looking for the mouse...

HERE is a neat article by author Clay Shirky on the topic of where our society, as consumers of media, are going. His theories are fascinating, and I particularly like the way he makes parallels between modern sitcoms and gin pushcarts from the early industrial revolution. here's a snippet of one of his punchier points, for the link averse:

So [watching less television is] the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

the title refers to the fact that a friend of his has a 4-year old who sprung up in the middle of a dvd to root around in the cables behind their entertainment center to "look for the mouse". because children today think that if their entertainment isn't interactive, it's probably not worth sitting through. as someone who hasn't sat down to watch tv on anything approaching a regular basis in three years, i heartily agree with the kid.

the new regime begins

HappyBox has met her demise. the were-cricket did her in and it was time for a new thang. so i bought a mac. above, you can see the new queen, ShinyBox, looking down from her cardboard throne on the bones of her fallen predecessor. true to reputation, i've been able to just plug in and run with all my existing hardware on ShinyBox. my keyboard, trackball, printer, external drives, GPS, and coffee cup warmer (thanks, sissie!). it all just works. i'm thrilled!

i got my WoW setup all squared away but of course i'm having to miss wow tonight because i'm traveling. so... i'm blogging from the admiral's club again.

i had some friends in from out of town this weekend and we went out to see the sights in the gayborhood. it was fun, i got to scoot a boot, and then we went for breakfast afterward. y'know, there are some people who really shouldn't drink alcohol... we were sitting next to one of them at breakfast this morning. he arrived late and loud with suspicious stains down the front of his shirt. he'd either spilled a red drink all over himself, or he'd puked on himself. either way, he was sloppy drunk. he spent the entire meal embarrassing his friends and attempting to get our attention as we noshed at the next table over. his name was curtis merillo, and he was from central missouri, originally. he wanted everyone to think he was from the FBI or CIA or somehow affiliated with secret agency of some kind... but mostly he was a jackass. the best part of the meal was when we were leaving. he reached out to try to high-five me, as though we'd shared some victorious experience, his surviving a meal without me stuffing my fist down his loud, stupid throat. so i grabbed his hand, shook it, and in the most pleasant tone i'm capable of using, i told him he was obnoxious and embarrassing and should have a good night. and i skipped off home to get my short night of sleep.

nothing beats the build-your-own crepes at cafe brazil for putting me in a good mood at 4 am. i damn sure wasn't going to let curtis merillo kill it for me.

It came from the swamp...

I took my dead computer off to my friends' house this weekend. There was going to be an exceptionally high concentration of geekery there, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use my friends for free tech support. Or for a source of expendable RAM that we could feed to my motherboard, however you want to view it. The good news is, they have a server with the same RAID controller that my dead motherboard sported so we were able to simply plug my drives in and watch them work. Yea! In addition to that, there was some griping and whining about the configuration of the case and how the video card was in the way of getting the drives out and blah blah blah cry cry cry whine whine whine blah blah blah. The hysterical bit about that is that the guy doing the crying was the one who PICKED THAT CASE IN THE FIRST PLACE. He spec'ed the computer for me three years ago, and my dear friend jaasper was the one who got stuck building it. I made stew and kept jaasper fed and watched him do all the crazy kit-bashing. I'd never done it before and while I'm certainly capable of reading the documentation and putting a kit together from scratch, it is far better to do such things with an advisor on hand. If the advisor is further willing to twist the tiny screwdriver himself in exchange for dinner, so much the better. Anyway, in the process of yanking the drives out of the box so they could be hooked up to the server, we discovered the most likely cause of the fried RAM. It was a WERE-CRICKET!!! (and it came from the swamp...)

A scary, hairy, desiccated, fried cricket slid out of the case when we pulled the cover off the backside. The hair was mostly dog-looking, but the way it was fused to the exoskeleton (I guess by the electricity?) the carcass quite seriously resembled a were-cricket. I had a computer bug!

Many, many thanks go to my friends for getting my hard drives back up and running so I could get all my data off them! Now I must merely bide my time, grow my patience, and refresh my web browser every 30 minutes until I see that my new Mac has shipped.

woe.

MY MOTHERBOARD ATE MY RAM!!!!

on friday. *sob* happybox is dead.

i was trying to run a long, computationally heavy process on my home PC (which i had dubbed happybox) because my work computer was occupied with deadline-based work. i thought it was taking too long, so i popped into task manager to see how much RAM it was using, and discovered it was using much less than i expected. weird. i checked to make sure i had the right target total in my head and the computer only reported 1GB available. now... i could've SWORN i put 2 x 1GB sticks of RAM in the case, but y'know it's been a couple of years and i have no head for these sorts of hardware details. it's why i've never been a good gearhead. you can't describe a car as having "one of those 2.something litre V-whatever thingies" and expect to be taken seriously. so the total ram available was half what i expected, which meant it was time to troubleshoot.

so i shut 'er down, cracked open the case, looked into happybox and found 2 x 1GB sticks hanging out of the motherboard. right, then. that meant either one stick was not seated properly (and had never been?) or i had some bad ram. so i put rose to work on it, because i was frantically trying to finish that aforementioned deadline work. she swapped the sticks to other slots, but it still only reported 1GB, which meant that either one pair of slots (a channel) or one stick of RAM was bad, but we didn't know which. we tried swapping the sticks into opposite channels to narrow it down, and then the computer wouldn't boot. this meant the RAM in the primary slot was bad, and i assumed that because of this it wasn't reading the (nominally good) RAM in the secondary slot.

i didn't think it through because if i had, i'd have recognized at this point that my bad slot had fried the RAM in it and putting more RAM in the computer would be a waste of money. instead, i went to Fry's and bought more RAM. but when i got home, reason took hold of my brain before i even unwrapped the new stuff... which meant i tried to ID the bad slot before putting the new RAM in, just in case it was what had fried the old stick. either that first round of swapping sticks into opposing channels or something in this later troubleshooting step exposed my poor old good ram to a bad slot on the motherboard. i'll never really know. all i know for sure is that i have at least one bad slot on my motherboard, and by "bad slot" i mean "vicious ram-eating slot." it munched down 2 1GB sticks of ram on friday, and i'll be darned if i'm feeding it any more.

so, in light of this woe and tragedy, i'm buying myself a mac. because if i'm going to use MacOS, it's not going to be windows' bloated, big-brother-like version of MacOS (aka: Vista) it's going to be the real gosh-darned thing. and, well, mac runs wow in addition to VMWare, so all the fun stuff i want runs natively and anything i absolutely must have windows for, i can have on a Virtual Machine. color me silver. :)

i <3 Dahlia Lithwick

if you're scratching your head and wondering who that is right now, hie thee hence to slate.com and just peruse a few of her articles. she's an insightful journalist who never fails to cut through the b.s. with common sense and a really good look past the hyperbole to the issues at hand. i love her articles, and i hope if i ever get to have a cup of coffee with her, i'd like her, too.

her latest is on the blogosphere and what can be done or what should be examined about some of the hypersexual threats aimed at women bloggers these days at clicky. unsurprisingly, this is an issue of keen interest to me. not that i attract the sort of attention that tends to bring on detractors, but i would hate to think i ever attracted a stalker. i just don't want to have to choose between sharing these little random slices of my brain with you and the sense of security i cling to when i lie down in my bed at night.

real live e-mail convo with someone i love

i just got this e-mail. it cracked me up, so i'm sharing it. i (like most geeks) do a little tech support on the side for my friends and loved ones. it's usually rewarding, but not usually entertaining. today, i was entertained.

Huh??? I got VIRTUAL MEMORY?????

Just when I thought Mother Nature and Father Time had depleted all my resources, I find I got virtual memory!!

The resident guru at Office Depot said my computer sluggishness might have to do with me nearing the limit of my virtual memory. He told me how to check it and the instructions went in one ear and out the other (without a lot of impediment I must say). In fact I believe the exit was faster than the entry!!! (instructions have a phobia about wide open spaces and darkness!!)

If you think this could be part of the problem, write me back and give me some intsructions. I remember something about cntrl/alt/delete which I thought was one of the seven venial sins......

first, i had to respond that there are 7 cardinal sins. there are, however, as many venial sins as the human mind and the devil's whispering voice can devise. go-go gadget catholic school education!

then i dispensed boring, but accurate, technical advice. i'll spare you having to read those bits. those of you who know me well might guess from all the asides and parenthetical notes that i'm somehow related to the questioner. and you might be right.