Posts in category "Daily Life"

It Stopped Raining

It stopped rain­ing, and the grey sky has turned black with the night. The refresh­ing smell of wet pave­ment and grass drifts lazi­ly through my win­dow, while droplets col­lect and fall from the over­hangs of every house, a dif­fer­ent sound with each vary­ing height and tex­ture. Cars dri­ve by, and I imag­ine the spray from their tires ris­ing and falling in the light of the mild, gold­en street lamps.

In per­son, I’m gen­er­al­ly very pri­vate about my life, but I find myself open­ing up to the strangest peo­ple late­ly.

The most unex­pect­ed ones seem to care.

An Odd Mood Lately

I spend my time squar­ing away every­thing in my room so that I’m com­fort­able enough to write. The extra cables are gone, as well as the ran­dom receipts and bus trans­fers that some­how end up on the car­pet. My mir­rors are all in place, mak­ing the room seem twice as big, but I when I look I only see myself, slouched com­fort­ably in my chair, hood over my head. Even Dolly has won­dered in to lay her­self flat on the emp­ty floor. By the time I’m done clean­ing, I’m at a loss for all the things I’ve been try­ing to get into well struc­tured para­graphs.

A new episode of Trailer Park Boys is play­ing on Showcase, and I’m watch­ing it with the sound off because too much infor­ma­tion would ruin the fourth sea­son, some­thing I’m deter­mined to see in order from the begin­ning. Ricky’s in a high school, com­plete­ly out of place as a thir­ty-some­thing man in shop class try­ing to make some hash or grow some weed or har­vest some kind of nar­cot­ic, and this only adds to my amuse­ment.

I’ve been let­ting my hair grow out, à la Matt Heafy in the video for Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr. Somehow, I’ve only now dis­cov­ered that my hair nat­u­ral­ly grows towards the front, and by brush­ing it for­ward, it still looks respectable when I haven’t had it cut in a month and a half.

I’ve been in an odd mood late­ly. Thoughts branch off in my mind, but noth­ing seems sol­id enough to fol­low through. Inspiration always comes the day after today.

More Sickness

Hence the absence from work. It feels like the long week­end burned me out, and I need anoth­er one. Thank god it’s already Wednesday.

Really, it’s prob­a­bly just a mild stom­ach bug, caus­ing my body to reject every­thing but very dry, thin­ly sliced toast that comes in packs of eight, named after the stage name of Australian opera singer Helen Porter Mitchell. I sus­pect that I’ll also be able to con­sume col­la­gen processed from pork skin, cat­tle bones, and cat­tle hide, but I’m still wait­ing for it to set in the freez­er.

I feel so help­less when I’m like this. I gen­er­al­ly don’t wor­ry about much, but health is the only thing that I can’t look at cere­bral­ly. I’m not even com­fort­able writ­ing this. It just keeps mak­ing me think of how bad I feel. Too nau­se­at­ed to fall asleep. Too tired to do any­thing else.

New Computer '05

I final­ly got my com­put­er, and have the week­end to spend set­ting every­thing up.

Let’s talk geek.

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Dual-Core) 4400+

Thumbnail: Large CPU heatsink

The sex­i­est stock heatsink I’ve ever seen. Notice the dense fins, and the sym­met­ri­cal cop­per heat pipes. I did­n’t dare take it off the cpu for a pic­ture. One time, after I pulled the heatsink off a P4, I noticed that the proces­sor was stuck to the bot­tom while the proces­sor lock was still in place. The ther­mal paste had caked and turned to glue. The edges of the cpu were chipped and a few pins were bent, but I care­ful­ly put them back in place and it still worked.

This one is an AMD though. It’s clocked at 2.2 GHz, with two megs of lev­el 2 cache (one per core). Even though it can almost be con­sid­ered unrea­son­ably expen­sive, I went with a dual-core proces­sor because I want­ed some­thing that could han­dle both sin­gle-thread­ed and mul­ti-thread­ed apps. All the reviews I read said that the Pentium Extreme Edition chips were slight­ly bet­ter for the lat­ter but much worse for the for­mer, so this marks my first for­ay into the use of an Advanced Micro Devices proces­sor, at work or at home.

Continue read­ing “New Computer ‘05”…

I Bought A New Computer

The last part came in from back order today and they’re run­ning the burn overnight, so it’ll be ready for me to pick up before the week­end.

It’s the most expen­sive sys­tem that I’ve ever bought, but also the most guilt-free. At home, I spend the major­i­ty of my time at the com­put­er — I use it to write, manip­u­late pho­tos, ren­der video, play games, com­mu­ni­cate with friends, watch movies, lis­ten to music. I could sur­vive on my cur­rent sys­tem, but I could also take advan­tage of an even bet­ter set­up.

Some of the parts may be a lit­tle exces­sive, but why not go all out? I only know a few peo­ple, such as Trolley, who could appre­ci­ate a top-of-the-line sys­tem in the same way. Ever since Intel announced their line­up of dual-core proces­sors in the first quar­ter, I’ve been sav­ing my mon­ey, keep­ing track of the parts I’ve want­ed. By the time AMD announced their own dual-core archi­tec­ture, I had a com­plete list of com­po­nents for my dream sys­tem. Most stores could­n’t even get their hands on the chips, so for two months I would peri­od­i­cal­ly check for avail­abil­i­ty. Eventually, I end­ed up going through a cor­po­rate con­tact, who has his own direct con­tact to AMD. To boot, he gave me a dis­count (rang­ing on 15%, which is insane, con­sid­er­ing the tiny mar­gin on com­put­er sys­tems) since I’m a busi­ness client as well.

The kick­er is that my work just hap­pens to need a com­put­er capa­ble of han­dling some heavy graph­ics edit­ing. The com­put­er most ade­quate to han­dle this usage is mine, since it’s also the fastest in the office, so I get to give up my already ade­quate sys­tem for a bet­ter one. I got approval to order the same sys­tem that I bought myself per­son­al­ly. The same sys­tem that I’ve been dream­ing of, plan­ning for, and drool­ing over since February.