I love gigs…

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Ahhh – this weekend just so happened to be an “Upgrade Your Computer” weekend…can life be any more frustrating fun?!

It all started out with a beautiful, new video card that was purchased with some leftover birthday money from my Grandpa (thanks again!). For some reason, the video card was the one thing that mysteriously got left out when I built my new machine last fall, possibly because somehow I believed that a 64 MB graphics card was “good enough” and possibly because after everything else, I’d kind of ran out of money! Either way, this was certainly an improvement – AGP 8X integration, 256 MB on board, and even potential for dual DVI outs once I score that huge contract and can afford a couple of 24″ LCDs…

I still haven’t even bothered to run any games on the thing to push its limits – I don’t really have time to game that much anyways – but it was nice to see that I’ll actually be able to watch anything that I want to download off bittorrent once again (my old card just couldn’t keep up with the latest DiVX codecs anymore). But of course, after a few hours of letting the downloads fly free, it was brought to my attention by one of those stupid, little taskbar bubbles that I was almost out of disk space on my last free drive. Fortunately, though, luck be with me today as a quick trip to hot-deals.org revealed a truly hot deal, indeed – 200 GB for a mere fifty bucks at CompUSA…and needless to say, I was there lickity split!

Mind you, the drive was more of a pain because first I didn’t have any free power cables (had to disconnect a CD drive that I never use anyways), then the disc tool was trying to limit me to a 137 GB partition because my BIOS was out of date…and my floppy drive wasn’t working to install the update because I was stupid when I first built the computer and put the cable on upside-down (…oops…), but as of now the new drive is spinning happily with the rest, files are getting shuffled to prepare for a new onslaught of television premieres, and all is right with the world. Well, close enough anyways…

…

Oh yes, but I can’t end this evening’s tale without sharing my latest infatuation with the group – I met her at CompUSA this evening and I’m not too shy to admit that I think I’m in love… :O

http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=117&modelid=9870

…that’s right – she’s a printer…what did you expect?! This beautiful work of art prints at up to 13″ x 19″ with 4800 x 2400 dpi, utilizing a whopping 8 ink cartridges, and cashing my credit card out at $500. No, no – I didn’t buy it just yet because I don’t really have the space…or the excuse…or the spare change, but just think of how cool the latest episodes of Ink, Paint & Tears… would look printed out at 13″ x 19″ – sweet doesn’t even begin to describe it! Ok, so maybe not right now, but if we ever start to look like we’re going somewhere with this, it certainly could be fun for promotional stuff…we’ll see. And by the way, as far as paper is concerned, photo paper for this beast is a buck a sheet for matte, two a piece for glossy. Has anybody ever seen reams of paper that size??? I don’t know about you, but I’m psyched!

two years in review…

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*** drum roll, etc… ***

On this day in history – 2003, to be specific – I first called the tropical hideaway that is the Sunshine State my new home! Just think, 731 days ago I was pulling off of that I-275 ramp with a gleam in my eye, a spring in my step, and a song in my heart after having just made arguably one of the most important trips of my life. I had a lot to look forward to that night…the horrendous back pain that comes from sleeping on a cheap, hotel bed for three weeks being but one highlight…and the more that I thought about it today, it’s hard to believe that it’s been two years already!
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book #6 is in the can…

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…and note, the time for this post actually is accurate – damn, I’d forgotten just how addictive these things can be! I should’ve known better when I layed down this evening with less than half of the book to go. Oh well.

What to say, what to say? Simply put – great book, and this one kept my attention a lot better than the last, I do believe – reminded me more of the first two in that sense. I still think that it’s amazing to think that a children’s series could gap generations like Harry Potter has … as disappointing as it was to see this one end, I can only imagine how we’re all going to feel after the final installment in a couple of years! What a fun ride, that’s for sure…

Of course, in the meantime now I can get back to my regularly scheduled life, seeing as I’ve officially blown off pretty much everything that I was supposed to do over the past few days to catch up on Harry’s latest adventure! With three hours of exercise, a weeks worth of coding, and lord knows how much writing procrastination to make up tomorrow, it’s bound to be a busy Wednesday…

But until then, g’night! 😛

I’m starting to like Steve Jobs more and more these days…

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Edgar Bronfman (head of Warner Music):“That’s not to say we want to raise prices across the board or that we don’t believe in a 99-cent price point for most music, but there are some songs for which consumers would be willing to pay more. And some we’d be willing to sell for less.”

Steve Jobs (head of Apple):“If they want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy…”

Check out the full article here:
Apple, record labels to face off over pricing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/22/AR2005092201722.html

But seriously, what’s it going to take to get these record execs to realize that in this new day and age, they’re simply not going to reap the same enormous profits that they saw when CDs first came out?! Jobs later hints that changing the rate structure as proposed is only going to encourage piracy…which I would believe isn’t far from the truth. I’m sure there’s still an overwhelming majority that doesn’t pay for its music now, and it’s tactics like these that are keeping the rest of us over on the bittorrent / IRC / usenet side of the fence, not even considering the hassle that is actually paying for our music…

talk about a lazy weekend!

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Well, I finally got past the “boring parts” in the latest Harry Potter book and let’s just say that I haven’t seen much of the light of day since! The bad news is that it kind of reminds me faintly of a cheesy romance novel (she likes him…who likes somebody else, but just to make her jealous…), but the good news is that I’m not really above that and have really been enjoying all of it so far! I’m about halfway through now already, though, so I suppose it won’t be too long before I’m back with the rest of the crowd, waiting for number seven… 😛

Also went up and drove around in search of more apartments today…to no avail. I did pick up some brochures that I’m going to look through tomorrow afternoon, but I think I’ve ultimately decided that if there’s any way for me to pull it, it would be best to just sign into another six-month lease here and deal with all of this moving nonsense later because I’m just not in the right headspace to be dealing with it right now. The manager here is supposed to be looking into the complaints that I originally filed in January, so I’m hoping such slip-ups might score me a renewal at my same rate, or at least something lesser than the atrosity that they were expecting before, and then I can just revisit this whole situation again next spring after things are in better focus.

But to end on a high note, I did get to watch the season premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm tonight and Mr. David certainly didn’t fail to entertain – a sandwich come and gone, interruptions during intercourse, and the rumor that he may even be adopted … should be an interesting season!

this is kinda freaky…

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For some reason, I’ve been reading the horoscopes more and more these days – not necessarily because I believe in them, mind you, but more because it amazes me how mysteriously close they’ve actually been to what’s going on in my life lately. Here’s my direction for Saturday:

Virgo – Stay home and play on the Internet. Confusion could cause crossed signals with a special someone, so avoid heart-to-heart discussions. Don’t sign on the dotted line when money is at stake.

Of course, chances are I was just going to stay home and play on the Internet anyways, but who knows?!

DHCP Post #168

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…ok folks – just disconnected and rebuilt the network from the ground up…cross your fingers and let’s see how long until DHCP chokes on renewals and starts crapping out on me again…

(Side note: I did find a trick to make my server IP static and that seems to be working ok now – I really hope that this is the last post that I ever have to make about this stupid router!)

Hurricane Katrina donations

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I normally don’t share too much insight with what happens at my day job because I’d like to continue keeping it, but yesterday we got an e-mail that I just can’t help but boast about. In a mere ten days of fundraising for hurricane relief, employees made over $38,000 in donations…which was matched by another $38,000 from the company itself. Along with a special grant from our Employee Association, we donated a total of $86,000 to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts… :O

It’s stuff like this that reminds me just how good of a company that I work for, despite some of the other things that might bother me from day to day. Certainly good to see that our little group of about 800 people could step up to make a difference!

curious about cardio

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Does anyone happen to know much about doing cardio exercise…specifically if there’s a set maximum duration to which after it’s not efficient for weight loss???

I’m wondering because I’ve been having trouble finding time to get to the gym over the past couple of weeks. For example, I was supposed to go tonight, but I didn’t finish up my work until just a few minutes ago and I decided that between bed now or bed after 1 AM, now would be better for keeping my job, which is also important! My original goal was to go every other day, which works out to about three times a week, but I usually end up pushing forward a day or two and it tends to screw with my overall schedule. I had conjured up the idea of penalizing myself an extra five minutes for every day that I missed, so that would make tomorrow night’s run a whopping 70 minutes plus cool-down…but if there’s a threshold to be met after a certain amount of time, I do have other things that I could be doing! 😛

Thoughts?