Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Starlight express
I caught myself thinking right at the start of the week : this has been a good holiday. If it had ended a week prematurely, I'd still have felt relaxed and recharged. Enough has happened to make me forget what it feels like - if only for a while - to be submerged in the chaos of A&E. Don't get me wrong, I love my work - but this has been good, too. Meeting up with old friends, meeting up with new. Buying a desktop, and making it work.
******
This last week has been occupied with making my new motherboard work. Warning : this section is uber-geeky, of the glazed-over-eyes variety. So for technophobes, just move swiftly on, nothing for you here.
First, I had to decide which mobo to buy. I've been out of the loop for quite a while now, since my Athlon XP 2000 was meant to last forever and ever and be fast enough for little old me. But unfortunately the two years it spent in an "always-on" configuration at the ex's house (since her broadband modem kept waking it up despite bios being set to "wake on lan = off") aged it prematurely, sending it to an early grave. So after a lot of review-reading and a few recce visits to sim lim square (the mecca of DIY computers in Singapore) I settled on an Athlon XP 2800 ("barton" according to the vendors, which shows you how much they know - bartons don't come in 2800s. 2800 is the last thoroughbred core before the barton appeared) with an Asus AVNX8-Deluxe Nvidia-based motherboard. It's got bells, whistles, a kitchen sink (make that two) and a whole tug-boat thrown in, with dual-lan, on board surround sound, wi-fi support and God knows what else. I figured, what the hey it's only another 60 dollars more (20 quid), which is really a lot of bang for buck (as opposed to P4s which are more bucks than bangs).
Choosing turned out to be the easy bit (much to my surprise). Plugging the whole thing up was a pain - the new mobo is so big I had to dismount EVERYTHING from the casing, hard-disks, casing fan, the works. Post-mounting everything back, turning on revealed a surprise - the mobo talks. It rather smugly reminded me (in a sexy american drawl) that I'd forgotten to mount the floppy disk (flarpy drives fail!) and then that the hard-disk wasn't working. A lot of head scratching later I discovered
1) sometimes the mobo comes up with the wrong error message, although the screen message is correct (bootup failed due to overclocking! when on screen it still says "floppy drives fail") making me suspect that it really is an american woman trapped in there after all, with the literacy of a small, unlettered peanut. Or mydreamd8 candidate. heh heh.
2) the mobo is, for some reason allergic to hard disks not set on "cable select".
So we get the hard disk up and running and the system zooms along at light speed up to the windows startup sequence. And even before the splash screen appears :
blue screen of death.
argh!
windows XP, that uber-customisable, ultra-intelligent creation of Willy Gates trips and falls at the starting line, even before the first hurdle.
re-minisce is so traumatised that he goes out and buys an ah-beng cooling fan (complete with red, green and blue neon lights) to mount on the inside of his case, since the system now idles at 50 degrees C, where before it idled at 30 degrees.
And then again the ambient temperature in singapore is 37 degrees. That might have something to do with it.
Lots more head-scratching and soul-searching later, it occurs to me that the change in chipset from via to nvidia must be causing a problem with one of the "taken-for-granted" startup drivers, even before windows starts and gets the change to tweak itself to suit the board.
an XP repair (thank you Willy Gates) later and we're good to go, except now windows blue screen of death (a new one) pops up after windows has started, apparently in response to ICQ, or perhaps my graphics software. That's okay though. Those're easy to isolate and fix.
Three days and we're still migrating to our new computer. Geez.
******
Borrowing from Clay Aiken's #1 fan, a bit of re-minisce trivia :
1) to debunk a few myths : re-minisce is nondescript-looking. Not particularly tall, nor particularly short. As it says on the left, occasionally bespectacled. Funny at turns, and not. Generally witty in large gatherings, but also more the quiet observer. Much more intimate in small group / one-on-one settings, chattier but also less funny.
In a nutshell - perfectly ordinary.
Oh yeah, and likes to slash at people with a long sword in his spare time. Long swords are hard to find so re-minisce settles for a sabre.
2) to fill in the gaps :
Re-minisce was chatting to a soon-to-be-married friend today about life, and love. Said friend faced the eternal challenge of stability over "magic" - having been traumatised by magic, she was all for stability.
Re-minisce doesn't believe in stability, or magic.
Re-minisce believes in stability, And magic.
The peaks and troughs that constitute magic - are wonderful if the troughs fall to ground level, and no lower. If magic alternates between ordinary, and exceptional. Rather than love and hate. If the sine-function alternates between stability and intensity.
Re-minisce believes that somewhere out there, someone like that exists.
Re-minisce isn't sure that he's got any conscious desires in an ideal partner. He never really liked to think he had a checklist, when he was younger. But age has given him... ?wisdom? or perhaps just made him finicky.
so this is how it goes :
1) must be near at hand. Distance is a Bad Thing. Only someone very, very special would deserve the mutual trauma of a long-distance affair. Someone who satisfied every criteria on the nonexistent mental checklist.
2) humour. A sparkling wit. Someone who makes re-minisce laugh with her spontaneous witticisms. Someone who communicated instinctively with him on a funny-scale. That sidelong knowing look when a sit-com joke presents itself - more than words. Far, far more than words. Or rather, even before words
3) Eyes. What, exactly - unknown. But re-minisce knows it when he sees it. It's vanishingly rare. It has something to do with expression of the soul. Not just a quiet murmur, but a glittering siren-call. An acuity of thought and life, spoken through naunces of eyebrow / eyelid and eye "gestures".
4) Self-effacement; humility - in the presence of ability. This is nearly extinct in Singapore, and pretty much the rest of the world. But re-minisce believes in them. And frankly, it's boring to keep hearing someone blow her trumpet over and over again. It destroys communication. It makes husbands switch off, and boyfriends tune-out. If someone is wonderful - she has only but to do. Re-minisce will notice - and appreciate, silently.
5) Height. This last is tenuous; re-minisce isn't sure that it's really entry-level criteria. But re-minisce is certain that he's attracted to women about his height - it has something to do with looking for an equal; a partner in every way. Something to do with making eye contact automatically. Without the time-lag of gaze adjustment. How silly is that?
6) Voice. Modulated. Heavily. With at least a neutral accent. Re-minisce doesn't like the pidgin Singspeak that he grew up with anymore. It probably has something to do with being immersed day in and out in Brit culture, but the odd hybrid we have back home of three-quarters american and one-quarter brit, and four-quarters Singaporean puts me on edge. It'll probably fade with time, once I've been back for a bit.
7) Race. Re-minisce, having lived in london for ages has unsurprisingly lost all racial preferences. He's learnt to appreciate almost all but south-african features. Although, truth be told, there's something wonderful about blonde hair...
Perhaps the ideal You doesn't exist. But once upon a time, I met You. And perhaps that's how the imaginary checklist came about - it's all Your fault. Entirely.
I caught myself thinking right at the start of the week : this has been a good holiday. If it had ended a week prematurely, I'd still have felt relaxed and recharged. Enough has happened to make me forget what it feels like - if only for a while - to be submerged in the chaos of A&E. Don't get me wrong, I love my work - but this has been good, too. Meeting up with old friends, meeting up with new. Buying a desktop, and making it work.
******
This last week has been occupied with making my new motherboard work. Warning : this section is uber-geeky, of the glazed-over-eyes variety. So for technophobes, just move swiftly on, nothing for you here.
First, I had to decide which mobo to buy. I've been out of the loop for quite a while now, since my Athlon XP 2000 was meant to last forever and ever and be fast enough for little old me. But unfortunately the two years it spent in an "always-on" configuration at the ex's house (since her broadband modem kept waking it up despite bios being set to "wake on lan = off") aged it prematurely, sending it to an early grave. So after a lot of review-reading and a few recce visits to sim lim square (the mecca of DIY computers in Singapore) I settled on an Athlon XP 2800 ("barton" according to the vendors, which shows you how much they know - bartons don't come in 2800s. 2800 is the last thoroughbred core before the barton appeared) with an Asus AVNX8-Deluxe Nvidia-based motherboard. It's got bells, whistles, a kitchen sink (make that two) and a whole tug-boat thrown in, with dual-lan, on board surround sound, wi-fi support and God knows what else. I figured, what the hey it's only another 60 dollars more (20 quid), which is really a lot of bang for buck (as opposed to P4s which are more bucks than bangs).
Choosing turned out to be the easy bit (much to my surprise). Plugging the whole thing up was a pain - the new mobo is so big I had to dismount EVERYTHING from the casing, hard-disks, casing fan, the works. Post-mounting everything back, turning on revealed a surprise - the mobo talks. It rather smugly reminded me (in a sexy american drawl) that I'd forgotten to mount the floppy disk (flarpy drives fail!) and then that the hard-disk wasn't working. A lot of head scratching later I discovered
1) sometimes the mobo comes up with the wrong error message, although the screen message is correct (bootup failed due to overclocking! when on screen it still says "floppy drives fail") making me suspect that it really is an american woman trapped in there after all, with the literacy of a small, unlettered peanut. Or mydreamd8 candidate. heh heh.
2) the mobo is, for some reason allergic to hard disks not set on "cable select".
So we get the hard disk up and running and the system zooms along at light speed up to the windows startup sequence. And even before the splash screen appears :
blue screen of death.
argh!
windows XP, that uber-customisable, ultra-intelligent creation of Willy Gates trips and falls at the starting line, even before the first hurdle.
re-minisce is so traumatised that he goes out and buys an ah-beng cooling fan (complete with red, green and blue neon lights) to mount on the inside of his case, since the system now idles at 50 degrees C, where before it idled at 30 degrees.
And then again the ambient temperature in singapore is 37 degrees. That might have something to do with it.
Lots more head-scratching and soul-searching later, it occurs to me that the change in chipset from via to nvidia must be causing a problem with one of the "taken-for-granted" startup drivers, even before windows starts and gets the change to tweak itself to suit the board.
an XP repair (thank you Willy Gates) later and we're good to go, except now windows blue screen of death (a new one) pops up after windows has started, apparently in response to ICQ, or perhaps my graphics software. That's okay though. Those're easy to isolate and fix.
Three days and we're still migrating to our new computer. Geez.
******
Borrowing from Clay Aiken's #1 fan, a bit of re-minisce trivia :
1) to debunk a few myths : re-minisce is nondescript-looking. Not particularly tall, nor particularly short. As it says on the left, occasionally bespectacled. Funny at turns, and not. Generally witty in large gatherings, but also more the quiet observer. Much more intimate in small group / one-on-one settings, chattier but also less funny.
In a nutshell - perfectly ordinary.
Oh yeah, and likes to slash at people with a long sword in his spare time. Long swords are hard to find so re-minisce settles for a sabre.
2) to fill in the gaps :
Re-minisce was chatting to a soon-to-be-married friend today about life, and love. Said friend faced the eternal challenge of stability over "magic" - having been traumatised by magic, she was all for stability.
Re-minisce doesn't believe in stability, or magic.
Re-minisce believes in stability, And magic.
The peaks and troughs that constitute magic - are wonderful if the troughs fall to ground level, and no lower. If magic alternates between ordinary, and exceptional. Rather than love and hate. If the sine-function alternates between stability and intensity.
Re-minisce believes that somewhere out there, someone like that exists.
Re-minisce isn't sure that he's got any conscious desires in an ideal partner. He never really liked to think he had a checklist, when he was younger. But age has given him... ?wisdom? or perhaps just made him finicky.
so this is how it goes :
1) must be near at hand. Distance is a Bad Thing. Only someone very, very special would deserve the mutual trauma of a long-distance affair. Someone who satisfied every criteria on the nonexistent mental checklist.
2) humour. A sparkling wit. Someone who makes re-minisce laugh with her spontaneous witticisms. Someone who communicated instinctively with him on a funny-scale. That sidelong knowing look when a sit-com joke presents itself - more than words. Far, far more than words. Or rather, even before words
3) Eyes. What, exactly - unknown. But re-minisce knows it when he sees it. It's vanishingly rare. It has something to do with expression of the soul. Not just a quiet murmur, but a glittering siren-call. An acuity of thought and life, spoken through naunces of eyebrow / eyelid and eye "gestures".
4) Self-effacement; humility - in the presence of ability. This is nearly extinct in Singapore, and pretty much the rest of the world. But re-minisce believes in them. And frankly, it's boring to keep hearing someone blow her trumpet over and over again. It destroys communication. It makes husbands switch off, and boyfriends tune-out. If someone is wonderful - she has only but to do. Re-minisce will notice - and appreciate, silently.
5) Height. This last is tenuous; re-minisce isn't sure that it's really entry-level criteria. But re-minisce is certain that he's attracted to women about his height - it has something to do with looking for an equal; a partner in every way. Something to do with making eye contact automatically. Without the time-lag of gaze adjustment. How silly is that?
6) Voice. Modulated. Heavily. With at least a neutral accent. Re-minisce doesn't like the pidgin Singspeak that he grew up with anymore. It probably has something to do with being immersed day in and out in Brit culture, but the odd hybrid we have back home of three-quarters american and one-quarter brit, and four-quarters Singaporean puts me on edge. It'll probably fade with time, once I've been back for a bit.
7) Race. Re-minisce, having lived in london for ages has unsurprisingly lost all racial preferences. He's learnt to appreciate almost all but south-african features. Although, truth be told, there's something wonderful about blonde hair...
Perhaps the ideal You doesn't exist. But once upon a time, I met You. And perhaps that's how the imaginary checklist came about - it's all Your fault. Entirely.
