atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

#3569: Really not feeling it today.

Just don't have any mojo, and don't know where to get any.

* * *

Romney wants to keep parts of Obamacare because Romney is Obama without the tan like I've been saying and saying all along.

* * *

Now that I've got that out of the way....

I don't know what's griping my wagger. I'd be a lot happier if I hadn't spent two hours' time, total, trying to get my laptop to install the latest patch to WoW.

The automatic patch has failed some five or six times, claiming it cannot download a file. This despite the LT being hard-wired to the switch, which is hard-wired to the router. There's no problem with accessing the Internet and I can download stuff just fine--the 120 MB game client installer came down without a hitch, and the six-odd gigabyte download I did overnight also worked fine--but when you get to the "optimizing game client" stage, it sits there at 0% for about five minutes, and then the whole thing coughs up a bucket of dicks.

To get the patch to download I had to manually activate the downloader, then leave the machine on all night while it downloaded the entirety of the patch. This was a solution I got from the Blizzard forums, but it didn't help one whit, so now I've uninstalled the game and am reinstalling it, which will probably require that I leave the machine on for another 20 hours since it has to download some twenty gigabytes of game.

Besides the WoW woes?

11th anniversary of 9/11? I don't know. By the time I woke up this morning it was already past the exact hour, but looking outside I can see that it's much the same kind of day as it was eleven years ago: sunny, clear, pleasant.

Maybe it's just because of how I slept. I couldn't just sleep, of course; no. Had to wake up about 2 AM unable to sleep more, then toss and turn until sunrise after being up for perhaps an hour or so. Argh etc.

...I bet that's it. I have such a crummy sleep pattern.

Well: I have one thing I must accomplish today before the close of business hours, just one...and then I can do as I like until 7 PM, when I must attend Bible study.

* * *

So last night I thought, "Fuck it! I'm going to order a video card for El-Hazard!"

Nope, said the Internet, you're not.

Pricewatch.com is my go-to site for computer hardware, but despite clicking through about 50,000,000 pages of video cards I could only find one that was PCI.

Not "PCIe" or "PCI-Express" but PCI. El-Hazard doesn't have a PCIe bus; its one slot is PCI and a PCIe video card WILL NOT WORK. Even if I could get the card into the slot, it wouldn't work, but the industry very carefully picked a different slot design for a reason: the standards are different.

So!

I managed to find one card which was probably an incremental improvement over El-Hazard's on-board video. *sigh*

Coupled to this is the fact that there are about 90,000,000,000 video cards out there. I came across a site which lists statistics for perhaps half of them, but was befuddled by inconsistent ratings methods. Okay, one chart was a performance number from a benchmark, and another was "price versus performance"--and while it offered a way to switch to the raw benchmark numbers, the links didn't work.

What I want to find is the most bang for my buck, but it's impossible to tell what that is when you can't compare numbers.

...all of which is irrelevant, considering that no one has any goddamned PCI video cards, anyway.

If I had just--in April--gone ahead and bought the nVidia geForce GT240 Wonderduck recommended, I would have been able to buy that card for a decent price without any trouble whatsoever and stick it right into El-Hazard the day it arrived.

(I just checked Pricewatch again--well, I see one GT240 that might be PCI--the picture looks like a PCI card--but guess what? "Out of stock". *sigh*)

On the plus side, after my interview tomorrow morning I'll be within spitting distance of Fry's Electronics, and if I have any energy left I can go over there and look around, and maybe (only "maybe") I can find something that'll suit my needs.

Of course, the people who make motherboards also make video cards, and they know what they're doing. If you can buy a PCI video card that has respectable performance, you could spend $100 on a motherboard with a 2 GHz Intel Atom dual-core processor, and then maybe another $100 on a video card, and perhaps $100 on memory, case, and an optical drive; if you have a hard drive laying around you could throw that into the machine and get a WoW-capable computer for $300.

Or if--like me--you very carefully went lowball on everything, $140 plus the cost of a video card. If I'd bought the one I saw in April, I'd have about $200 in El-Hazard and it'd play WoW.

*sigh*

* * *

The book of baby names from the 1950s lists "Sextur" as a potential name for a boy. This is the same book which has "Edsel" in it.

"Sextur" means "sixth born" and can you imagine how that would go over in this hyper-sexualized era? No one knows latinate roots any longer but they sure know what "sex" means! So Mr. Sextur Smith would be a walking sexual harassment lawsuit. Shit.

On the distaff side I came across "Hertha", for when "Bertha" ("This is our daughter, Bertha...she eats villages") just isn't cruel enough.

But the ultimate worst female name I found in this thing? "Sharman (see Charemon)". "Meet our baby girl Charmin!" *rolleyes*

It also lists "Euphemia". "Why'd your parents name you after a disease?"

* * *

The longer I sit here, the less energy I have. *sigh*
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