baque|Fawth

Today I went on an excursion to a computer product retailer www.rtvcomputers.com.au. If you load this site you will notice many new release movies are for sale there in VCD format.

They even offer cheap "backup" copies on their site. Myself and a friend went down there loaded with the phone number for Australia's software piracy watchdog the BSAA, in the hope of extorting a couple of new video cards from them.

While browsing a list of available titles in the store, we were told bluntly by (I assume) the manager that these were not available anymore. Seems we were too late.

Oh well, I'll just have to pay for a new geforce. Darn.

Daylog
Yestaday|Tomorra

Last night, the old B&C and I went out with a workmate, his fiance, and a couple of her cow orkers, who are games developers.

Turned out one of them was mates with Jeff Minter. He could not confirm that the constant risque comments Jeff makes about farm animals are necessarily jokes. Neither could he confirm that they were jokes, of course.

Still, that is one beautiful sheep.

Australia Day was used as an excuse for a Fosters promotion at the pub. £1 a pint. I don't normally drink lager, but for the money, it was worth it.

I had a story I submitted to Slashdot get posted. Ahhh, the excitement of getting a story posted on Slashdot. Helped break up an otherwise boring work day that I would rather have spent sleeping. Though it was probably the fact that it had to do with nanotechnology that got it posted.

I think I'm getting sick. And I don't like that. One bit.

I have been drinking coffee almost every day for about a week now. This morning I have a twitch in my right eyelid. Despite bedding down at a reasonable hour (by 10PM) last night, rising was difficult as ever this morning; I got to work ~15 min late. That’s better than the last two days, 1.5 hr late TUE and .5 hr late WED.
Driving up SR 17 North last night, I took a quick look at Computer Renaissance, which was closed. Odd, I thought, before 8PM, but maybe they close earlier than other retail stores would.
Today, in daylight, I discover that they are not merely closed, but really most sincerely closed. The store is empty but for a few forlorn display racks and tables. I will not be wrangling a small, cheap, used hard drive here, and my hopes of obtaining a used monitor or printer are now dashed. Well, there's always ebay. Perhaps that's why Computer Renaissance is permanently closed.
At "the other" CompUSA, smaller and saner than the one I visited last night, I get a 10GB drive. This is the smallest drive they carry, and my delight at the wonders of technology (yesterday's 40GB drive) turns to disgust. (I would be quite happy with a 3GB drive, even a 1GB drive, I didn't want to dish out another $100!) On the plus side, I discover why the power switch turns the computer on but not off: I had misconfigured the motherboard's power management.

Continued tomorrow...
I went on walkabout that night, through the piles of snow. The precipitation had slowed to an anemic pace - a single lone flake would drift down from the sky, daring you to run and catch it in your mouth. (In a related note, the snow tasted great.)

It was cold, and I had a hot toddy and some spiced wine to keep my spirits high. The clouds were low, and the air was still. I had detoured through a neighborhood, an upper-class 'burb, 2.3 kids, a Mercedes minivan, and a dog in the backyard. All the houses were silent, no lights, no shadows, just the steady crunch-crunch of my sneakers on snow echoing through the streets.

Ever have one of those 'last man on the Earth' fantasies? Where all the worldly possessions are still intact, but all life is gone? It was like that, this night had that same dreamy quality, but not quite...

The lights from downtown reflected off of the cloud canopy, reddish-tinged ambience giving everything an unreal, movie-set look. The houses all looked like doll houses, with Barbie and Ken and a pink plastic convertible outside, and a water vapor ceiling overhead, up high... no air was moving. The shrubbery looked plastic, the cars cardboard.

After about five minutes of alcohol retarding neural response and the crunch of snow underfoot, I started to build a fantasy - all this, all these buildings, all these finely-honed details, tire tracks in the snow, footprints large and small, looping about in great circles, all of these were created by another just for my entertainment. I could actually feel all the stars realign themselves so that they now rotated around me. It was a wonderful, if egotistical and dangerous, feeling.

I slowly woke up to the truth of myself among many good people and buried the ego-trip. I put a few snow angels in the ground and went to bed.

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