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Tuesday 13 August 2002 // 1533 EDT Seeing: Kick-ass graphics! Hearing: Propellerheads feat. Shirley Bassey - History Repeating Touching: Silver thermal paste on my fingertips Tasting: Ben and Jerry's Everything But The... Thinking: I think I need a day off from my weekend...and I even took two days off before my
weekend, and I was off work yesterday too! It's actually pretty strange, I suppose
you know you're all grown up when you take a day off work and get a crapload of stuff
done...yesterday, for example, I got things straightened out with the
Anyways, aside from that I managed to call OIT about my contract and get it worked out so I
could stop by and sign it today, and I managed to finally finish all the recovery
work on my computer(more on that later.). Waking up at 10AM even though you were up
all night the night before and are still tired will really make you productive. So I
wound up working a little bit on the EDMC
website-which is by NO means up or finished right now-but I'm planning on getting it
done by the end of the month. But last night, I vaccumed the floor, mopped the
kitchen, cleaned up a bit, you know-got a lot of stuff done. I was pretty tired by
night's end, but I wound up sprawling on the couch and chatting with Rob about a
whole assortment of things, all of which were pretty interesting, especially our
long-term plans for the house and things we want to do with it.
As for the weekend? Yeah-it started with me getting my brand new GeForce4 TI 4200 and
promptly installing it in my shiny black ninja computer. The machine worked for a
while, then suddenly died-I mean no video, no sound, no nothing-it was like it was
on...but off. So I restarted it a couple of times, but it wouldn't boot at
all-confused, I pried the ninja case(that I spraypainted myself all glossyblack and
pretty) off and examined the innards, and discovered that it wasn't posting at
all-wasn't booting whatsoever. After Rob and I hacked at it a bit, we figured out we
blew a capacitor somewhere, and figured it was the power supply unevenly distributing
power to the system components. By that time it was something like 11PM, so Saturday
when I got up, I rushed out to CompUSA to get a
new power supply, and upon seeing
the one I needed being 99 dollars, I decided to shop around to
Best Buy(who didnt
have one I could use at all) and then Radio
Shack(who doesn't sell them at all), and settled that back to CompUSA was the
place to go. I bought the power supply, took it home, tried it, and no luck, the
system still wouldn't post. So now, knowing it wasn't the power supply, the only
components left to check are the motherboard and the CPU-so I wandered over to the
counter that the motherboards were stored behind and tried to shop for one-the tech
at the counter told me that he didn't have a motherboard that would work with my
chip and I would have to look somewhere else. BestBuy doesn't sell motherboards, so I
called up the CompUSA in Glen Burnie and asked them if they had one-they did have one
they knew would work with my chip, so I rushed down to that CompUSA something like 45
minutes before they closed, and bought it. I got home to find a message in IRC from
Jas, telling me that any socket A motherboard that would handle an athlon
would have handled my chip just fine-so I didnt have to run around town or
necessarily drop the cash I did-but it's okay-I have a decent board. I installed the
board, put the CPU on it, mounted the heat sink, found a use for the DDR RAM that rob
bought for his sister's computer(but couldn't use because it didn't like the
motherboard they they bought a while ago-funny how things work out, huh?) and powered
it up....sure enough, it loaded into windows and promptly froze. I kept trying and it
kept freezing moments into windows, so I thought my windows installation was messed
up-so I tried reinstalling...but the installer froze too. I eventually gave up and
went to bed.
Sunday, I got up and tried again, no such luck. Frustrated, I started to make
other boot disks and the like, trying to figure out what the problem was, and
eventually we got on the topic of CPUs-shortly thereafter I found out my Athlon was
running at 70 degrees celsius, or something like 165 degrees farenheit....WAY too
hot. So I powered down the computer, rushed back to Best Buy, bought some thermal
compound and another 256MB stick of DDR RAM to put in the 3rd slot, and came
home-installed the RAM, spread the goo all over the CPU(and my finger), and powered
it up. Sure enough-the installer loaded properly. I screwed up my installation of
windows in the process of messing around, so I had to reinstall, but I was so happy I
didn't mind doing recovery work on all my applications and start menu items until
something like 4AM. Never before had my Macintosh
Performa come in such handy, it was quite impressive. Anyway, it's up and
running now, freshly reinstalled, all my programs working, my fabulous graphics and
sound owning, my fast new memory going...my computer is so frickin' l33t I love it,
and after this weekend, I've GOT to have the skills required to be A+ certified.
So that was the weekend-I finished some of the recovery work yesterday, but aside
from all of that, everything has been wonderful and I'm so happy everything
works. Now I can go back to thinking hard about those turntables I should have in
just under 2 weeks...I'll be paying the first half off this weekend, and then when I
get my last paycheck from AQ I'll be all set to complete the sale and move them into
the basement, all nice and happy and ready to get rocked. I'm really looking forward
to that. Aside from all of that, I start at OIT on Monday and leave Absolute Quality on Friday, so while it'll be a sad
departure, I'm not particularly upset that I'll be leaving...this place was starting
to grate a bit on my nerves anyway-it'll be good to be back in familiar surroundings
with people I know already, even if none of them are attractive women.
Lately I've been feeling like part of my life is something like this, but even so, I dont really
think I have to worry about that too much anymore, I just thought it was applicable
and amusing enough to make me smile, so I thought I'd share.
In the meantime, I've been hangin in there, getting more productive things done,
focusing on my own energy and synchronicity, and doing a lot more reading and
enjoying my time...it's actually really impressive how much more energy I've had
lately and how much better things have been, I didn't think it was going to be quite
like this-but in the end, things are working out, and I'm doing pretty well, and it's
chicken stir fry for dinner tonight-It'll be yummy.
In the meantime, I have friends coming home to visit soon, and more friends in the
area...now I just have to get off my lazy butt and call them and hang
out-hell,I've been talking to people I haven't talked to in weeks--as soon as
we get the house all cleaned up and ready to go, I'm all about bringing people over
to see the new place, and hopefully my shiny new turntables. We'll see, we'll see.
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