Today at about midnight I thought it would be a great idea to neaten up the cables in my case! It wasn't! Couldn't turn anything on! I panicked, went to bed, couldn't sleep, got up, and reaized that I'd accidentally moved the plug one pin to the right, It's fine now! But I still can't sleep.  

The build went through several revisions. I originally started out building a mATX system in a mini tower (Silverstone TJ08-E) but Justin had reservations about the usability of the optical drive, and the clearance behind the top-mounted power supply. I wanted a small case so I said "fuck it" to mATX and 5.25" expansion bays and picked mITX components instead. The chances of me ever needing dual graphics cards or a sound card are very small. The budget was $1500 for everything, including Windows, peripherals, tax, and shipping.

( parts list and process )

Adam told a story today.

He was working from home and eating a nice hot country style sausage. Since Adam tends not to chew his food very much he swallowed a large piece of sausage and it got stuck in his throat. It was deep enough that he couldn't swallow it, or anything else. But it was also deep enough that he could dial an ambulance and go to the hospital to remove the sausage in his throat.

In the hospital they gave him a bucket to spit in because he couldn't swallow. Adam got so dehydrated that by the time the nurse came to rehydrate him via IV, they poked at him for 20 minutes trying to find a vein.

When you swallow too much stuff they stick a tube down and try to pull it out but in this case the sausage was too large. So they just pushed the sausage down his esophagus into his stomach. Adam described the experience as being extremely uncomfortable.

I asked him if that had all happened when he was, like, five years old. No, he said. It was last October.

Anyways this is the best excuse for hospitalization I've ever heard firsthand.

The moral of the story is to chew your food thoroughly before swallowing.

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Tomorrow I am going to eat Italian food and probably build a computer. I might have made a mistake with the hard drive I bought for my research backup. I'm going to get comp'd when the prof comes back from France but Seagate has kind of rubbish reliability rates. For my build I have an SSD which I paid through the nose through, and one of Justin's mystery Seagates. I could pay ~$60 for a different brand of drive but really I still have the external HD, the research external HD, and my laptop, which is perfectly fine. Mostly.

IDK, it's started stuttering a bit more during certain games and I got nervous. Not to mention that the Windows installation has been fucked up since 2011 because I thought it would be a brilliant idea to just remove a user account by deleting the folder, which resulted in not being able to make a guest account on the machine, not that anyone ever needs a guest account on this machine.

(Also... Dishonored 2 is coming out soon this year.)

I promise I'll post a build log and parts list later. At the beginning of this process Justin promised that I would get to do the most important part ("you can hold the camera!") in the construction process. But the distribution of work will be reversed. I think he might be a little bit annoyed at this point because of all the interrogation, going from 0 to 60 in knowledge of stuff, and unpaid consultancy fees.

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The Harry Potter Audiobooks.

I wrote about this before but I was still at the Chamber of Secrets when I wrote that. Now I'm on book 5 because I'm at a really, really boring (but necessary) part of my research and have made the following observations:

1) Book 4 got a LOT DARKER than I remembered. I totally missed out on the trauma aspect of Book 4 all the other times I read it. I don't know how I missed it.
2) I missed a lot of the other undertones. I think I'm doing this reading thing wrong.
3) Harry's semi stream o' consciousness comes across a lot more as his "voice" rather than an external narrator in the audiobook
4) The Book 5 bloat is really obvious.
5) Since when did Harry start antagonizing Dudley on purpose?

1) Company 2 fucking delivered. I now have 72 hrs of video from probably about 10 cameras, which will all be repeated in October. I need to start thinking seriously about experimental design.

2) I enjoyed the open bar and tacos at the staff party but I was exhausted when I got home at 1AM. Also, there was no cheese plate. But the owners' speeches were very nice. There is a new co-owner. I've heard that these parties start ramping up around midnight - I'd like to stick around for that sometime, but I don't want to ride the vomit comet afterwards.

3) I felt shitty yesterday afternoon. Everyone needs a friend to put things in perspective sometimes.

She's obviously an incredibly insecure and petty person to post something like that
also, she has terrible grammar

whoa girl slow down

We are going to eat more tacos on Monday. But maybe not tacos, because I'm all taco'd out right now.

4) The SSD is in Richmond being sorted. My excitement is barely being contained.

Today my advisor said "Hi" when I was going to get his comments on my paper draft from his office and I shrieked and jumped a foot in the air.



But the comments... I wish I'd gotten the comments questioning the core assumptions of my paper before I submitted the 99% complete version for review!

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I am getting excited about the build! Yesterday I spent several hours angsting over what case to put things in. I think I've settled on the Silverstone Temjin TJ08b because: 
- It's smallish-er than some other mATX cases, including the alternatives.
- There's a big 180mm fan at the front and room for another at the back for cooling. Designed to be kinda a wind tunnel This comes with air filters. And we know that cleaning lint out of the dryer filter is one of the great joys of life.
- It's pretty in a conservative way... because the core design has been around since 2006.
- I get two 5.25 external bays to continue propagating the illusion that I actually need an optical drive / card reader / knicknack drawer / hard drive hammock.
- According to reviews, superior build quality, as reflected by the money dollars this costs, though the runner-up is no slouch either

The #1 alternative is the Thermaltake cube of mystery which has the following advantages
- Fits massive honking 200mm fan at the front. Also has air filters.
- Easier to build in
- Cube shaped. Modular. Mysterious.
- Unfortunately it is also bigger than the Silverstone and the front logo is ugly.

A case is one of the components that will last the longest because, well, it's a case, meaning that I'd have to look at it for a long time. I would have been ok housing this in a milk crate like the old UW DC++ server but if I have to pay money for a case it might as well be a nice case. But too nice. I'm not made of money. 

Last night, I woke up at 3:50 because some fucksticks were skateboarding outside on the street. I peeled a fuzzy wolf blanket off a pink woven throw in the closet because it was cold. The blanket sparked in the darkness and I smelled ozone.

This triggered memories of my brother and I rubbing our heads into a cheap polyester fleece and pulling it away to watch the air light up and crackle under the sheets. We were probably about 10.

Anyways I thought this was worth noting because while I do get a feel of deja vu a lot - I've never gotten deja vu so vividly from an event so long ago.

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Last night's episode of Game of Thrones was nearly unwatchable. I don't mean it in either a good or a bad way, but in a I am going to shit myself in anxiety kind of way. It'll win a bunch of awards at the Emmys. Sansa is still a bit of a wet blanket. Whatever. My favourite location all season has been the clusterfuck down at King's Landing and I am looking forward to watching that pile of gold-plated hemmorhoids go down next Sunday.

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I wasted a few hours trying to do Python and just. It's clearly meant for Linux, I can't even figure out how to run a script with arguments in Windows, either in the command line or with the IDE. I'm gonna end up doing my thesis with Excel and Visual Basic. But it would build so much character if I learned to use Python... Fuck my life and the horse it rode in on.

--

Then I burped in James' mouth by accident. He laughed but I was so embarassed. Usually I do that on purpose.

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The consensus is that I might have difficulty running CERTAIN GAMES with a GTX 465, but since that costs me literally nothing (spare parts) I might as well use that now and upgrade later. The rest of the budget is going to an SSD and... ???     TBD. 

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.