Of Cars, Computers, and Picn*x
2004-08-13 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbear(The MandelBear's Weekend) Just to catch up briefly, I brought my car in to be serviced last Saturday, then headed out with the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flower_cat and super_star_girl (the Younger Daughter) to the Linux Picnic. (Meanwhile the OD, chaoswolf, went off to a FurCon picnic.)
The picnic was relaxing; lots of good conversations and catching-up. The YD got bored after lunch, so I took her home to find Mayhem and Phil (both frequent visitors) just arriving. On the way home my service rep at Honda called to say my car was ready but was going to need more work soon.
On the way home, the Cat dropped me off to pick up my car. The minor service was cheap, but in another 7000 miles or so (i.e., at the next scheduled service) I'm going to need new front brakes: pads, calipers, and disks. Grumble.
Still, I couldn't complain too much, so (having dodged an $800 brake job this time), so on Sunday I started reading the Fry's ads a little more closely, and Tuesday went out to Fry's and snagged a motherboard/CPU combo and half a Gig of RAM to go in the new Antec Sonata case. It's an Athlon XP2700, i.e. something that would have been on the bleeding edge a year ago, which is the way I like to buy hardware. Total $180, bringing the total for the box up to about $240 before hard drive and CD-RW, both of which I had lying around the house.
Tuesday evening I started putting it together, after somehow getting a nasty papercut or something across the ball of my right thumb (which gave me an excuse not to play guitar on Wednesday). By a little after midnight I had everything but the hard drive in place, so I booted up Knoppix just to make sure it all worked.
(Edit -- I originally had Sunday as the purchase date of the new computer. I should remember to check my receipts before posting.)
flower_cat and super_star_girl (the Younger Daughter) to the Linux Picnic. (Meanwhile the OD, chaoswolf, went off to a FurCon picnic.)The picnic was relaxing; lots of good conversations and catching-up. The YD got bored after lunch, so I took her home to find Mayhem and Phil (both frequent visitors) just arriving. On the way home my service rep at Honda called to say my car was ready but was going to need more work soon.
On the way home, the Cat dropped me off to pick up my car. The minor service was cheap, but in another 7000 miles or so (i.e., at the next scheduled service) I'm going to need new front brakes: pads, calipers, and disks. Grumble.
Still, I couldn't complain too much, so (having dodged an $800 brake job this time), so on Sunday I started reading the Fry's ads a little more closely, and Tuesday went out to Fry's and snagged a motherboard/CPU combo and half a Gig of RAM to go in the new Antec Sonata case. It's an Athlon XP2700, i.e. something that would have been on the bleeding edge a year ago, which is the way I like to buy hardware. Total $180, bringing the total for the box up to about $240 before hard drive and CD-RW, both of which I had lying around the house.
Tuesday evening I started putting it together, after somehow getting a nasty papercut or something across the ball of my right thumb (which gave me an excuse not to play guitar on Wednesday). By a little after midnight I had everything but the hard drive in place, so I booted up Knoppix just to make sure it all worked.
(Edit -- I originally had Sunday as the purchase date of the new computer. I should remember to check my receipts before posting.)
