My Slice of Reality

The quest has finally ended, we’ve found an apartment. While it’s a bit more expensive than we’d like it’s within the maximum we figured we could afford right now. Hopefully, it’ll become even more affordable in the near future when I can find a better job and she starts working full time as well.

What makes the place so nice? Two bedrooms, two full baths. About 1,100 square feet in total that was recently renovated with new carpeting, painting, etc. It also has quite new appliances and central A/C and gas heating.

We’re both looking forward to moving in (hopefully the 19th if the landlord gets back to us on that) and getting out of our respective living situations since neither one is all that optimal right now. Either way, it should be an interesting time in a new household

While attempting to show Laura the wonders of Launchy we ran into an interesting…issue. Apparently its a bit confused by common American slang.

Today is the eventful day; Service Pack 1 for Vista is finally released. I’ve linked to the stand alone installer page but it’s seeding out through Windows Update now. I’ll be installing later this evening and will update with how it goes in the morning. Wish me luck.

Download details: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone (KB936330)

Laura’s beat up old 1990 Subaru Legacy finally got to the point where it was beyond servicing this weekend. Tuesday it started making an extremely heinous noise from the engine bay that was later identified as a bearing in the transmission failing. It only got worse as the week wore on.

Thankfully, the car shopping process had quasi been put into place already and the money was available for buying a new car. However, her parents were the ones who had to pick it out. Not myself, or even Laura who’d be owning the car for hopefully years to come. Nope, the parents who were 200 miles away.

Did I mention they have an unhealthy obsession with Subaru?

Suffice to say, Laura has a new-ish car (1997 Subaru Impreza Outback)¹ that doesn’t quite meet all the things she was looking for. For one, she wanted a 2000 or newer. Also, cruise control that worked and finally one of the clicker-unluck thingies (don’t ask, thats what it was initially called).

Yea, we struck out on all three.However, the car runs, its got a new head unit installed that can interface with her Zune or play mp3 cds built in and in a few weeks she’ll have the clicker unlock thingy that’s also a remote start.

I guess what happens in Vegas really doesnt stay in vegas, eh?

Crashing Las Vegas - The Daily WTF

SP1 for Vista cannot come soon enough. Its ridiculous that transferring 44Gb of data between two USB2 drives (both 7200rpm hard drives) has taken almost an hour. According to the transfer window its sending at 15MB/s. Thats just…wrong. I’m not even going to attempt to transfer the movies folder tonight.

As you can see I’m slowly making some updates and changes. Finally got sick of Sam and Laura nagging me about it and lack of updates. So here ya go, hope your happy!

I’m building a fairly high end computer for a friend and to be honest, its pretty much finished. The CPU (Core 2 Duo running at 3Ghz) runs a tad warm for my tastes but I guess 53c while thrashing at Prime95 and ATITools isnt that bad really. Especially not with the stock heatsink.

It also sucks that the 4Gb of memory only shows as 3.2Gb in Vista but that was to be expected. Hell, even the annoying little quarks I’ve run into with the 680i motherboard aren’t bad either; they just took time.

No, by far the most annoying thing I’ve run into was the new NVIDIA monitoring software. Who in the hell though that piece of crap should be published on the internet? Seriously, a spinning collection of your devices with the temperatures displayed below that takes about 2mins to cycle between devices and just plain locks up randomly?

Brilliant.

I did a weird thing today; I imported a bookmarks file from almost two years ago to see what was in there. Unsurprisingly there was quite a few common sites. I haven’t really changed my tech hardware or software sites that I read, or gaming, or even adult sites. I’ve added some more web comics and stopped reading a few others, changed a few forums I hang out with and really dropped out of the 3D graphics scene but on the whole it stayed remarkably similar.

Except…except for one area. Blogs.

I think I first tried feed readers my freshmen year of college but I never got into them. I felt so disassociated from the websites I was reading. It also quickly overloaded me; I could track a ton of information but I simply couldn’t process it. So, for the longest time I kept a folder of websites and just loaded them all in one go, grabbed a coffee, and started to read. It worked well considering the folder consisted of about 80 sites; more than I read now in my feed reader (when I load it).

I find that ironic. There was no overload to me reading 80 sites a day through the web browser. Maybe because I paced myself; there was no rush. If I didnt get to a page? Oh well, let it sit till tomorrow.

With a feed reader I feel like I must get through each new updated item the second its posted. It’s like OCD for information. Its simply not scalable and not reasonable but its what flashes through my slightly numbed brain. I wonder where the disconnect comes in.

Whats even more ironic is how the sites I read have changed. It used to be the personal sites; the big fish in the small weblog pong. I wonder how many of them really make a splash on the scene now? They’ve all been replaced by Engadget and Major Nelson. Or maybe they haven’t. It’s been so long since I’ve really followed or cared how should I know?

But reading the voices of Shelly or Derek or Unix Girl or even Noah feels so strange after such a long absence. The voices sound so familiar but thats it; no longer can I match the face I see when I read the words (even if its nothing close to who they really are). Odd; two years doesn’t feel that long.

More a note to myself than anything else but Lifehacker linked to YouTorrent today which looks to be a pretty sweet bittorrent search site. Similar in a sense to torrentz.com I suppose. Have to check it out later.

BitTorrent: YouTorrent, Your New Favorite BitTorrent Site