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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Jeran's Den's InsaneJournal:
| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | |
| 12:36 am | What's behind that door? "Sarge, what's on the other side of that door?" "Private, some day you'll have a chance to find that out. And on that day, you'll remember this conversation and say to yourself "Well, Sarge was right, I didn't want to know what's behind that door."."  |
| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | |
| 12:44 pm | Recovering I'm slowly recovering. What I'm eating is staying down now, that's making a world of difference. The fever flashes seem to be fading. I think I'm going to stay out from work Monday, though, to make sure I don't spread this junk and to give me a bit more time to feel healthy.  |
| Saturday, November 21st, 2009 | |
| 12:20 am | Down sick Being sick sucks. Wednesday afternoon I started feeling a bit off, tender joints and the like. By night it'd gotten serious. Thursday I was running a fever of 100.5 most of the day, peaking over 102 a couple of times. Today the fever broke around noon, but I'm feeling like I was run over by an entire freeway worth of traffic. Eating is a major chore, and I'm spending more time in bed than not. Bleh. Hopefully I'll be feeling better by tomorrow.  |
| Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | |
| 11:31 pm | Presumptuous boss Tallk about gall. My boss (well, actually the overall manager of the department) wants to schedule a dinner to celebrate a project. Fine and good. But this afternoon he wants to know if tomorrow evening's good. And he has the nerve to act shocked when I tell him I won't be able to be there, and to ask why I can't clear my schedule. Well, technically I could rearrange things, yes. But I have a rule: there are only a few people who get to ask me to clear my schedule on 24 hours notice. Family. A handful of close friends. A manager at work is... well, not in either of those categories. So even if I could theoretically clear my schedule, on general principles I'm not going to. On 2 days notice, maybe, if I don't have anything critical already scheduled. But 24 hours notice for a non-emergency? Not happening.  |
| 11:31 pm | To Michael Duvall, and his ilk among those politicians who paint themselves as exemplars of family values:  see more Lol Celebs  |
| 11:31 pm | Printers I need a new printer. The old Deskjet 895 is starting to go. This time, I'm buying a real laser printer. No more inkjets. And preferably a color one. Brother makes some decent-looking color lasers in the under-$400 range, and all of them seem to do at least PCL6 which should mean no problems under Linux. And some of them are network-capable. It'll be more expensive to get right off, and toner cartridges cost more than inkjet cartridges, but I'll get more pages out of a single set of cartridges so long-term it should be cheaper than the inkjet. And better print quality.  |
| 11:31 pm | The effect of Windows on computer prices People scoff at the "Microsoft tax". Let me put it into perspective: the motherboard, CPU and memory are pretty much the heart of a computer. A retail copy of Windows costs more than those three items combined. You can throw in a video card and still have spent less on the hardware than on Windows, if you aren't building a gaming system. That's a pretty big chunk of a system's price going solely to the operating system. Yes, I know, OEM copies of Windows are cheaper. But then, OEMs can get better prices on the hardware too.  |
| 11:31 pm | Falling over Bleh. Went for a nap last evening, planned for a half-hour or so just to refresh myself. Woke up at 2:30am long enough to use the bathroom, then crashed again until the alarm went off. I hate that.  |
| 11:31 pm | Computer parts Oy vey. Priced SATA hard drives. Hitachi, 500Gb is $55, 1Tb is $80. I expected good prices, but not that good. At those prices it literally isn't worth it to put less than a terabyte of storage in a new system. Geez.  |
| 11:31 pm | Subway I noticed yesterday that they've put in a Subway a few blocks down Adams from me. It's not Quiznos, but it's a decent alternative when I want something to munch on and don't feel like cooking.  |
| 11:31 pm | Plans for the weekend First, don't go anywhere. The Adams Avenue Street Fair will be running, so parking will be utterly insane. Second, assemble the new gateway box. It's all sitting there except for the display, it's high time it got put together and gotten ready to go. If I do have to go out, I'm going to stop by Fry's and pick up the cheapest display I can lay my hands on. Otherwise I'll get the display Monday evening. Third, start pricing parts and assembling a shopping list for the new computers. Priority #1 is getting 3 copies of XP SP3 before Newegg has to stop carrying them. Tonight is Fire & Ice, followed hopefully by a shard instance or two.  |
| 11:31 pm | Computer builds OK, Newegg has AMD Athlon II and Phenom II 3.0GHz dual-core CPUs for about $100 each. That's pretty good. They're Socket AM3 chips. So, the plan is to get the best motherboard I can find in AM3 that'll support the highest-end quad-core chips. Then populate it with the dual-core chips with an eye towards upgrading to quad-core as prices fall. I want 3.0GHz because Everquest 2 is CPU-bound and needs all the clock cycles and memory it can get, so in the short term I'm better off trading cores for clock speed and more memory. I've decided to go with the Antec 300 case for the systems. It's shorter so it'll fit better, it's got a bottom-mounted power supply, and it's cheaper. With a little appropriate arranging of where to put the boxes, the filters shouldn't be too hard to get at. I also need a laptop. I've pretty well settled on the HP dv7, but desktop boxes are a higher priority. Now to start arranging the money.  |
| 11:31 pm | Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction Ye almighty gods, they're still obsessing over that. It was what, 5 years ago? Let it go already. I know the Religious Right like to scream about even the slightest hint of secondary sexual characteristics (at least female ones, male ones seem to be just fine by them), but it's high time to tell them to get a life.  |
| 11:31 pm | Definition of gun control Gun control: a 1-inch diameter group slightly above center-of-mass.  |
| 11:31 pm | Lottery Tomorrow's Mega Millions lottery draw is for $252 million dollars. A quarter of a billion. That's a lot of money.  |
| 11:31 pm | Threes "Three things never trust in: the maiden sworn as pure, the vows a king has given, and the ambush that is sure."  |
| 11:31 pm | Filksongs I got a bit of money from Mom back when I was helping her deal with the last of the stuff at Grandpa's farm for the auction. I blew a bit of it on a USB-interface tape deck so I can transfer some of my old tapes over to MP3. A lot of these are old, late 80s and early 90s. I'm worried the tapes themselves will be going bad, so I want the music copied over. Typically, the "easy beginner's" software that's supposed to make things simple fails to work at all. The "advanced, don't use this unless you're an expert" software, by comparison, is dead simple to use and records without a hitch. I'll have to enter all the album and track information by hand, but then I didn't expect Gracenote to know diddly about Bayfilk tapes anyway. Next item to get: one of the USB-interface turntables so I can copy some of my old LPs (including a bunch of Kiss albums from their first incarnation, and some C.W. McCall) over.  |
| 11:31 pm | Funny Republicans and the stock market It's funny, but back in February and March the Republicans were all over Obama because the stock market was continuing to fall, even though he'd only had a month or two in office and hadn't had a chance to finish getting set up and start actually doing things. But now that the market's back at 9400 and steadily climbing, it's all "Oh, the stock market doesn't matter, it's the real economy that's still bad.".  |
| 11:31 pm | Lost day OK, this hasn't happened in a while. I seem to have lost a day this week. It's Wednesday, but my internal calendar's saying it was Tuesday.  |
| Thursday, November 12th, 2009 | |
| 8:59 pm | Comic Con sold out Gah. Comic Con's sold out of 4-day memberships for 2010. And it's still 9 months or so until the con, only 3 months since this year's.  |