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feeling: uninspired
listening to: Outlaw Star - Tsuki no Ie
...That reminds me. I gotta download The Real Folk Blues from Cowboy Bebop soon. It is nifty.
Now back to your regularly scheduled rant. (sad how accurate that statement is...) This family has had nothing but bad luck with computers since the first time we had one that counted as a computer. That means the 2 or 3 Commodores we used to have don't count. Those ruled. Anyway... now, we've always been about a year or two behind in the tech world, though we're starting to sort of catch up... but... back when almost every household was newly stocked with an internet-supporting machine, we got our first "real" computer: a pathetic little thing with Windows 3.1, a 486-speed processor, and exactly 110 megabytes in the hard drive. Yeah, you heard me. The thing even had a B drive - remember those? They took REAL floppy disks, those thin, 6-inch or so things that Commodores used to use. Well, a year or so after that, I finally convinced my dad to get the internet (twas around my 16th birthday) - but first, we had to get a modem for the thing. It had, like, a 14K one in it, or whatever those lowest ones were. It absolutely refused to comply with the internet, so that day dad upgraded it to a 33.6K, which we used for some time. Because the hard drive was so dinky, we had to empty out our cache (yes, cache, not "temporary internet files" or "history") at the end of every day, or the internet wouldn't load anything. And, naturally, it was painfully slow. Well, then, maybe a year later, I went away for a weekend on a band field trip... and when I came back, a brand new computer was sitting on the desk. I nearly had a heart attack. A REAL computer, with Windows 98, a Celeron 400 (about like a Pentium 2), seven GIGS of hard drive, a 56K modem, no B drive... oh yeah, we were livin' in style now. They'd just gotten a new tower though; we kept the old cheesy 15" monitor. However, that monitor went up in smoke a week later, so we got a brand new, 17" one. Ohhh yeah. Cruisin' now. :P
So I was quite happy there for a few months. That system stayed with us; we occasionally upgraded it over the next couple years, adding more memory and such... but it was still pretty slow. And our internet provider was CRAP. Anywho, somewhere in that time a church friend gave my dad a very old, very crappy laptop, an IBM Thinkpad with exatly 4 megs of memory. It sucked, but it was pretty handy, especially during my first quarter at college when I still didn't have my own computer. That litle laptop, which we upgraded to *gasp* 26 MB of memory, got me through a good bit of the quarter in the department of typing papers. Well, finally, my computer (which was leagues better than my parents', had DVD/RW/CD-ROM, scanner, and webcam, but still barely over half as good as top-of-the-line machines) showed up... and that provided us with all new adventures. But, I've blogged about it before... go find it. :P And earlier this school year, my dad got rid of that cheesy old laptop and got a "new" one, another Thinkpad that was actually about as good as my parents' desktop, that 7-gig one I mentioned. Well, then, just a few months ago, a new providor came along and we upgraded ourselves to a cable modem. No more 56K slowness or tying up of phone lines... but, of course, this cable provider is not very reliable. And guess what happened then? Parents' computer blew up. Well, not literally, but... power supply went kablooey, I think. So daddy got himself a new tower - a HUGE one. This tower is, I kid you not, twice as tall as a regular one. His reason? He wanted lots of room in there to play around with hardware and such. Heh, ok, sure. Well, anyway, he was excited. All the working parts from the old machine went into this one, plus some more memory, if I remember right. Guess what? That monster tower has turned out to be a piece of CRAP. Since day one, it absolutely refuses to do anything right for more than... well, sometimes less than 5 minutes. See, after a while of messing around it starts bringing up illegal operation errors, and they won't cease until the machine is restarted, and even then, only temporarily. We have absolutely no clue what is causing this. Dad thinks it could be a bad memory stick or some imcompatibility with the cable modem's USB hub *shrug* but I dunno. At any rate, this computer is the single most retarded, worthless piece of crap I have ever had the misfortune of being stuck with. I'd have hurled it out the window weeks ago if the tower wasn't so bloody huge. Oh, and the most recent computer occurrence: that monitor we got a week after that weekend field trip I mentioned just blew out a few weeks ago, and we replaced it with a 17" flatscreen. Just the screen is flat, the whole monitor still has the same depth as the older style. Still, s'cool.
And through all of this mess (remember, see my archives about the horror stories of MY computer), guess which computer has proved the most reliable and useful? That 26-MB RAM Thinkpad. That's right. That little thing got us through some rough times, even handled the internet when it had to (like when my parents loaned me their desktop to use at school, and they needed one), and no matter how many times it was dropped, kicked, slammed, pummeled, banged, hammered, you name it - the little bugger pressed on. Still works to this day. We don't have it though, dad gave it to my uncle when he got the second Thinkpad. Which is proving to be just as durable and stable as the first one. We should just auction off both our desktops and use nothing but Thinkpads the rest of our lives...
Well, that was fun. The point of all that drivel? THIS COMPUTER SUCKS. I wish it to die. A slow, horrifying, gruesome death.
Anywaaaaay...
I finally got to see my nephew tonight~ *glee* It's been 3 weeks since I last did... man, do they grow when you're away for that long. And I will stand by this proclamation till the day I die: he is the single most ADORABLE baby in the entire history of the world. Anyone dares to challenge that statement, they shall suffer my wrath. No, see... I'm one of those people who finds cuteness in... unusual... places. I find certain anime characters cuter than I find most real human babies. Merle and Minnie May come to mind... but yeah. I always feel bad when people are going on and on about how cute and precious their little baby/grandbaby/niece/nephew/friend/whatever-baby is, and then I look at it and just... disagree. :P In all honesty, babies have just never been that cute to me. I always found them sort of... deformed looking and... stuff. Hey, like I said, I do feel bad about it sometimes. o_o; But my little nephy is just... *squeal* I swear, there can't be a cuter baby in this world. I haven't found one. Those chubby cheeks, that dark hair, that little giggly smile that makes his huge blue eyes just twinkle... *melts* When my brother first handed him to me tonight, I sat him down so that he kinda leaned back on me, so he could see the TV rather than my face. I swear, he really was watching TV. Hee. Well, after a minute of this he kinda acted like he might start fussing, so I turned him around, and as soon as he saw my face he just smiled so big, and his eyes gleamed... ohh, that was the best greeting anyone could ever give me, I think. ^____^ And he's a good baby. I mean a GOOD baby. It's so easy to make him laugh, he actually enjoys having his diaper changed, he loves to be held, I'm told he's always in a cheery mood when he wakes up in the morning, and when he does cry, it's rarely loud. Only once in his life have I heard him REALLY scream. Now, I'm sure his parents have heard it a little more often, but... I only heard it once, when they were putting him in his car seat and covering him up with blankets to go home from our house one day. He's not fond of the car seat. Or hats. But if someone makes faces at him, gives him a finger to squeeze, or just keeps him company, he'll tolerate anything. Even when he's sick, he usually doesn't know it because we try so hard to entertain him to keep his mind off it, so he spends more time laughing than feeling icky. ^^ Ack, he is too precious...
On a final rant (yes, I'm almost done for the day... everyone cheer and clap now), Mitsu is acting really weird lately. I have no clue what it is. Thursday night, after the stress of moving home wore off, he was totally fine. He ate like normal, was waving at me, flaring, and his chewed-up tail healed very quickly. And as late as this morning, he had a pretty nice little bubble nest going. But when I fed him today, he just... I dunno... acted like he was blind or something. Whereas he used to instantly know that my removing the fake plant from the top pf his vase means food is coming, today (and Friday, actually), he didn't even seem to notice. And when I dropped the first flake in, he swam right by it several times before it finally sank to the bottom, minutes later. I kept trying, and more flakes fell, but he eventually figured out that it was food and gradually got more into it. Never quite returned to normal though. Normal for him is being a total pig - spying every flake from halfway across the vase, lunging at them like a little shark, jumping out of the water to grab a flake off my fingertip, wasting nothing, inhaling everything, and always looking around for more after feeding time's over. Today, each flake had to be directly in front of his nose before he noticed it, and rather than lunge at it, he just sort of sucked it in like he didn't really even care. Each flake took him a minute or two or three to locate. He did get a little better toward the end of his feeding, but never totally up to standard. Also, before I fed him, I saw that his bubble nest was pretty much gone, and he wouldn't flare. But his color and fins looked normal, and other than all that he looked fine... *is at a loss* I was starting to wonder if he's going blind... but he can't be, cause he can still see me from several feet away, and waves at me. Well, at least he eats. If he didn't even try to eat, THEN I'd be worried. Maybe he misses the dorm... o_O
Well, that may have been my longest blog yet. :P Yeah, I'm bored. And holy crap, I've been at this for like, an hour and a half... *drops*
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dragged from Becky's stream of consciousness at 3/25/2002 12:12:00 AM
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