Laurabelle's Blog

Saturday evening I bought myself a new computer. Well, technically I just bought the parts; they'll arrive tomorrow or Thursday. It isn't really a computer until I put them all together.

My current machine is a Dell laptop I bought in March of 2002. Her name is Delilah, and she has been a good machine for these five years. I've had no major problems with her, though I have some gripes with Dell support. (And the three-year extended warranty came in handy since I had the screen replaced not once but twice during that time.) Still, five years is five years, and she's a little underpowered for the kind of applications I want to run these days.

So I ordered parts for a new PC. This will not be a thoroughly decent machine but not top-of-the-line by any means; all the hardware is a couple of generations old. Still, the specs leave Delilah in the water.

• Delilah
  • 1.13 GHz processor
  • 256 MB of RAM
  • GeForce2 Go video card
  • 30 GB hard drive
  • DVD burner
  • 1600x1200 screen
• New machine
  • 2.3 GHz dual core 64-bit processor
  • 2 GB of RAM
  • GeForce 7600GS 256MB video card (which Jeff tells me is several generations beyond the GeForce2 Go)
  • 250 GB hard drive
  • CD burner
  • 1600x1200 LCD monitor (but rather larger than Delilah's screen)

The monitor was by far the largest splurge. It was fully a third of the total cost (not counting tax and shipping).

When I spec'd out a new computer the last time, I had rather different ideas about the new machine. For example, I wasn't planning to install Windows at all, but I've backed off that decision now. I've also changed my mind about the name, although I won't reveal my current idea just yet. That will wait until I see whether it fits.

Friday was a holiday at Jeff’s work, so I took a day off too, and we made a day trip to Yosemite National Park.

The day commenced at 3:30am, and we were on the road by 4:40am. The highways were empty that early in the morning, so we made good time and reached the trailhead shortly after 8am. It isn’t much of a trailhead, just a little gravel parking lot with a couple of road signs that there’s a trail somewhere around. It was 8:30am when we hit the trail.

The guidebook described the first half-mile as punishing, but we found it to be nothing of the sort (possibly because it was still early and the air chilly). Before we entered trees, the top of the hill featured lovely views of Yosemite Valley, including El Capitan and Yosemite Falls.

Yesterday Jeff and I went out to Mount Diablo and hiked the Mitchell Canyon and Eagle Peak loop. We meant to do the hike last weekend but didn’t make it; this week we had better luck.

In fact we had a fairly active weekend. Friday evening was guest night at Berkeley Ironworks, so we invited a co-worker and her fiancé to climb with us. We had planned to have them take a belay safety class, but I ended up teaching them myself, which was rather cool. They passed the test (by BI staff, not me) with flying colors. They seemed to enjoy the climbing too, although it was a bit difficult for them (as things always are when one begins).

That wasn’t enough climbing for me, so we went back Saturday evening. I was perhaps still a bit tired from the evening before, but I nevertheless reached the top of two new 5.6 routes, one of which I had been trying off and on, and another I had never attempted.

And then, of course, we hiked on Sunday.

Jeff and I went hiking yesterday for the first time in an embarrassingly long while. The venue was Donner Canyon, at Mount Diablo State Park. It was a beautiful day and a pretty little loop hike, though not greatly spectacular.

I did get a nice shot of Jeff being majestic in a mountain-climber way.

Yesterday evening Jeff called me from work to say that he had missed his train home. He had forgotten his cell phone at home, so he'd had to bike back to work in order to call me. My phone cut out during our conversation, complaining of a low battery, so I called him back on his own cell phone. (I thought I was being very clever.) I was puzzled by the drained battery, because the phone had been plugged in overnight and usually takes several days to drain.

After we got back home from my picking him up, I noticed that my phone was not charging, and neither was it even responding to being plugged in. I thought all kinds of expletive and resigned myself to buying a new phone.

I did not get around to purchasing a new phone today, which is a good thing because this evening I discovered the source of the whole trouble. The phone hadn't been charging because my darling husband had unplugged my charger without telling me.

A few months ago I switched my schedule from Monday-Friday to Tuesday-Saturday. One of the perks of this schedule is that I get to pick when to take my holidays, since most of them fall on Monday and I don't work Mondays. So I'm taking one of my holidays this Tuesday, and boy, I'm looking forward to it. I plan to relax and do not much otherwise.

For the past couple of weeks Jeff and I have been taking flax oil at bedtime, on the theory that it might help us sleep better. (I don't have any references for this; Jeff got the idea from a couple of his friends and wanted to try it.) I think it may have been helping, although it's hard to pin down such a subjective idea. In any case, whether because of the flax oil or by some other factor, I'm feeling a bit better rested these days.

This is possibly why I finally managed to go to the gym yesterday. For the past couple of months Jeff has been a member of Berkeley Ironworks, a small rock-climbing and fitness gym near my work, and he has been going in on Saturdays while I'm at work. He kept trying to get me to try it, not even necessarily to climb but just to use the fitness equipment, and I never managed to muster the energy to go, until yesterday.

Credit is also due to a co-worker who happened to mention climbing at lunch last week. She had a more female perspective on climbing, which appealed to me more than Jeff's reasons. (Jeff mostly just wants to be on top of things; he doesn't know why.) She also suggested that I take a belay safety class, which would let me meet other new people. Jeff thought that was a good idea too, so that's what we did.

Jeff is now overjoyed that he has a belay partner and can get off the bouldering walls. I am perhaps not so enthusiastic as he about the climbing, but I plan to use the fitness equipment. We're going to try to go in before work in the morning; we'll see how that goes.

Last weekend Jeff and I invested in a Yakima roof rack to carry skis to Tahoe, whence we are going next weekend for Christmas. Yesterday we attempted to install it on top of the car.

This was slightly more interesting than it should have been. Reading through the directions, I discovered that crucial information was missing from the directions. The rack is designed so that the same basic parts can be installed on many different cars, with only slightly different components (mostly what Yakima calls Q-clips, of which there are many different sizes and shapes). The Q-clip boxes include the required measurements for the cars they fit, but guess what? No Honda Civic mentioned anywhere. Oops.

The guy we talked to at REI couldn't find the measurements, but Jeff managed to locate them by searching Yakima's site with Google. (Yay Google indexing PDFs!)

We managed to get the cross-bars installed with minimal trouble, since Jeff and I both know how to read and follow instructions. However, when it came to installing the attachment for carrying skis, we ran into a more significant snag. The instructions told us to insert a screw through a certain piece of metal where there was no hole! We took the thing back to REI, and the Customer Service rep who helped us thought this was hilarious. She opened another box for us, and voilà, holes in the right places. Problem solved.

After that, putting the ski attachment on the racks was child's play.

We also bought a fairing during the REI trip yesterday; the difference in the wind noise was amazing. Jeff thought it was worth the $55 just because it looks cool, but I appreciate the functionality more.

So we're set to ski next weekend. Hopefully I'll have stories to tell, but I won't be telling them while there. We'll be in a hotel where there are no phones in the rooms, no televisions, and no net access. Bliss.

I have started brailling again. I stopped because I was moving to California, and then I didn’t start again because I was tired from my new job or because I was planning my wedding. A week before the latter event, the WTBBL called and said I should either do some work for them or give the software license key back. I said I’d start up again after the wedding, and I did.

I completed the first assignment over the first weekend I had it, but the second took me a while to find the time (really, the energy). I started on Monday and am now three-quarters done.

I have also recommenced knitting. I took a hiatus for quite a while because I simply felt uninspired. I was uninspired by the yarn in my stash, mostly left-over or speculative purchases, and I didn’t feel that I could afford to buy new yarn. I saw the exotic fibers my co-workers brought in and felt scornful of my own plain wool.

In the summer I bought a load of Blue Sky Cotton and knitted what I call Jeff’s go-faster sweater. After that I bought a lot of other yarn for little Christmas projects (and a couple of bigger gift projects too). I am finished with most of my planned Christmas projects and am looking forward to starting on other things.

I was tired for a long time—a fatigue that sleep never seemed entirely to solve. I have begun to sleep more effectively, perhaps—not necessarily to sleep better but to feel better after sleep. For a while I came home exhausted after work, took a nap, and then couldn’t sleep for half the night. I am trying not to do that any more.

Maybe my hobbies are helping too. I felt like I only had time to work, eat, and sleep, but now that I am making time for myself and my interests, especially brailling now, I feel like I am using myself and my time to a fuller extent. I am living my life, not the other way around. As I am so fond of saying, there’s not enough of it to waste.

When I woke up this morning my engagement ring was not on my hand, and my wedding ring was on the wrong finger. My middle finger, to be exact, where it fits only with great force. I have no idea how it got there, though I must have put it there myself. It was rather painful, and the mark was visible for a couple of hours afterward.

The engagement ring, luckily, was merely under my pillow and not completely lost.

I've been slowly working my way through name-change stuff at work. First I had to wait for the marriage certificate to arrive, then there were the Social Security thing and the driver's license thing (which are a story in and of themselves), and then I had to start changing things at work. The new Social Security card was a prerequisite for the work stuff.

So today, more than a month and a half after my marriage, I finally got around to changing my username on my work PC. Since I use Linux, this was incredibly simple. Become root, edit /etc/passwd, edit /etc/shadow, rename home directory, and voilà. Everything works perfectly under the new username, and I don't have to reconfigure a single thing. Linux rocks!