incredibly happy lobotomy

So, a couple weeks ago, a very curious thing happened to my desktop. It was off. I'd had my BIOS set up to automatically power on, and it .... didn't. Flipped the switch on the PSU a couple times, and the best I got out of it was a little green light to the motherboard indicating that, yes, there was power, but it wasn't going to turn on. Power switch on the front? Nothing. So, I opened the case and discovered that the switch had mysteriously been disconnected and was resting several inches away from the header on the motherboard that it should have been plugged into. Unfortunately, reconnecting it did nothing.

Fast forward a bit; a friend gave me a mostly-working system that he'd upgraded from, which "just" needed a hard drive. This ought to be easy, I thought, I have plenty of hard drives! So I plugged my drives into that system, connected the peripherals, and plugged it in. I was greeted with a mysterious blinking green light on the PSU. Not to be deterred, I swapped that for the power supply on my old computer – which, to the best of my knowledge, worked.... and I got a blinking amber light on the front panel of the case. After several frustrating hours of guessing, swapping out every single component on the system, and being increasingly annoyed at the whole affair (all the while, repeating the mantra: I hate hardware) I gave up and went to sleep.

Next day: an hour drive to Micro Center, $730 out of my pocket, and I've got all brand new parts. I spent that night, and well into the next morning, meticulously assembling everything while watching several hours of demos. I plugged in the monitor, and after struggling with what turned out to be a non-functioning power outlet (I hate wiring) I got it to turn on and greet me with a "New CPU detected, press F1 to enter setup" prompt. Oops, didn't plug in the keyboard..... prompt goes away... no operating system found. Connect keyboard, reboot, no prompt. Hit F1 anyway. Black screen. Strange. Tried booting from some random OS install disc (I think it was Debian?) and that worked, so hopefully I'd never need to get into the BIOS.

I went to sleep for about two hours, got back up, moved everything from the living room to underneath my desk where it's supposed to go, hoping that whatever was broken would magically resolve itself – riiiight. Well, guess what. It did. I hit F1, it dumped me into the slickest, most impressive BIOS I've ever seen. Changing the boot order? Drag and drop the icons. Looking at a long list of choices? Use that scroll wheel. I had no words. ._. (And before anyone asks: the keyboard works just fine too; you don't need the mouse. But ohmygawd it is slick.)

Sooooo anyway. I'll casually skip past the nonsense where I lost the DVD I was going to use, and had to re-download Windows Server 2008, which took creating another account on DreamSpark. (Why? Because it's entirely legitimate, it's free, and with Server, all of the crap you'd normally have to disable is already turned off in the first place – and there's taskbar buttons by default to open a terminal window and the system settings.) So I get the disc, pop it in, it boots just fine, goes well beyond the point where it would routinely blue screen on my other computer, and the entire install takes a couple minutes.

I'll also skip past the stupid bit of trying to get a wireless card to work. You have to enable WLAN in the system settings first.

So now, what I have is essentially a trimmed-down Windows 7 install that works really, really well, and has way more power than I actually need. How much? Well, have a look:

Hehehe.

It's a castle!

This stands a bit under four inches tall, has over 550 pieces, and took me about three hours to build. (Pardon the rather clumsy photo.)

> The Camba had weekly benders with laboratory-proof alcohol, and, Dwight Heath said, "There was no social pathology—none. No arguments, no disputes, no sexual aggression, no verbal aggression. There was pleasant conversation or silence." On the Brown University campus, a few blocks away, beer—which is to Camba rum approximately what a peashooter is to a bazooka—was known to reduce the student population to a raging hormonal frenzy on Friday nights. "The drinking didn't interfere with work," Heath went on. "It didn't bring in the police. And there was no alcoholism, either."

­— Drinking Games, The New Yorker, 15 February 2010

> While this system of markings should represent an enormous effort and investment of resources on our part, the construction itself should be of materials of little value, and the workmanship should not bestow any value through the elegance of craft or artistry. Doing substantial work on materials of little value suggests that the place is not commemorative of phenomena highly valued by the culture that made it, but as marking something important yet quite unvalued... not a treasure, but its opposite... a location of highly devalued material ("dangerous garbage" or an "un-treasure").

> The place should not suggest shelter, protection or nurture... it should suggest that it is not a place for dwelling, nor for farming or husbandry. This would be most strongly communicated if the place obviously tries to deny inhabitation and utilization. It might best be designed as a place difficult to be in, and to work in...both actually and symbolically. Given this, the center of the place should reject rather than embrace. Any attractive focus on/near that center would suggest welcome, and by extension, occupancy and utilization.

A difficult problem: try to design something that communicates "don't stick beans up your nose" and doesn't make people want to try sticking beans up their noses, and moreover, will last as long as people still have beans and noses.

Together we can play some rock and roll.

A long while ago, I signed up for Google Apps so that I could switch to GMail and still keep my address at my own domain. At the time, Google Apps was sort of third-rate and only did a handful of things, so I had to make a separate Google account with a more-or-less throwaway email, and then Google started integrating Google Apps more sensibly, which unfortunately caused as many problems as it fixed since I suddenly had collisions between my "regular" Google account and my Google Apps account... I won't go into all the details, since they're mundane, and besides, I think I already rambled on about this not too terribly long ago.

The short story is I ended up nuking my non-Apps account, then for some reason making another new one because I didn't necessarily want everything to be associated with my domain, so I still have two Google accounts to keep track of, but it really hasn't been too big of a deal since I mostly got everything rearranged sensibly so that there isn't any overlap between them.

Except, tonight I signed up for Google Voice... and now it's tied to the account where my email isn't, which means none of my contacts show up in Google Voice.

Argh.

Steve Jobs just resigned. Wonder what that means for Apple.

What happens when you don't pay attention to package manager updates? Well, this:

> uname -sr
Linux 3.0-ARCH

Seems pretty same-ish, really.

Have an article. Aside from the fact that I think they just called me a hipster (or maybe not – at any rate, I'm not a parent), it's pretty well written.