Life

My computer’s time had come to an end. It’s specs were something like an AMD 1800+ (Single Core) , 512 MB of RAM (DDR), and a number of other several-year-old specs. The lights were flickering (I had a very nice gaming case) and one stopped working altogether. It was time.

My dad recommended a site, 3B Tech.net, which I highly recommend if you can build your own computer. They have some incredible barebone deals, one of which I purchased. For about $170, I ordered an AMD  64 Athlon 4400+, Dual Core, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, and so on. Those are the main specs that I cared about, but the other ones were good as well.

It arrived last night and to my pleasant surprise they had upgraded my CPU to a 5000+. I have no idea why, but it was definitely welcomed and won my favor.

Anyway, this was all very exciting and so on, but it brings me to my next point. When transferring an existing hard drive to a new computer, you can’t always keep the same operating system. I did it before, and it worked fine. So, I moved over my DVD/CD ROM (I could write a whole post about the troubles I had with this, getting down to completely taking it apart and almost to a point of soldering) and hard drive into my new computer.

The moment was coming… would it work?

The answer was, no. No, it would not work. Crap.

This means I have to reinstall my operating system, my plethora of programs, and the plugins with each one, and keep the data that was on it, as that was kind of vital. Lucky for me, I have another computer at another location  (writing on it right now…). So, I ordered a new nice SATA 250 GB hard drive. Yes, I am aware that it’s really small in our day and age, and I could have gotten a lot more.

I, however, don’t download music or videos. I have never filled up more than 150gbs of space, and I wasn’t getting rid of my old hard drive, so I still have however much space was on it as well.

To conclude the story, I wanted to get on the internet right then and there. This lead me searching for a bootable CD. I was going to use BartPE, but for various reasons I couldn’t create the CD. So, I tried a version of Linux. It didn’t work.

This lead me to Ubuntu! I had heard a lot about it through places like Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker, and so on. I am a coder at heart, and I get a kind of warm fuzzy feeling when I can control a computer through command console. So, I created an Ubuntu bootable CD, and worked off that.

I was very impressed, and lead me to the decision that I will be keeping a dual boot on my new hard drive of Ubuntu and Windows XP. I will use Ubuntu as much as I can, but I’m sure I will run into some things that I will feel a need for Windows.

So, looking forward to use my new pretty-frackin’-fast computer next week!

-Kerry

I had the brilliant idea of having Fondue for Christmas Eve with my mother. Well, that got postponed to New Year’s Eve, which seemed and even better celebratory occasion.

I had fondue about once before — two years back and was not involved in the cooking process in the least. My mother last had it about thirty years back.

So, I found an online recipe from Go Fondue for a classic Swiss cheese recipe.

I followed its recipe, put in two cups of wine, then started adding the cheese.

Stop. Stop right there. That’s where we went wrong.

As I mentioned before, we had no idea what we were doing. So, we added all of the two cups at once. You are supposed to add a little, heat it up, then add a little cheese, then more wine, more cheese, and so on.

We ended up pouring our entire pound of cheese into the pot, and it was still like liquid. I went out and bought another half pound of cheese. We added it to little avail, while it gained a bit of a thicker consistency it wasn’t much. The wine was also much too strong for both my mother’s, her friend’s and my taste.

We ate a little bit, but it was far too strong for me. All in all, it was a fun learning experience!

I’ll definitely be doing it again, I’ll probably report here. Hopefully it will be successful next time!

-Kerry