(no subject)

Runnin' Up on Me Again

Friday morning
Before B left for work or I got out of bed

(Unspoken words in parentheses)

B: What are you doing today (with your day off)?
Me: I don't (wanna tell YOU) no(thing about it)
B: Oh.
Me: ---
B: Well, if you go to the Mall, call me and I'll meet you after work.
Me: (Doh!)

So I just plain didn't go to the Mall as a reward to myself. I ran scads of errands, went shopping at the Toy Store for Nerds, then met her at the mall for food court dinner and maybe two rides B wanted to enjoy. Then I demonstrated my Shredder Mutant Masher Curse. Translation: that (bleep)ing stupid ride breaks down the MINUTE I step in line. You'd think I'm kidding, but now there's eyewitnesses. I'm NOT crazy.

Fine--not crazy when reporting the curse.
If you wanna call me crazy, here's a better reason.

B didn't get the whole sequence on my phone--but I counted 32. The rideop counted 30 without really trying. Then she showed the inversion counter on the back of each vehicle and how to reset it before boarding.

This is both harder than it looks and somewhat tiring, since you're bodily creating the wind resistance that flips the ride vehicle. I wear a hoodie so it's a bit less of a beating, but then it's rather warm at the end of the cycle. AND you honestly feel like you're gonna fall out and die. Which you won't hear Mister 200-coasters-and-change admit very often.

What I bought during my errands...? That's for another post.

(no subject)

The Rest of My Weekend, In NerdSpeak

I said goodbye to some old friends, hello to sorts to others.
As farewells go, some relics from Da Babies' days got sent to recycling...






Wasn't easy. Always thought of the all-black one as my speed champion. It isn't any more. So hard to let go while thinking of the 'good parts that could be recycled.' But it's a quad-core AMD Phenom 965--which not only sucks a staggering 140 watts, but takes it constantly. That's not a peak TDP. It lacks the smarts to power down three of its four cores and throttle the fourth to half-speed cuz I'm only surfing the Web. To say nothing of the heat. Hell, after rebuilding into that smaller case? I had to keep the cover loose for temperature's sake or that thing would shut itself down.

Oh--and all those DVD burners, right? From the glorious days of burning copies of everything. You remember those days? When 8GB was a lot of space or 2,000 GB was an unthinkable amount of storage, not $100 worth? Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy before SSDs and all.

Speaking of which--the 'new' friend is a Toshiba laptop. It's a used, but personally enhanced twin of the Absolution Project. Oh wait! Some of my newer readers might not know what that was. The Absolution Project was a Toshiba C55-A5386 gifted to Midget at the end of her junior year. She dreamt of being a professional camera operator at sports events. Or an animator. Or a Vine/Youtoob superstar. I handed her a nylon bag with shoulder strap loaded with the following:

- The lappy, model listed above
- Starter animation software (Anime Studio Pro 9, NOT the debut edition)
- A cheapie camera (actually, the exact camera I took to Europe--tho B carried a better one)
- A small tripod
- Video editing software (was it a Cyberlink Video Suite, or just the video segment?)
- A green backdrop for Chromakey work

And a plea to DO SOMETHING WITH IT, even if she wasn't gonna take the prof's offer to sit in on a local community college course over the summer. For FREE.

She did nothing. Besides clear my conscience that I'd taken my best shot at getting her started.
But enough about her!

Anyway, I took the same model, bought an additional 8GB of RAM and a 960GB SSD at the Nerdling Toy Store and tried to upgrade things a bit. Tried. Cloning the hard drive wasn't working from the laptop itself with the SSD in a USB 3.0 external enclosure. So I switched to another USB 3.0 enclosure. No dice. Then I overreacted, tore into Monolith (my fastest desktop) and hung all the hard drives from its SATA ports. Almost.






I was too lazy to pull a SATA power cable from one side of the PC case to meet the SATA data cable on the other. In the photo, the SSD's actually attached to an eSATA connector BUT the drive wasn't drawing power from the connector and I couldn't remember where I'd put the external AC adapter (after all, I'd last used that enclosure in I dunno 2011 maybe?) SooOOOOooo I wound up hooking the old enclosure with the SSD from the USB interface. USB 2.0 to be exact. UGH. I needed to establish an operational baseline. Desperately.

Turns out I'd only needed to CHKDSK the source drive all along. I could have been done in a fraction of the time! Never needed to open the lappy OR Monolith. But NOW that a successful drive-cloning started? It was transferring data at one-tenth the speed it could have been. GAAAAAAH. By which time it was 2:30 AM. I went to bed and dreamt of data transfers.

Love the results, tho. Love. The. Result. Cannot say that enough.

It's a 'crappy' OCZ Trion 100 960GB. 'Crappy' if you read the reviews and benchmarks, but only $229 when a Samsung costs $350. Compared to a physical hard drive? It's still a bat outta hell. Saved me enough money to buy that additional 8GB RAM and impulse-purchase an external Blu-Ray burner. And wonder why I have it. I could change my mind about that purchase, but we'll see.

But don't I already have a laptop? Doesn't B have an iPad? Don't I already have a crap Android tablet and a very nice Samsung tablet, too?

Me: I wanna use it when I'm sitting in bed.
B: OkaAAaayyy....why not the one we already have?
Me: It's expensive. If I drop a cheap one from bed and crack the screen, I'm not gonna cry.
B: Why don't you get a good lappy with all the features you want instead?
Me: Mobile Skylake with Iris Graphics on board. Zen.
B: Huh?
Me: Before I'd spend a lot of money, I'd have to be really, REALLY sure it's EXACTLY what I want. And 'maybe sure' won't be available until some time next year.
B: You know, I have a project I'm working on right now. Maybe I could use the cheap laptop for--
Me: NEWP! *death grip*

The Biggest Idea of a Lappy in Bed is that I'd hypothetically get to bed earlier. Instead of working from Four or from Monolith in the Family Room, all my computer goofery would be done from *HEADSMACK* three guesses who's not in bed right now. BLAAAAHHHHHHH