Beer and Cooking and Computers

Beer is good for you. I swear, it is. That's why I have to keep drinking so much of it!

Food is good too, but unlike beer I'm responsible for making "good" into "great." Fortunately I've got mad crazy skill at it. Tonight I'm doing a sort of Swiss steak/pot roast thing. Pretty simple, just a couple of ingredients and basic spices, but my wife ADORES it and I'm a pretty big fan too.

Not to go off on a rant or anything, but how is it that people can't cook? I know I go here about once every 6-8 months, but come on!! You season meat, you cook it long enough to be done but not so long that it dries out. Sauté some veggies in olive oil, a little garlic, and sprinkle some cheese on it for special occasions. Maybe some potatoes, rice, or pasta. Simple, tasty, and cheaper than eating out.

Speaking of which... building my own computer. Not simple, hopefully no flavor, and I don't know if it is cheaper or not. Whatever it is, after spending $200 on a case I'm sort of committed to doing it. It seems like every year it gets more complicated, not to mention more expensive. When you're buying all of the parts and assembling it, you have to make sure all the parts are physically compatible in that they fit together, AND that there aren't any software issues or other hidden standing between you and your build. Since my wife and I are sharing her laptop right now, I need to finish this build as soon as I can, so not much more time for research.

Gosh, this really sucks. It is exciting, but it sucks!

...and then I did it!

"Someday" turned out to be "yesterday" for my very late spring cleaning. Yay!

I dragged a trash can in here and tossed away a ton shitload of stuff. I saved things that I actually had room and a place for, like my Star Wars bobbleheads. The rest just went in the trash. I went from a full closet to a full shelf in the closet plus one small box full of cables and guitar accessory stuff. Things I'll actually use someday, in other words.

Gone is the CD-ROM drive from a computer I threw away four years ago. Totally tossed out the cheap pendant that came with a video game that got traded back last year. I'm not even holding on to that digital guitar amp that sounds sort of cool but crashes after 5 minutes. All of it gone. I just started picking things up and throwing them in the trash can. If I wasn't sure if I would use something again but it cost less than $10 I figured I could someday buy another if I really need it. Really, do you need to hold onto everything you ever bought?

The funny part is I found one of those cardboard tubes that the Scotch comes in. I was going to use it as a little bank for change, and when it was full I'd take it to the Coinstar thing and take my wife out to dinner and a movie or something. Turns out it was already full... OF SCOTCH!!!

Somehow I wound up with an unopened bottle of 15 year old Glenfiddich in the closet. Stranger things have happened... I assume that this was a holdout from last Xmas. Around the holidays the booze companies sell gift packs with multiple bottles and extras like shot glasses, flasks, that sort of thing. So of course being a packrat I've got to have some collectible nonsense to fill the closet with. I guess in the haze of all the car bombs and rusty nails I was drinking, I lost track of one of the bottles? All I know for sure is that you don't complain about a $50 bottle of hooch just turning up unexpectedly!

Also, got my fancy computer case yesterday. Thing is effing HUGE!!! It is probably 6 inches taller and 9 inches deeper than the old case. It comes with a mess of giant fans, and slots for even more giant fans. There's even a little box inside to keep extra screws and stuff in. Everything has silicone grommets and seals to prevent any rattling sounds, which is just awesome. Since I was in a doing mood last night, I went ahead and installed the hard drives and DVD-ROM drive in the new case. I guess I can take out the audio and video cards from the old computer and stick them in plastic bags, and toss out the rest of the old computer tomorrow morning. Good times!

Another sample layout, and laying around the house collecting dust

Check it yo! It is all brown and stuff!

Anyhoo, I've been out of school for what feels like months, and has only been like a week and a half. Wow, yeah. Between the free time, the loss of my computers, and the inability to get on XBox Live to play multiplayer games, I'm sort of going stir-crazy. I could just do what I did last summer, and drink constantly, but I'm trying to avoid that sort of thing this year. I got to the point that I was probably drinking more than 70 beers a week, and that's really REALLY no good. I'd really like to keep it somewhere around or below 24 a week, and spread out over 2-3 days.

Anyways, at the same time as all this, I've been catching that weird A&E Hoarders show on the TV. Those folks collect so much stuff that they are ruining their lives. And once you get a certain amount of shit strewn all over your house, it becomes seriously overwhelming and you can't get a handle on cleaning it. What's worse is that for most of them, they are so attached to most of it that they can't allow any of it to be taken away, even when A&E is paying a crew to haul their trash away and clean their homes for them. It is apparently inheritable, since they show a couple of multi-generation hoarder families.

That's a little scary, because my dad is sort of a hoarder. He's nowhere near as bad as those folks on the TV, since he limits it to mostly one room in his house and is willing to sell things. He's been having yard sales, and that's where it has started to get bad. It used to be that he just "hoarded" financial paperwork, old tax returns and bank statements and even that started for a good reason. After he bounced a few checks and things got "wiggy" financially for a couple of months, he's been rightly careful about his records. Unfortunately, he's completely unorganized and doesn't know what's good and what's not so he just keeps all of it. That's something that a professional organizer could sort out for him in a day or two, and then once it was all straight he could simply trash the stuff that he doesn't need.

The yard sale stuff? That's a little harder. He's convinced that someone, someday, is going to buy all of his stuff. So he keeps collecting stuff, and it is always more stuff than anyone would ever actually buy. He also has a semi-giant baseball card collection that is just as disorganized as his bills. Again, he could hire someone to go through all of those and have them sold, but he would have to pay a percentage of the sales to the person who sorts through it. The rest of it? Who knows... but I guess as long as he keeps it in one small room in the house it doesn't mean he's too crazy.

As for me... I used to be a bit of a hoarder myself. These days, I have a tendency to just throw stuff away, even if I could eventually sell it and make a few bucks. I just don't like having stuff laying around without a place for it to go. Instead of building a million shelves and stacking things everywhere, every 6 months to a year I throw away boxes and boxes of junk. There's sort of an expiration date on things, where if I don't use them for long enough it means I'm probably never going to. I hate to see money wasted that way, but truth be told the money is ALREADY wasted whether something sits in my closet forever, or goes in the trash tomorrow.

Just like the hoarders on that show, and my dad, I'm also convinced that some things are going to be part of a project I'm going to complete someday. The reality is that no, I'm never going to fucking do anything of the sort. Here's sort of an example from this month: My laptop and desktop computers both died in the last 6 weeks or so. There's a chance that I could magically use the spare parts to build an home theater PC and/or a home server to store all of our media on. The reality is that I'd simply have both computers sitting broken in a closet for the rest of my life. So, I stripped out the hard drive from the laptop, I'm taking the hard drives out of the desktop this week, and I'm hooking them all up to the new PC I'm building. I'm also going to salvage the DVD drive, graphics and audio cards from the desktop, but that's it. There's nothing else I can use from either computer, so on Thursday the leftover bits are going out with the trash.

I've got some other stuff to toss out, but I just can't deal with it today. Or tomorrow... I console myself with the knowledge that it is just the closet floor, and it is only one layer of junk. One of these days I'll drag in a trash can from the garage and throw it all out. I swear I will! Really!

Still screwing with my layout, and other stuff

One of these days, I'll create the perfect blog layout. Until then, I guess I'll keep tweaking it. Advice is welcome and possibly even appreciated.

In other news, after long agonizing over the decision I have decided to build a new computer. I've replaced parts before, but never before have I sort of bought all the parts and assembled them all myself. This is going to be a nightmare for me... I'm horrible at making decisions in general because I way overthink everything. Now I have a dozen components that I have to decide on. What's worse is that once I buy the first bit of electronics, I have just 30 days to complete the project and make sure that nothing's broken. Otherwise, I can't return anything and I'll be stuck with a $700 paperweight. Fun fun fun!!

I already ordered the case, and it looks super-sharp. It really shows where I've been growing up over the last 5-10 years, because until recently I had dreamed of building a PC that looks like it came from an alien spaceship and could be called a dimensional transfunctioner or a flux capacitor like this beauty here:

I mean, really? If I were 12 years old... or, to be honest, 27... I would think that was the coolest thing EVER!!! Now that I'm FINALLY a grown-up, I want a grown-up computer case for my custom build. Something like... THIS!

No neon lights, no flashy colors or shiny bits. The vaguely hexagonal thing on the side is an 8" cooling fan with removable dust filter. It is designed to stay cool and run quiet, and looks IMO like a computer should: simple, elegant, purposeful. It has plenty of room for extra fans, an extra-large and extra-quiet power supply, and no side window. The case itself is made of multiple layers of material for sound dampening, which is a plus. My old PC sounded like it was going to fly around the room sometimes.

Also, it looks a tiny bit like the monolith from 2001: A Space Oddysey. What, just because I'm a grown-up it doesn't mean I'm not also still a gigantic geek!

adventures in electronics

This year, everything is breaking. So far, this is the list of stuff that has broken down:

Home theater receiver

Guitar amplifier

iced tea maker

wireless router

wireless adapter for XBox 360

my new laptop

Add my desktop computer to the list. I tried replacing the power supply, and that didn't work. Since I'm going to have to buy a new motherboard and case anyways, I'm probably going to just build a whole new computer and be done with it. I'm probably going to carry over the hard drives and DVD drive from the old computer, and maybe the processor and RAM too, depending on how much money the basics are going to cost me and how patient I can be.

In the meanwhile, I'm doing 99% of my Internetting from my phone, which is a combination of a relief and a giant burden. This blog entry is from my wife's computer which fortunately does still work.

This is going to be a long summer, I can already tell.

Finals week is upon us again!

Oh boy...

I've been sort of low-key about school this semester. Between my wife's multiple trips to the hospital, my relatively light schedule, and my conscious effort to not get all bent out of shape about every single assignment and grade, I've managed to put things in a different perspective. We'll see how that affects my grades, but I think I'm in acceptable shape. Maybe not another 4.0 semester, but that's OK with me. I'm not grade grubbing nearly as hard as I used to.

I'm studying in a much more reasonable way as well. I'm doing one section of physics and one section of calculus every day leading up to finals on Thursday and Friday. It takes me about 2-3 hours total for both classes, and I'm not lying awake at night stressing about it. To me, that's as important of an achievement as getting good grades. Giving myself an ulcer over school doesn't do me any good at all.

Somebody needs to help me out here...

What the fuck is wrong with Gloria Allred?!?! She's like some sort of Mafia extortion queen/lawyer in California who helps skank whores blackmail the rich and famous men who fuck them. Is this legal? I know sure as shit it isn't ethical.

She's the asshole who's representing the chicks who slept with Tiger Woods and now David BoringAnus from that show Bones that my wife likes to watch. I don't have a law degree, and I've never held a press conference or even been on TV, but....

... and this is a serious question here...

If a woman insists that a man owes her money because he stuck his penis in her, doesn't that make her a prostitute? If she insists that a man owes her money in order to keep her from telling his wife that he stuck his penis in her, doesn't that constitute blackmail? Aren't prostitution and blackmail illegal? Shouldn't Gloria Allred lose her licence to practice law for facilitating criminal actions like prostitution and blackmail? Can she also be beaten to death with a shit-dipped sea bass?

Please? Can anyone explain any of this shit to me? Because it is currently driving a painful wedge of incredulity into my skull.

**Edited to add: I say that Gloria Allred is an asshole. How soon can I expect her to sue me for saying that?

Spam in my BRAIN!!!!!!

It is 5:30 in the morning here, and I've been up for like an hour. Not for any good reason, but because my brain was hacked by a computer virus, and started producing all sorts of fake emails and message board posts. No, really!

I have these weird dreams. Like weird that you can't imagine. A couple of nights ago, I dreamed that I was in Vegas with my wife. She was flirting with the hotel manager, she told him I was harassing her, and then she got a big laugh at both of our expenses. That got us kicked out of the hotel. The next hotel we went to, Mickey Rourke needed me to help him avoid the cops. Then something about a swimming pool the size of a small lake, some guns that wouldn't shoot so we had to throw them at people, and on and on.

This morning's dream was that someone had hacked into my computer. They were using my browsing history to generate bogus messages based on an amalgamation of everything I've read in the past couple of days. So for instance, there was a large stream of "girls in Princess Leia bikinis take homeopathic supplements for bone cancer" sort of things. "Cast of Doctor Who gets autism from guitar cables." Just a weird mash-up of everything I read online.

The problem is, once my brain gets on one of these loops, it gets STUCK on the loop. So I woke up from strange spinning brain overload, and the MOMENT I closed my eyes again, the loop started back up. I've had similar dreams in the past, where my brain starts listing things or counting things or I'm trying to complete some Sisyphean task. No matter how much I lay there and try to sleep through it I always wind up feeling drained and not at all rested the next morning. It is just a disaster.

I'm going to try to go back to bed in a few minutes, and see if I can get some normal sleep. Otherwise, I'll be a mess all day long.