Perhaps I ought to wait until the last day of the year to bash out some thoughts about the dozen months gone by, but knowing how well I’ve stuck to my writing plan lately I’d probably end up writing this in mid-January… or not at all, most likely. (Let’s not dwell upon how many things I meant to write about but never did, and now can’t because I’ve lost too many of the details. Ugh.)
Two thousand seven, the year that was… after the break. (more…)
Dear Windows Vista,
What the everloving what is going on here?
I’m running a nice fancy powerful almost-new desktop PC, only a couple of running programs, plenty of free CPU cycles and gobs of available memory. And you’re telling me that it’s going to take most of three minutes to extract a ZIP file of less than three megabytes? What is this, the early 1990s?
Seriously. Eat hot death.
Yours In Servitude,
– The Little Grey Duck
(And it took even longer than the initial dialog display led me to believe. This is insanity. I’m going to install a 3rd-party archive handler and see if I can improve my simple archive extraction times.)
Just because I have a place to write doesn’t mean that I have anything to say.
I wonder how much my lack of writing output is because my life isn’t terribly interesting. Not that it ever was, I suppose. Maybe I’ve just lost my enthusiasm for talking about myself. What’s to say? “More of the same, yep! Some parts of my life are good, some parts are bad, and I’m tired a lot!” I don’t want to be the broken record guy, you know?
I want to change things up, but the pressures of my life keep squeezing me into the same routine whether I like it or not. I’m not even getting the basics done, most of the time. (Let’s not talk about how long it’s been since I last shopped for groceries.) The good parts of my life are good, make no mistake. I’m not complaining about the core parts. My health is as good as ever, there isn’t any relationship drama to speak of, my kids are their usual outstanding selves, nothing has broken or burned lately.
And yet, I’m tired all of the time. I don’t make very good company nowadays because I tend to yawn, fade, or otherwise wind down once the clock ticks past 8pm. To get a “decent night’s sleep” I have to crawl into bed shortly after 9pm, and that’s still no guarantee. Nightmares and insomnia are regular visitors in my psyche.
All of the projects I say that I want to accomplish require me to get home with enough energy to want to do more than curl up and veg out. I’m not sure what I can do about this. One proposed solution is to move closer to my work… which takes me away from nearly everyone I care about, which means I’ll only see them on weekends, which means my weekends will be overbooked, which means I’ll start work Monday feeling like I haven’t rested at all and still won’t have put in nearly enough quality time with my loved ones.
Hmm, I think not.
The other solution is just as plausible: Change jobs. And the less said about that notion the better, here.
So. Much of my life is good, but my ability to enjoy what’s good is hampered by the parts of my life that aren’t so good. Fun, eh?
The Sitka spruce along Highway 26 fell down. For some reason this saddens me more than finding out that SixApart has sold LiveJournal to a Russian outfit called SUP.
Here. Enjoy the two pictures I have of a big old tree.
This is not an auspicious beginning to my December, folks.
I built a nice, powerful multimedia PC a few weeks ago, but once I got past the initial installation stages it’s been giving me some trouble. Most annoying among the ongoing problems is something of a showstopper: Every time someone touches the front of the computer, it resets.
A problem, yes?
On a whim I went a-Googlin’. It turns out that I’m not the only one with this problem. There’s also a relatively simple solution, though it involves hauling the machine off of the shelf yet again so I can monkey around with its innards. As a test I may just tape a piece of conductive material to the side of the chassis, bridging the front panel and the rest of the chassis, to see if this is indeed the final fix.
Add this to the fact that the VFD (supposedly a multi-function display built into the chassis) has never worked as advertised and actually causes more problems than it’s worth (which is why I just unplugged all power to that useless piece of junk).
In short: If you’re looking for a multimedia PC chassis, you might want to steer clear of the Antec Fusion Black… unless you feel like getting your hands dirty doing some internal rewiring.
