Today I broke 500 geocache finds in a little more than a year! I celebrated by buying myself a slushee after my 501st find. The day before that I celebrated my 496th find by stuffing my gob with dairy products. Specifically, maple bacon ice cream and blueberry gelato from Ed's Real Scoop in the Beaches. It was about 30 deg C out there this weekend, feeling like 34. I built a lot of character.

I also cleaned dust out of my laptop. Did I mention it's almost six years old now? I'm very proud of this too, but I might need to replace it sooner because I've been experiencing some stutter. Stutter is indicative of GPU overheating and the blob of dust I pulled out of the radiator is quite small.

So I posted the current tentative parts list to ask the internet where the money should go - the budget is $1500, but through using last-gen parts and "spare parts" and surplus office supplies we've only been able to spend about $1100. Leaving $400 to spend on... ??? Justin suspects that it should go for a better WIFI card or video card, I think a bigger HDD might be nice (or also an SSD). Part of this problem is starting from scratch - means I also need a screen, case, etc, speakers, etc... instead of just trying to figure out where the bottlenecks are.

OTOH I might just be overthinking this. All I REALLY want is to play some games at 1920x1080 with a bearable frame rate. And some future games too.  I don't care about blocky faces, ugly trees, and "dangling objects." I'd be so happy if Geralt could run relatively smoothly while having more texture than a mannequin.

Hmm. I also got my dad chocolates for Father's Day. We ate some duck. Duck is my favourite animal to eat, I think.

Speaking of duck - I saw this article in the Star about a retired restauranteur passing on his legacy for peking duck with extra crispy skin. Too bad the chefs are from Dailo and Jacob's Steakhouse - not exactly as cheap as a standard Chinese restaurant.

   

I cleaned dust out of my laptop a few hours ago, but was disappointed that it didn't fit the description of any of the fan-cleaning horror stories I've heard. Just a few q-tips worth of dust.

Heh. I got 20/20 on the final assignment for my mandatory professional development course, for an hour and a half of effort. 

EDIT: ADBLOCK IS SHOWING ME CATS

Cleaned an incriminating collection of erotic art and photography off the old computer, and moved them to a new folder on my laptop's hard drive.

It feels kind of weird, actually, because I haven't saved any to my hard drive in a long time - or, for that matter, partaken in the creation of such material. But only if by "a long time" we're talking in terms of months. And by "material" we mean material that's made it onto a hard drive by hook or by crook.

After that, I recovered a bunch of albums, and cursed Derp's name for having such damn huge image files. Then I thought about running everything through an image resizer, but decided that I'd like to remember everyone's camwhore moments in great detail. I never took any of her prints at the time when she offered in algeo. Should I have? Nah. Probably. I only still have one picture - the group one at prom and the *shudder* other one at prom. 

Printed employment forms. Found bank branch number. Filled out forms.

Updated lj-sec. I was seriously considering bulk-editing the privacy settings on old entries to be public again but it's probably a bad idea in light of recent events.

I found tomorrow's bus route. It will take an hour and a half if I'm lucky. Three buses and a subway. Fuck my life.

Deleted all my Breaking Bad episodes. And all the glee episodes. I tried to recover the suits and game of thrones episodes but I accidentally deleted those too. And then deleted some unspectacular movies, including Logan's Run. Citizen Kane is next to go, when I watch it. And then Children of Earth - that's been on my hard drive for at least a year now.

Last night I dreamed I was playing Skyrim. Then I was Sean "Dark Smoke Puncher" McNinja, collaborating with Dr. McNinja and Gordito Delgado to do something about a chemical plant somewhere. They were corrupted by the plant, and then I escaped with a cat in a nursing home. 

The reason for this post, as you may have ascertained, is that I am INCREDIBLY bored. 

I STILL DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE MICROSOFT ACCESS. T_T

This is either the most awesome article of clothing I've seen all month, or a horrible mistake that I'm not aware of yet. However, this chiffon and leather piece is not yet available in Canada, or even online, from what I can tell. But when it does, $80 is a price I'd gladly pay.

Wifi-at-will? Not tonight. I'm not patient enough for my laptop (I was pretty lucky to have bought one with a built in card that could be turned to monitor mode) to collect the several thousand packets from a network several houses away. 

Next: sorting documents dating to 2010. Opening a file for everything the bank sends me. Opening a file for all the employment information. Open file for everything. 

In March: When healed and stuff is on sale, go to beadfx at Warden/Eglinton and pick up sterling threadersand maybe one each of these:It's been a long time. Would crimping a threader ruin it?

urghhhh

 I ended up just wiping Ubuntu out completely again. The temptation to meddle with forces which I know not is too great.

They say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing... due to messing around with the grub menu, I am now stuck with a system neither BBI or ResNet can fix.

I never even made it to the Ballmer peak :(

 in maintaining a steady sleep schedule the last few days - dead at 11pm, up at 8am. Please note time of this post.

The last few hours have been spent rebooting and reinstalling ubuntu. Probably not helped by fatigue.To try to enable headphones on my laptop and uninvert the webcam picture (turns out that the manufacturer screwed up and installed it upside down, later fixing it through a windows driver). Inverted webcam, I can live with... my bleary mug looks better that way. No headphones, not so tolerable. 

I tried at least three times. With various degrees of success, ranging from wiping out all sound on laptop, to wiping out the GUI, to wiping out... everything (on that partition). 

Better try again tomorrow. I resolve not fiddle around too much with IMPORTANT crap I don't understand (power is an aphrodisiac).

ON SATURDAY I finally bought The Laptop. From Staples. The first unit was dead out of the box. When it booted for the first time there was nothing to see except the Purple And Green Stripes Of Death. The second unit worked fine, but I'm still not sure what the hell is so great about Windows 7. On the other hand, I believe that Vista is ok and have never recognized any bugs in its operation.

ON SUNDAY I tried to connect it to the router. Dude Boy took that moment to reveal that he had accidentally pulled out a cable too quickly last year. Nobody was home so he hammered all the loose metal bits flat. Two of the four ports are now blocked. Oh well because I can't even get internet on the laptop yet unless I plug it directly into the modem. So instead I watched The Matrix.

SUNDAY NIGHT I had a dream that I was doing the ecosystem project from grade 7 for bleepingprogram Night in grade 12. The ecosystem project, in both the dream and real life cases, consisted of smallish fish in a fish tank. I installed the fish tank into the wall and watched the fish gasped at the surface of the water, rolled over, and died. Then I lost my sandal in the rows of chairs in the caf during chair setup.

I don't remember the after party because it never happened.

Afterwards I was running through the kindie playground and the nonexistent janitor secret passages at my elementary school. I was holding a plastic bag and a gust of wind blew me up to the 1st floor roof over the intermediate doors, where there was a party. I jumped again and the wind blew me to the 2nd floor roof, where there was another party. I jumped once more and figured out that I could use the handles of the bag to steer my flight path. When I landed I realized that my plastic bag was a mesh fruit bag completely unsuited to flying, and woke up.

ON MONDAY I ended up here again.

 I'm down to two choices - the Sony Vaio 15.5" with Intel Core i3 (EB series) and the Toshiba Satellite 15.6" with Intel Core i3 (L650). RAM/hd/size/numeric keypad wise they're both as good as I need them to be. So the devil's in the details.

Toshiba	Sony
Tinny speakers, no amplifier 10/100 Ethernet 3 USB ports OK battery life - 4h advertised 50 grams heavier Satellite series has an honorary mention for worst laptop keyboards 100CDN cheaper "Toshiba is the poor man's Sony" Recovery disk status unknown	Amplifier built in 10/100/1000 Ethernet  4 USB ports, also has ExpressCard reader and more random card slot t Kind of crappy battery life - 3.5h advertised almost 1cm thinner Vaio series has an honorary mention for best laptop keyboards LSD-inspired colours for 50CDN more More matte and much sexier Need to create own recovery disks.

Sigh. By the time I get there, they'll be out of stock.