The '09 Rebuild Pt. I

Anyone who has an avid passion or feels a couple steps above a passing interest in something will experience periods where the need to get into that thing will be higher than others. I'm guessing people who like to travel will have periods where they need to get up and go. J has his moments where there's a burst of car activity and lots of action taking place in the garage, and then there's times when there's a lull and his activity is limited to trolling eBay and the forums for parts. I get that way about music, right now I'm on an extended trance kick... but recently I was bitten by the need to rebuild the computer :-)

OK, I'll spill the beans. Although a large part of this is me giving myself a gift for completing my masters and earning honors, a large part is because I saw that The Sims 3 is being released in June. (If you're not sure what The Sims is, it's only one of the best selling PC games in history. Learn about The Sims 3 here.) I played heavily until things with the masters started getting intense, but now that I'm done I can immerse myself again and a new Sims base game, meant it was time to update so that my machine could handle it. So that's the basis for this build.


I'll start out by listing what I had before I started:

• ASUS A8R-MX/SI 939 ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard (shown above)
  
• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice 2.4GHz Socket 939 89W Single-Core Processor Model ADA3800BPBOX
• CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory Model VS1GB400C3
• A 7-series NVIDIA GeForce PCI Express video card (I think either 7600 or 7800)
  
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card
• ASUS 16X DVD±R DVD Burner with 12X DVD-RAM Write and LightScribe Black E-IDE/ATAPI Model DRW-1612BL-BK
• A 400 watt PSU that also supported SATA connectors
• Widescreen Hanspree 19" LCD monitor (HDMI capable)

My initial intent was to upgrade the motherboard, CPU and the RAM, but of course, even the best laid plands...

Three months into 2009

Wow, I just checked my blogged dashboard and realized that my last entry was more than four months ago. October 2008 seems like half a lifetime away, but my mother always used to say that as you get older life passes you by much faster. I'm going to blame my absence squarely on Facebook. Although I don't blog using its Notes feature, I have becoming addicted to doing Posted Items or Links as they're now called. Not only that, but the Virtual Library application is amazing and I'll admit to spending an inordinate amount of time playing Who Has the Biggest Brain? and Word Challenge lol

Anyway, a lot has happened since then including life changing occurrences that I think will lead to long term success in the most important area of my life — my marriage and my family :-)

Moo Moo is growing up faster than my brain can keep track of but that made Christmas with relatives over from London the best ever. I also finished my Masters in Management, earning a high enough GPA to graduate with top honors. I've also passed the half-way mark for Leadership Bay (I rode in a U.S. school bus for the first time, yay!).

Volunteer season has kicked back up and I was fortunate enough to be a stage hand for the annual Taste of Home Cooking School on-stage demonstration last week. (Not eating the food was torture!) Spring cleaning has started and there's been an intense dusting and vacuuming going on at the house and it's almost time to start nursing this year's crop of scotch bonnet peppers.

The most exciting thing at this moment though is the new build for the PC at home. To be honest, that's the reason I logged in this morning. I decided that the rebuild would be a great blog opportunity because J' and I are doing everything ourselves at home. So that will be the next blog entry or two, coming shortly!

• Mood: Humble and hopeful
  
• Music: Keyboard noise and other office sounds
  

Halloween hi jinks

Today was an extra-long day at work (I was there for more than 11 hours), but at 10 a.m. we had children from a local early start program come through to trick or treat for Halloween. They were so cute! If I didn't already have my Moo Moo they'd have definitely won me over to having children.

I decked out my desk with a black cloth (thanks Melissa!) and lights and like last week, most of my costume I already had here at home (including the black collars). But the $5 black wig I bought at Wal-Mart this morning was the icing on the cake. I went from punk rock chick to Cher like that *snap* Check out the video of the visit, which includes a couple still photos of me and some video footage of me and my boss in the background at the end.

Sobering realization

I recently realized that when people say, "Time will make it better," they don't mean that time will make it go away. All that platitude means is that time makes it easier to deal with. If it's come to someone saying that to you, then sadly "it" is unlikely to go away.

Candy casualty

So I had another run in with our candy vending machine today. I won't bore anyone with the details of my bad day but between the needs of our letter writers and the apparent new additions to my job, I needed candy... HAD to have it... and not the chocolate I had on my desk. I grudgingly took a dollar out my purse, upset that I was giving in to to the inflated cost of a pack of Starburst and headed back to the machine.

Of course, the machine never takes my dollar on the first try (after we're done with it, they better never install it in a strip club!), but then when I finally get it in there and hit "D7," it starts making a funky beeping noise.

Would you believe that the inflated-price goods-carrying, dollar-rejecting, loose morals piece of metal had the audacity to demand exact change? After a half dozen tries when I finally realized what was going on, I so wanted to shout, "Exact change yuh mummah!" But I refrained. After all, the associate publisher's office door is right by the machine — a fact that I'm sure makes the machine feel brazen and bold.

So I had to walk up to the cashiers to get the change I needed for the machine. God bless Ms. Rose she made me smile though. I asked for three quarters, two dimes and a nickle and after she gives it to me, she says, "Are you sure that's a dollar?" I had the deer in headlights look for about 10 seconds before I realized she was pulling my leg.

Then it was back to the machine for the Starbursts.

I tell you, next thing you know the machine is going to expect us to reach up inside it to get the damn candy ourselves.

Sad.