Random Shopping

I feel some Livejournalling coming on.

I've been doing a lot of random shopping lately. On the weekend, I went to Savers, where I rarely find anything I really want. The clothes never fit for example, or they're so painfully daggy even I wouldn't wear them.

This time, I hit something of a jackpot. I got a luridly bright red spatula, which looked like it had come out of a time-warp from the seventies. A pint glass from some micro brewery (which I plan to drink water from. Hydrated!), a passable t-shirt made from a dense woven cotton. Lets see... A greeting card for a friend how has had a baby, and finally... A Village People "60 Minutes of Non Stop Dance" vinyl album! Which I then gave to Deb. All of which set me back the princely sum of... $11.95.

We also came across at least three t-shirts advertising various Bear events... Not the "Wilds of Canada" type bears, more the "Hairy of Parhran" type bears! Weird. And a t-shirt which just said "Biotechnology for Africa". Took a photo of that one...

Then today popped into the Asian grocery store in the basement of Melbourne Central on the way home. Two soy bean drinks, something called "Sesame Mochi", which looks a bit like something you'd see at Yum Cha. Some Cod Fish Snacks, and a small bottle of "Basil Seed Drink with Honey", which looks like it has tiny eye balls floating in it!

I can report that Cod Fish Snacks are... disgusting. A bit like fish food, combined with the fish themselves :-)

Being All Grown Up And Mature

I went to an MBA information session this evening. It was actually quite interesting, and I can't see why I won't be enrolling in it in June. Well, aside from having to find $1200 and the time to actually do the home work! Still, it's all online so that makes it a whole crap load easier...

And I've been doing a mediation course. Fuck... This is what Middle Age must be about!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Must go out and ROCK somewhere!

"Now I'm lucky to find half an hour a week in which to get funky" - Homer Simpson.

Big New Fuck Off Computer

Did I mention I felt the need to do some LJing? :-)

I've got meself a new PC. Which, if I think about it, is the first time I've every actually had a completely new computer... Aside from the ill-advised purchasing of a Mac Classic in about 1992...

Anyway, it's a Beast, hence I've named it Godzilla.

But first, let me tell you about the machine it replaced.

Old Machine

IBM NetVista of some vintage.
Pentium 4 1.8Ghz
768 Meg of RAM (random, I know)
32 Meg Video (built in)
DVD Burner (recently acquired)
2 x 80 Gb HD's
Floppy Disc Drive
Various USB ports and PCI cards

New Machine

Home built from a pile of parts from Computer Parts Land
Quad Core Intel Duo 2.6Ghz
3 Gb of RAM
512 Meg Nvidia 8600GT Video Card
1 x 160 GB SATA HD
1 x 500 GB SATA HD
1 x 110 GB IDE HD
1 x 500 GB IDE HD (for a total of over a terabyte)
LG DVD/CD Burner
8 USB ports on the back of the motherboard
2 more USB ports on the front.
Coolermaster Centurian Case with 460 Watt power supply. Nice case, BTW.

So, as you can imagine, it's a tad faster. And of course, now I'm discovering what a bottle neck my el-cheapo ADSL is... *le sigh*

It was funny, the old machine was showing signs of dying (although it seems to have recovered since) so I decided to get a new system on Anzac day. Computer Parts Land was the only place open, so I circled some parts on their price list, and went down there and bought 'em. Only took about 40 minutes to assemble the whole thing... Although it took a little while to get the IDE drives working.

So basically I'm using this as a reason to consolidate my collection of PCs. Godzilla is two machines combined into one. I had a an aging AMD-based server with five hard drives in it as my MP3 and storage machine. Then I realised that I could fit the contents of four of the drives onto the one 500 Gb drive I acquired to put my MP3s on... So then I no longer really needed that computer... And I'm going to retire the NetVista, once I've wiped the hard drives... Might give it to my first cousin once removed Isaac.

Actually, the purge goes beyond that. I've also got an ancient Mac G3 taking up space on my desk. I've also now got (at least) two 80 Gb hard drives to get rid of, not to mention several boxes of random Computer parts. My plan is to keep only the new Godzilla box, my ancient laptop and the Linux machine in the clear case... Although having said that, I'm not really using it either. In the long term I plan to have a Mac Laptop and the Beast as my only machines.

Oh, and I might have bought a low-end Pentium III on Ebay to use as a bit torrent downloader, rather than leaving a machine with four hard drives running all night, and doing terrible things to my carbon foot print.

So, anyone want an old server? Some random hard drives?