My Corner of the Interweb

Boom.

Mood: Vaguely achy.
Music: Big in Japan, Alphaville.
Game: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Guild Wars, Forza.
Book: The Lost Art of War, Sun Tzu II, Cleary Translation.
Muffin: Blueberry-Peach.
Punchline: "Poof."

The heat's caused its first major casualty in my apartment. I don't consider my sleep patterns to be dead...just severely wounded and disfigured.

Last night, my ATI Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder basically gave up and freaked. Little green boxes showed up in a checkerboard pattern, and since I was in the middle of a round of Call of Duty, texture boundaries lost vertices and shot bizarre angled planes of texture all over the screen. It was like being in a crystal forest made of WWII textures.

I shut down, and replaced the card with a spare 9700 I had lying around. (Who the hell keeps a spare 9700?) Machine came right back up, and worked fine for the rest of the night.

The video card I removed was HOT. Not hot like they usually get...but hot enough to burn me if I wasn't careful. Now, considering that my new air conditioner was blowing directly on the open case of my computer, and the fan on the card was running (I checked) I figure the card is basically screwed.

No downtime for gaming, but all of a sudden I'm out a $300+ card...which kinda sucks.

While I was clearing stuff away from underneath the window in which I was going to install my air conditioner I accidentally knocked a dead hard drive off a box it was resting on...and had it land directly on the second toe of my right foot. Blood everywhere, and the nail turned black and blue immediately. After hopping around cursing for a while, I bandaged my toe, cleaned up the blood and went out with Adam to pick up my air conditioner. I installed it with him and everything, with my toe throbbing and oozing the whole time. Even today it's sore and tender...although no longer bleeding. Hurts a bit to walk on it...but I think that's the bruise under the nail. It's not broken...so I got that going for me...which is nice.

I also got an email yesterday from one of the moderators of a site I used to write for and work on. It seems he and a few of the old time moderators are quitting, because they're getting tired of being told nothing and treated like low-pay employees that don't get paid.

The current owner of the site (who bought it from the guy who founded it, and brought all of us on) responded to the letter of resignation with this classy line: "We can’t and won’t be sharing top level information anytime soon. There’s too many leaks in the system and not enough people I trust."

A great way to motivate a volunteer staff, right? "I'm not going to tell you anything because I don't trust any of you." And these are people who have been working on the site for YEARS before he got there. Building, designing, maintaining order, making people laugh. And he comes in and says "I don't trust any of you."

Matter of time before the whole site collapses under the weight of incompetence and bureaucracy it's become. Too bad, really. It was an important part of my life for a while there.

I've been getting home from work, and not doing anything but turning on the air conditioner and playing games. I should pay some bills, organize my Limewear business expenses so I can close the business entity, do my dishes...chores in general. I just have no energy to do it. Maybe I'll take a day or two off or something, and use that time off to really clean up properly, get my chores done, polish my resume once more and send it out a few times.

Sounds pretty good, really. Time to find out how much vacation time I have left....

Posted by Glenn at June 14, 2005 10:47 AM