My debit card turned up on a list, so now I get to wait "seven to ten days" for a new one, and in the meantime the old one has been pre-emptively shut off by the bank.
I do not mind this.
What I do mind is now having to dig out my bank statements for the past couple of months and go through them line by line to ensure I haven't had any money stolen. If any is missing it won't be a lot--well under $100--but still, what a pain.
* * *
I haven't heard anyone cutting their grass, and I'm not cutting mine because it hasn't rained and the grass is not growing. Today is sixteen days since I last cut it.
But the weather outside is blissfully cool, which means I not only don't have to run the AC but I can actually have all the damned fans shut off. It's quiet in here!
* * *
Mrs. Fungus and I are now into the last season of Lost. With about a dozen eps left in the series, there seems to be very little resolution taking place. At least now I understand why Locke is in a wheelchair "back home" (BH) and walking around on the island even when the two timelines are supposed to be concurrent.
When I saw the end of the final episode, while waiting for some other show to be on (Flash Forward? I don't remember now) I recall thinking that the island scenes were flashback and the BH scenes were present day because Locke was in the chair. I am a bit less confused about things now, but not much. I have a theory on how BH and island scenes can be concurrent, but it'd be serious spoilers to discuss it here.
* * *
Wonderduck is having computer woes. O Lord do I feel his pain.
All he is trying to do is upgrade/replace the video card in his computer. The old card's cooling fan died, so he thought to shove a new video card in. Unfortunately, the card seems to have been made by Satan or Mephistopheles or Nixon, and refuses to work in his computer longer than about five minutes.
It's come down to looking like it's a basic incompatibility between the card and the motherboard, something which you simply do not see very often any more.
From my earliest days I recall a story about one expansion card or another, for the original ISA bus. It would work fine in every slot of a specific motherboard except the one on the outside end of the bus. If you put the card in there, it would set up a standing wave in the expansion bus that would prevent operation, and the computer wouldn't even appear to switch on much less boot.
Wonderduck's travails remind me of the problems I had trying to put a video card into El-Hazard, so I could eschew using the on-board video. I had a similar problem, as you might recall, and I ended up sending the card back for a refund rather than screw around with it. Then again, it's not my main machine....
Speaking of computers:
Mrs. Fungus wants to play Ultima II.
Nine months after I got rid of the last CGA monitor in the western hemisphere, she asks me to make it possible for her to play a game that would run perfectly on the old NEC MultiSpeed laptop I have in the basement...if only I had a monitor for it.
The laptop has a non-backlit monochrome LCD screen, but you can't play U2 on that. (It might be text-only, come to think of it.) If I'd kept the CGA monitor, I could then set the thing up on the dining room table and let her go to town--but I recycled the monitor in October.
Play it on one of our present computers? Sure. This is a game written to run on an 8086 processor, and like many game programmers in 1982 Richard Garriott used NOP loops for game timing. A NOP loop that introduces a 10 millisecond delay when run on an 8086 processor will introduce a 10 nanosecond delay on a Pentium D; it makes the game unplayable when one keypress leads to your character crossing the continent, running into a dragon, and dying.
"Dosbox", you say. Aye, Dosbox. As soon as I get around to it, sure. And figuring out how to make the thing work, and getting the delay factor dialed in, and-and-and.
Incidentally, this project led to me downloading a version of Dosbox for Android and installing it on my Nook. An external keyboard would make it totally usable, and then I could actually run DOS programs on the thing. Wouldn't that be a scream?
I know what I'll end up doing: pointing her at GOG.com or some similar site and saying, "Buy it for your computer." That'll do it. It won't even cost a lot, a few bucks at most, but my credibility as a tech guru will take a hit. *sigh*
* * *
Okay, a bit in this prior Fungus post from last year made me laugh:
...[I]slam is a weak religion. It's weak because it absolutely cannot tolerate the mildest of slights. That's why its adherents fly into incandescent rage at the barest of adversity: it's not a religion; it's an inferiority complex. It's a religion that was ginned up by a man who never wanted for anything other than recognition as a prophet and who died in bed.The italics are in the original; I bolded the part that made me laugh. Dang, that was a good quip. "It's not a religion; it's an inferiority complex." Prove me wrong.
* * *
Turns out I've had my current cell phone since September 2007. So come 9/22/2013 it'll be a mere six years old.
Perhaps it might be time to buy a new one....
* * *
Anyway, it's gloriously cool outside for July. Seventies and low eighties predicted for the coming week, which is good because I have a staggering buttload of things to take care of next week, all outdoors. *sigh*
I just hope I can find the energy for it.