1999-02-20

I lost the bid on the drives, so I bid again tonight. If I get them, I get them, if not, I'll find them somewhere else for a similar price. The case hunting didn't go so well, in fact, z0mbieb0y and I only went to one store, and I didn't like any of the cases there. It's just a damn case you say? Well, what I look for in a case:
- rounded metal, there's nothing worse than dying of tetanus because you swapped your board and scraped your finger
- removable sides, one should only have to remove what they need to get at the parts, rather than mess with some flimsy metal shell
- removable board tray, one should only have to put the board in and work on it on a pre-fab piece of metal, rather than take out the drive cages to get the board in without bending it
- 250W power supply minimum, because you never know how many Y adapters you're going to use in the future

The first case I ever bought, and I still use, has all of the above (well, it has a new power supply because I burnt out the old one), and is housing my wife's computer right now. Seriously, it is about 6 years old, and cost some ridiculous amount of money at the time, but hey, spread that out over 6 years, and it is pocket change. So the search for the perfect case is still alive. Maybe I'll go find a computer show and just dig around.

z0mbieb0y and I didn't get much case surfing done because we played Descent 3, Need For Speed III, and Half-life for a few too many hours, uhh, 10 to many hours. Anyway, look at it as improving eye-hand coordination, just in case that ever comes up in a life and death situation, we'll be ready. Hint: don't play NFSIII and then go into the real world and drive to get dinner, it blurs the distinction between real world and game world. I get frustrated that the real world car doesn't perform like the Mercedes CLK-GTR in NFSIII.

I'm one step closer to dropping my Microsoft reliance. Unlike some, I'm not going to just convert to total linux until I can replace every application I use in Win32. I have 4 years of data in MS Money format (technically it is an Access database with a bunch of ActiveX controls as a front end, but hey, whatever), converting that, or losing that data for some 0.1 rev linux program just doesn't seem worth it. Until now, I saw MoneyDance on freshmeat a few days ago and just d/l'd and checked it out. Cool, almost as cool as Quicken for linux could be, if Intuit would port it already. The alternative is GnuCash, which is still in alpha testing; or CBB which is a combo Perl/Tcl script based package. Other than
MS Money, it's Frontpage. I'm working on that, however it always seems to take longer than I planned.

I read the book, "A walk in the woods" by Bill Bryson around the Disney trip. I think it took a total of 3 hours to read it. It's light and comical. The reason I mention it is that I thought about how fast I read it, in comparison to the speed (or lack thereof) with which I read technical books. It was refreshing to realize I'm not a complete imbecile and can actually read a 300 page book in under three weeks. After a week of only getting 4-5 hours of sleep a night, I think I'm losing my mind. If performance comparisons of book reading is foremost on my mind, I must be losing it.