All entries written in August, 2008
August 20, 2008 at 9:17 am · Filed under Misc, Thoughts
I know this is a poor excuse for a post in an already-dry time (for the record, when I go a while between posts in an Intermission, it usually means I’m working like crazy, and these last few weeks have been no exception), but still, I just saw what I thought was the funniest spam e-mail message I’d ever received. It wasn’t about my penis–that joke got played out 10 years ago. The headline I glanced across promised to deliver to me “[My] Direct Swiss Cheese Source.” Wow! That’s different! I don’t even like cheese, and I was intrigued.
It turned out that I’d read the header wrong–it was promising to be my direct Swiss secret, i.e. another stupid watch ad. Oh, well. At least I got the benefit of one of those psychiatric word-association tests…you know, “what word do you think of when I say…?”
“Swiss?” “Cheese.”
“Bank?” “Deutsche”
“Car?” “Heem.” (that one might take a Google search to understand).
I don’t know how fair it is if I do both halves myself. God, I have been inside alone waaay too long.
August 10, 2008 at 9:49 am · Filed under Misc, Thoughts
Does everybody who moves to Queens have bad luck with some specific appliance? For my aunt, it was always answering machines–she used to go through like one a year. For me, it seems to be toasters. I’ve been living in this apartment for 13 months, and as of today, I will be on my third toaster! Both of my previous toasters broke the same way: one morning, I woke up and the toast lever would no longer lock down, rendering the unit useless. At first I thought that the roaches I know damn well are getting into them were gnawing through the mechanisms or something, but in my heart, I know that the difference between the modern toasters I’ve been buying and the one my parents have had for 15+ years is in the design. My toasters simply pop up too hard–the lever can only take it so many times before it breaks inside. It’s a shame, because to look at it one way, this is a nice feature. I always have to reach way into my parents’ toaster to get the stuff out…but my newest toaster had a “lift” lever, so it arguably didn’t need the “pop” at all!
Here’s my last toaster. Believe it or not, it actually looked good in my kitchen. I like weird things.
August 1, 2008 at 9:07 am · Filed under Personal, Thoughts
Well, despite the fact that retrofitting my sister’s old computer for my own use was ostensibly to increase my computing power for free, I’ve sunk nearly $500 into the thing at this point. First it was the 320 GB hard drive, then it was a $75 hard drive enclosure to create a backup/transfer disk, and now it’s $190 for a new graphics card. What can I say? One of the main reasons I was looking forward to having this computer was so that I could play the copy of Oblivion I bought nearly two years ago, and though it runs well enough, it gets choppy and crashes just frequently enough to make me worry about the long-term effects on the system. Constant restarts are no good, especially on an OS like XP Media Center, where everything uses the video card and thus everything gets messed up even if I manage to quit out of the game without restarting.
So I upgraded the video card the system came with (an Nvidia 7300LE) to a new one, an Nvidia 8800GT, which, as I said, cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $190-$200 with tax. Buuuut it was on sale from $260, and I was able to use a $5 off coupon, so I’d say I got a pretty good deal. And what a difference this thing is going to make…here’s a specs comparison screenshot I quickly stitched together from the Nvidia website:
Yikes! Just look at that jump! With this, I shouldn’t have to worry about being able to run my games for a long time…which is nice, because I like to not worry. And in the end, I’m still happy with the way this project turned out, because less than $500 is a ridiculously good deal to get on a computer this powerful. Here’s to the end of annoying crashes!
(That will be all of my geeky side for now)
