Today I am tired and grouchy and this entire week has been stressy.
So…..tell me something good in *your* life. It’ll cheer me up. Please?
Month: July 2006
For all my emo whining about my computer earlier in the week, today is a day that cannot help but be a great day. Because tonight sometime about 8-ish, aiela will be arriving on an airplane, and I will be waiting to meet her!
This time it’s only been 4 months since we’ve seen each other. If we’re not careful, we’ll get spoiled. 🙂
Yay, can’t wait! 🙂
sarekofvulcan posts in his blog:
Melanie Martinez, host of PBS Kids Sprout’s The Good Night Show, was fired recently because she appeared 7 years ago in a short independent film that her producers deemed inappropriate.
Right.
After all, I definitely want my work performance to be judged on what I did in college
Yeah, its really important, because you know that pre-school kids are a *huge* segment of the independent film demographic. Hell, I can’t stand to go to Sundance or Cannes anymore, because I’m always tripping over toddlers at the screenings.
Furrfu!
The computer is NOT my friend.[1]
I got home yesterday at my usual time, a little after 5pm, and, after taking care of the dirty dishes, decided to play a little CoV before making dinner. Went through the entire map, was engaged in combat with the big bad at the end when….everything locked up and CoV crashed. It’s been doing that alot lately, and inf act this was the third attempt to do this mission. So I started to see if I could diagnose the problem. My first thought was that it might be a memory problem, caused by having unmatched DIMMS. I shut everything down, and pulled 256meg of RAM out, leaving the pair of 512s.
And the computer wouldn’t boot. No errors. No beeps. Nothing. The lights came on, the drives spun up, but no video, no sound, nothing.
I spent the next hour or so checking and reseating all the connections, trying replacing the various ram chips in different combinations, unplugging different parts. Absolutely nothing worked, and as near as I could tell, it was a dead system.
To say I did not react well to this was….an understatement. I take computers failing on me rather personally at times. It’s not just a hardware fault. It’s a betrayal. And this betrayal drove me to do something I have not done since the mid-1980s [2].
I went to CompUSA and bought a retail PC.
I know I just lost a ton of geek-cred, but honestly, I don’t think I could have built a system for as cheap as they’re selling in the stores anymore.[3] For $550 (after rebate), I got myself a lovely Compaq Presario SR1950NX, with Athlon 64 3800 processor, 1GB of ram, dual-layer DVD-RW and a 250GB SATA hard drive.[4]
I got it home, and immediately put the RAM from my old PC in, bringing me to 2GB, and tried to put my hard drives in place. I figured out pretty quickly that they weren’t going to install nicely in the actual drive bays, so I finally settled for standing them on edge in the bottom of the case and hooking them up. I’ll evetually get myself some external enclosures for them.
The only thing I need now is a good video card[5] and I’ll be ready to rumble.
[1] If this be treason, then let us make the most of it!
[2] The last retail computer I bought new was a Laser 128 Apple ][e clone. I bought two Amigas second hand after that, and have since then owned 4 different PCs, all of them hand-built.
[3] And if you think you could, don’t tell me. I need what few illusions I have left, Besides, whatever small amount I MIGHT have gotten cheaper is offset by the instant gratification factor.
[4] And yes, Windows XP. This is the gaming system, which makes Linux and MacOS be less than ideal.
[5] The video card in my old system was an AGP card, and the new system is PCI-E. I’ve got a couple of people who might be interested in buying my old card though, so I’m hoping to offset some of the cost of the new one.
Thanks to beige_alert for pointing this one out:
Come One, Come All, Join the Terror Target List
It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”
[…]
The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.
“We don’t find it embarrassing,” said the department’s deputy press secretary, Jarrod Agen. “The list is a valuable tool.”
But the audit says that lower-level department officials agreed that some older information in the inventory “was of low quality and that they had little faith in it.”
“The presence of large numbers of out-of-place assets taints the credibility of the data,” the report says.
In addition to the petting zoo, in Woodville, Ala., and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., the auditors questioned many entries, including “Nix’s Check Cashing,” “Mall at Sears,” “Ice Cream Parlor,” “Tackle Shop,” “Donut Shop,” “Anti-Cruelty Society” and “Bean Fest.”
Obviously, the terrorists know that if they can disrupt the Mule Day parade in Columbia, TN, a wave of fear will culminate in the cancellation of the National Hollerin’ Contest in Spivy’s Corner, NC, and our very way of life will be destroyed. Either that, or the government is trying to very cleverly provide the terrorists with disinformation, drawing them away from the real targets. Which might work, if the terrorists were all complete idiots.
In the words of Lily Tomlin: “I try to be cynical, but it’s so hard to keep up.”
(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)
| ✓ I miss somebody right now. (More than one.) | × I don’t watch much TV these days. (Probably more than I ought to, but still not as much as the average person.) | ✓ I own lots of books. (And i need to build more shelves) |
| ✓ I wear glasses or contact lenses. | ✓ I love to play video games. (I spend a lot more time playing City of Villains than I probably should.) | ✓ I’ve tried marijuana. (In college. Couldn’t see what the fuss was.) |
| ✓ I’ve watched porn movies. (I’ve even watched them with SOs. Sometimes we’d take notes for later.) | × I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship. | ✓ I believe honesty is usually the best policy. |
| ✓ I curse sometimes. (Working on cutting down on that.) | ✓ I have changed a lot mentally over the last year. (Not always for the better.) | × I carry my knife/razor everywhere with me. |
During an IM conversation with hejira2006, this popped out of nowhere:
FRANKLIN: “That John Adams is one bad motherf—”
JEFFERSON, BARTLETT, and LIVINGSTON: “Shut yo mouth!”
FRANKLIN: “I’m just talkin’ about John Adams!”
DICKINSON: “He’s a complicated man, and no one understands him…”
WILSON: “But his woman?”
DICKINSON: No, seriously. *No one* understands him”
“The country is run by extremists, because moderates have shit to do.”
–John Stewart, “The Daily Show”