All day today it was crappy out – not the good, interesting, thunder-and-lightning crappy that it was around 3am, but the kind of bland, anonymous crappy of not cold enough to be statistically significant and not dark and gray enough to be interesting. I spent it kind of recovering from a Halloween party last night, and trying to make sense of the dodgy piece of metal that is my computer, even though all I really wanted to do was stay in my warm bed.
Party
Just after getting home, which is just after catching some Anna’s with J.R. and *, which was just before * blowing a tire on the huge-ass pothole on Undefined St., I found out about a Halloween (dress-up) party being thrown by some folks who showed up at the guys downstairs’ party the day before. So on such short notice, I had no choice but to dust off my duct tape duds from last year (OK, that’s pretty original, at least in the sense of people asking “What are YOU supposed to be?” [something like Spider-Man, everybody recognizes], but no time to create something NEW AND original), while two of my housemates came as the Unabomber (sweat hoodie, aviator specs and a ticking package [Scattergories timer] addressed to a university building in Waco with no return address) and Caesar (toga and golden laurels), respectively. We’re a house full of MacGvers.
Aside from the dressing-up aspect, it was pretty much like any other party. Drinking, striking up chitchat with people you don’t know and will probably never see again, getting introduced to 50 people and not remembering any of their names, and being cold-shouldered by girls who, not to be mean about it, just a realist [even with my beer goggles securely fastened], were not in a position to cold-shoulder hardly anybody, let alone the likes of us. I mean, seriously… “I need to go and…find my friend…”* would get an F– if I were a professor at Excuses to Politely Get Out of Talking to Someone U. In fact, an even better one would have been: “You’re wierd and boring, and I need to go somewhere that isn’t here, because here is where you are, and elsewhere is where you’re not.” So yeah, this is [one of 3e+08 reasons] why I don’t get along well with normal people.
Der Computermachine
A Frankenstein kludge I assembled my sophomore year of college, when I was a broke college student and computers were expensive. Motherboard, CPU, case and video board ordered from various places online, hard drives transplanted from previous machine, noisy old brown floppy drive ripped out of some old machine and will probably outlive me, even after hacksawing off a portion of its metal case to fit around all the stuff that sticks up off the motherboard. (And soundcard bought right off the shelf at Best Buy on short notice because…WTF, only PCI and AGP slots, what manner of newdangfangled technology is this? My “AzTech WaveRider”, or whatever that old beast was called, had finally reached its end-of-life because they stopped making slots it would fit into.)
Anyway. It served me well all through college and beyond, and never gave me any trouble until I decided I wanted to a) move away from Win95 and install Win2k, b) throw in a Big Hard Drive. Anyway, some issue between the motherboard/ then-current BIOS and Win2k prevents the 2nd IDE channel from being usable, meanwhile, some other issue prevented the ATA100 interface from being usable with big hard drives. Long story shorter**, one hacked BIOS later, everything kind of reached an uneasy agreement.
Now I decided to throw in a DVD burner and another big hard drive. Anyway, I’ve spent today copying things between drives, wondering why they don’t work on certain interfaces, why it’s consistently freezing on start-up, and why my sound card and its drivers keep disappearing all of the sudden***. Yeah, I should probably just toss this whole hunk of 800MHz metal scrap and get a new one, but it’s laced with miles and memories, and once it’s stable it actually works nicely, and I don’t really have (ironically) time to do anything CPU-intensive these days, like multiplayer FPS mapping, 3D rendering, excessive gaming or any of that other stuff I used to have time for. Memories like the Unit E geek squad performing open-HDD surgery in my room, or the Pimply-Faced Youth crashed out in a “power nap” on my floor because I was borrowing his new drive for data recovery, and he couldn’t let it out of his sight. Declining a slim, but non-zero possibility of losing my (at the time…yes, in college…shaddap) virginity because I had just finished installing Linux for the first time ever and couldn’t wait to get back to my room and play with it, even though some late-20s-looking blonde bimbette who showed up for a football game had started chatting me up on my way back from the library****. And drying it out after it was submerged in dirty Pontiac-water during my trek to Boston.
* friend who went to “use the ladies’ room”, but apparently decided the next room over was a close enough approximation
** Modern BIOSes don’t come in one tight little handcrafted piece anymore; the main BIOS people, e.g. Award, write the main module, and the folks behind the ATA100 chipset write their little piece, and so on, and they all get thrown together into one happy little family. So it came down to grabbing two different BIOS versions, one where the second IDE channel worked, and one where the ATA controller worked, then mix-n-matching the extracted modules into a new file and burning it onto the chip. The stupid “Energy Star” logo is just another module, so that’s just as easy to replace while you’re at it.
*** in the figurative, Windows-y sense, not in the sense of a little green board yelling “peek-a-boo” and then running back behind my bookshelf, although that would be really disturbing.
**** although maybe this has to do less with my complete (ineptitude as a normal human male / lack of priorities) than with the fact that blonde bimbettes don’t really do it for me, and the odds of any hot blonde inviting me back to her place for any legitimate purpose (as opposed to, say, some robbery | kidnapping | forced threesome with her and some toothless old farmer named Zeke | “it puts the lotion on its skin”…) are the same as getting struck by lightning in the hand that’s holding the winning Powerball ticket.
QOTD:
[15:48] LI*: meet any foxy ladies?lol
[15:48] me: a bit of a sausage fest, but that’s par for the course
[15:48] me: not really :(
[15:48] LI*: ha ha ha
[15:48] LI*: that sucks
[15:49] me: I think I scare away ‘normal’ girls
[15:49] LI*: normal girls are over rated
[15:49] me: yeah
[15:49] me: sadly, that’s all there was here
[15:49] LI*: its the weird ones that have the most fun
[15:49] LI*: eh they can all go to hell and have lots of stupid babies
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