Toshiba Satellite laptop as a gift from my grandfather -- a very tech-savvy fellow indeed. It kept my prying hands away from my mother's prized Sony VAIOs, though unluckily for her, I had discovered the power of my room's phone jack and the speed of my laptop's 56K modem. That and how perfect the two were for surfing the web, chatting on AOL Instant Messenger and finding guitar tabs so I could learn Blink-182 and Green Day songs with my band. Let's just say that by the early 2000s I'd become a master at running up excessive dial-up internet and cellphone bills, much to my parents' dismay. 
High school was odd, to say the least. The short version is that it felt like middle school all over again -- after the Co-op, I found myself in a place with a huge sports focus, and that just wasn't me. Throughout freshman year, I got more into music and started going to local ska and rock shows. By the next term I had taken up the drums, fallen in love with the electric bass guitar and started trying to get bands together. This was also the year my school hooked up a WiFi network. I carried an Acer convertible tablet with Windows XP Tablet Edition in a failed attempt to rid myself of binders, but it mostly helped me spend classtime skimming MySpace for new friends and attempting to code my profile in HTML. I also got heavily into online gaming and would stay up all night playing SOCOM 2. Somehow, though, my grades didn't tank. 
Senior year was a game changer for me. As much as I wanted to love Windows it just wouldn't play nice with me, and I finally made the switch to a black MacBook that runs decently to this day. Keep in mind, I was the kind of guy who went for a brown Zune over an iPod, so this was a big leap. The second important thing I embraced was Engadget. I'd always been curious about gear, but hadn't found a site that held my interest the way this one did. By the time college rolled around I was getting further involved as a bassist and playing more shows, and in my downtime would obsessively check the internet to get my gadget news fix, usually starting here. Constantly wanting to do more, I figured this blogging thing might be fun to try on my own, so I took to YouTube, talking to my iSight camera about my quest to acquire a PS3 and HDTV. Surprisingly, my terrible videos weren't doing half bad and, incidentally, neither were the bands I was involved with. That was my life, in a sentence: going to school, gadget vlogging and generally trying my best to be a rock star. 
I did get to play some big shows and even hit the road in a van and trailer a few times, but after a while I realized the music industry was an even bigger gamble than I imagined. I continued at it while becoming more serious as a blogger, focusing on headphones and gaming gear, and nursing my dream of one day ending up at this very site. On December 1, 2010 I played my last gig at NYC's Roseland Ballroom and decided to put all my energy toward that goal, and amazingly half a year later I was on board as an editor! There's no doubt that technology is huge part of who I am and covering it professionally is the best thing I could've hoped for. I haven't forgotten my rocker roots, but I don't think I'll ever love it as much as writing on my laptop and listening to Blink with cans on while wearing my favorite skinny jeans. Joe Pollicino's one of the most multifaceted gents you'll ever meet, with a loud speaking voice and a love of the great indoors. He'll sometimes announce his next pizza delivery order or complain about gadgets on Twitter (@akaTRENT), and when he's on the move there's always a laptop by his side in some sort-of crazy bag. Any time he has left, he spends pwning n00bz on PSN (ID: akaTRENT).
Couldn't get your hands on a discount TouchPad? It's not quite as cheap, but X10 does boldly claim that its new AirPad is "the best tablet on the market for under $200." It's important to have realistic goals, after all. The seven-inch slate packs in 4GB of storage (plus a microSD slot), WiFi, and Android 2.3.
HotHardware just herded up a trio of new mainboards equipped with AMD's 990FX chipset, which will support those famed 8-core Bulldozer-based processors when they finally arrive, as well as being compatible with existing Phenom II and Athlon II chips. All the boards had similarly high performance, good connectivity and plenty of overclocking and tweaking potential. However, the $229 Asus CrossHair V Formula inched its way to overall victory thanks to its reliability, attractive build and smart layout. The ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional placed second despite being cheaper at $200 and having richer connectivity, including FireWire and a front-mountable USB 3.0 panel. Finally, the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 lagged behind due to its excessive $250 price tag, a lack of color coding to help guide less experienced builders, plus an ugly and outdated BIOS utility. So, there you have it: if you want to gear up for your next Bulldozer-ready AMD build, the Asus and ASRock 990FX boards are ripe for picking. Check out the source link for the full comparisons and benchmarks. 
Another official teardown, another predictable revelation: the new Sony Vaio Z's viscera are thinner, flatter and, er, more compressed than those of its predecessor. But at least this dissection is performed by an actual Vaio engineer who ought to know his stuff. In the video after the break, Shinji Oguchi explains how cooling was improved using a range of tricks, like aerating the laptop's guts via holes in the keyboard. He also splits open the innovative external media dock, which connects via Intel's Light Peak technology and uses a discrete GPU to give the Vaio Z some gaming oomph. Finally, there's a separate, speeded-up video of Shinji putting the whole thing back together again from memory. The poor guy must be sick of it by now. 
By Richard Lawler 
It's been a while since we heard anything solid about the DirecTV Nomad unit, but a teaser page recently went live on the satellite company's website showing the device. The tiny pic isn't incredibly revealing, but other than "coming soon" the page also displays a laptop, phone and tablet -- likely targets for viewers to watch their TV broadcasts away from the satellite box. That MDR1R0-01 remains scarce, but hit the source link and keep your eye peeled on that URL for more information about DirecTV's competitor to the Slingbox / iPad apps being offered by other TV providers.