LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

computer

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

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The scene: Monday night. We are tired. Lloyd is working in front of his giant monitor.

Lloyd: “Come read my new rubric for web design class.” (That’s right, we use words like ‘rubric’ around here. We’re Smarty-Smartersons.)

Me: “Mm-hmmm. Yes… looks good….” (Counting in my head to seventy-five while staring at the screen and pretending to know what it means. What the heck is a rubric, anyway?)

Lloyd: “You’re not really reading, are you?”

Me: “Ummmmm…..”

Luckily, at this point his giant monitor starts to flicker in a mad, seizure-inducing way.

Lloyd gets very, very quiet.

I start laughing.

Lloyd glares.

I stop laughing.

I take pictures.

October 27 2009 RIP

Lloyd messes with the controls and continues to be very, very quiet.

I go to my trusty, non-broken computer, look up “Gateway monitor flicker” and find many, many angry people in the world who hate Gateway with a fiery passion because their monitors have also betrayed them.

Lloyd is also doing research, watching (through the flicker) a video of someone who is speaking in a calm, comforting voice – like a person highly trained in comforting the bereaved.

I get bored and start watching YouTube videos.

Lloyd quietly hisses, “Stop watching videos. You’re using all my bandwidths.”

I go to bed and leave him alone in his sorrow.

End scene

Please leave your condolences below.

Oh, and just so you know, though in this story I seem like a really awful, heartless person – I know what a rubric is.

Oh the ironies

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This is the email that I sent out this morning before I drove off:

The NE Technology Coordinator’s Fall meeting (or as I like to call it,
“The day all the computers in Nebraska schools stop working.”) Is
happening in Grand Island today. If you need me, that’s where I’ll
be.
–Lloyd

About an hour later I received a flurry of text messages, phone calls and e-mails, including this one:

So – as long as it doesn’t end up being a super headache for you, I am amused that the server crashed the day you were at a tech conference. I think the server read your email.
–Jared

Well, it turned out to be a very good conference. Really, “conference” is probably too strong a word for it. It was a bunch of technology coordinators from across Nebraska getting together. Some were from schools smaller than Lincoln Lutheran and some were from districts with 48,000 students. Someone would complain about something and a dozen other people would commiserate that the same thing happened to them and then 3 or 4 people would offer some really good ways to deal with that problem. (lather, rinse, repeat)

It was free, and I even bummed a ride with a group of people coming from Omaha. But I’m not really looking forward to going back to school tomorrow. To keep my mind off of it, I bought this game:

It’s called World of Goo, and it’s a sort of puzzle/physics simulation type game. It’s the 1st anniversary of the game, and they are currently selling it for “Whatever you want to pay for it.” If you decide to buy it (and at that price, why wouldn’t you?) I would be interested in knowing what you paid for it. There are versions for Windows, Macs, Linux and Wii. The music is cool, and I played about 5 levels tonight before watching the movie Rounders.

Geekfest 2009

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This past Thursday we put together 25 computers for one of Lincoln Lutheran’s computer labs. The week before I sent out an email to Lincoln Lutheran families asking if anyone wanted to help put some computers together. I had about 12 students, 3 alumni and 1 teacher join in the fun.

The motherboard motherlode

We spent a little while in the morning talking about how to pick parts for a computer and where to buy them. Then we looked at a couple of computers that some of us had recently put together. Then we had pizza. I view the pizza as the most vital part of any successful geekfest.

After Pizza was accomplished we broke into teams of two and I walked them through how to put all of the pieces together. Once we had build one in a step-by-step fashion they went to town on the others. Our very talented alumni put the assembled computers through their paces and set some settings in the BIOS.

I told them the Hard Drive was the Flux Capacitor.

I think I have been away from our students for too long. I couldn’t believe how helpful and intelligent they were. When we were finished and were just cleaning up several of them came up to me and said, “What else can I do to help?” And after one of the students asked me what to do with the completed computers and I said, “I guess take them back to the Mac lab.”, he replied, “Why don’t I take them to the PC lab. That way you don’t have to move them later?” The PC lab was about 3 times further away.

The Lauren Made Me Do It.

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We were watching a movie on the new monitor a few weeks ago and it was skipping frames. Lauren asked why it was doing that and I said my computer was too slow for the fantastically amazing resolution of the new monitor. She said I should get a new computer.

I actually just changed the resolution on the monitor to something a mere mortal might use, and the movie was fine, but she did say I could get a new computer.

The next day I spent about, no kidding, six hours figuring out what parts to buy. I’m pretty computer geeky, so you might think that I would be up on all that stuff, but the tightwad in me knows that if I start looking at new computer things, I’ll realize how slow mine is and want to buy something new. So I don’t ever look at computer parts unless I’m ready to buy something.

All the little boxes came in a bigger box.

Here’s what I came up with:

  • Motherboard: ASUS M4A78T-E $114 (nice enough)
  • Processor: AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz $104 (overclocked to 3.4GHz)
  • Video Card: HIS Radeon HD 4850 1GB $114 (4 times faster than my old one)
  • Case: Antec Three Hundred $28 ($54 discount on this & power supply)
  • hec Raptor500 $17 (cables are almost too short)
  • Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 250GB $53 (I don’t need this much space)
  • Memory: Crucial 4GB $58 (about what I was using before)
  • DVD Writer: SAMSUNG SH-S223L $28 (I needed a black one)

Total cost was $517 after shipping (which was only $10) and rebates. If you’re interested in this sort of thing you can read all of the details on the various parts. Most of the parts arrived in a few days, but I had to wait on the stupid DVD burner. I didn’t wait, I started putting it together right away.

Before

After

Ready for inspection.

The old computer would get incredibly dirty inside (this happens with all computers that sit on the floor unless your house looks like Annette’s house). We decided to raise it up a few inches to keep that from happening so quickly. Lauren thought a basket would look good. I was really pulling for turtles to support it. Since it was about 4 inches higher, the cooling system had to be re-engineered as well.

At first, I thought I would cut a hole in the bottom.

Lloyd’s Gigantic Day of Fun

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Well, we went looking at computer monitors at Nebraska Furniture Mart. I never thought that Lloyd could out-Mart me. I went looking at all their cool stuff while he stood in a trance in front of a bank of monitors, looking stoic. Apparently he has been thinking about this decision for quite a while, and had his choices narrowed down to six. NFM had three of those choices, so it took him two and a half hours to scrutinize their features: number of ports / does it have t.v. or not / resolution / blah blah blah blah blah. (I saw some cool toasters! Thanks for asking.)

When I’d check in on him every fifteen minutes to make sure he was breathing, he’s say, “Look at these. Which one looks better to you?”

Me: “That one. It’s red.”

Lloyd: “No. The picture on the screen.”

Me: “The pictures look identical. Get the red one.”

Lloyd: “What do you think about the dot pitch resolution?”

Me: “Ooo! Is that a toaster?”

We took a lunch break at the Burger King inside NFM, and I just have to say that it is genius for large furniture stores to take care of all your physical needs so you never have to leave. We could eat, pee and shower there. Genius.

Anyway, after lunch Lloyd asked, “Is there a clearance section here?” By that time I had already visited it three times, so I took him back there where we found a GIANT monitor that Lloyd had never added to his Original Six lineup because of it’s prohibitive price. It was marked down 65%, so he chose that one. Good thing he stared at those others for so long, right?

It is larger than our television.

Y’know, looking back on the day, I don’t think that I was supposed to shower there.

Hee hee hee

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Whatever could this be for?

Lauren’s making crap again.

We have a laptop!  It was supposed to be for school, but I’ve already named it, so now it’s mine.  It’s SOOOOOOOOO cute!  Teeny-tiny, and cute as a button.  It arrived last week (9 3/4 by 7 1/2 inches , 2 lbs 11 oz, brown eyes, brown hair), and it’s delightful!  It came with a weeny little sleeve, though, and since I’ll be toting it to and from school, I sewed a new sleeve out of the remains of the Slanket and a windbreaker.  Good enough for who it’s for.

The daisy is to hide my awful sewing.

So, how tiny is it?  Tiny.

So sad that it should come to this. We tried to warn you all but oh dear.