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

My dance partner called me last Sunday and told me that her cabaret show was in need of men to do lifts, and wanted to know if I was interested. It was a bit of a drive, but told me to come on Wednesday evening to audition if so.

I was quite interested so I showed up at a lounge in Pomona — I had never been in a lounge before. It had a fairly large dance floor and all the girls and the other guy were there, sitting at the bar, chatting and stretching.

After a while, things got going. I was called up and asked if I could suppot a girl sitting on my leg. I had done much harder things and demonstrated it, and I was in! That was it!

After that, one of the girls introduced a new routine to the group where the men were needed. Since there was only two guys and six girls, me and the other guy each played a couple parts. So, more to hear from this end in the future!

Welcome to my blog on my life! This is the first post, and most will probably be just as random as this one.

I had decided to help my friend move some of her furniture. The funny thing was that I had 3 hours of sleep the night before, with a 45 min to 1 hour nap. My friend moving also had 3 hours of sleep the night before – we were at the same restaurant until 5:30AM.

I’m going to skip all the boring details of us eating and so on. The interesting part of the day was trying to move her bed to the third story of a townhouse. We got her mattress up with a little push and shove, no big deal.

While we were doing this, I had decided to make it a little bit more fun. We grabbed the mattress and sprinted across the road in a very funny fashion. We also took the foundation (box spring) and ran across the road army style. I’m hoping the cars got a good laugh.

Anyway, we decided to try to shove the foundation up the stairs. After 10 or so minutes, we decided it wasn’t possible. We had already ripped the bottom cloth (unimportant) and gotten some black marks on the wall. That’s when I decided to get creative.

I asked Heather (the one moving) if she had some rope. She didn’t, but our other friend, Catrina, did. I asked her to get it so we could see the length. Heather asked me what I was planning.

I told her that I planned on using the balcony to hoist her foundation up. She was like “not happening!” I talked a little more, so she went up to check if it was possible, and it was. She said that there was no railing that I could use though, so I’d be standing over the edge of the building. I told her fine by me!

So Catrina returend with two old and pretty frayed ropes. I, unfortunately, only remembered part of the knots I learned over a year ago for Sea Scouts (I never actually used them). I did remember one of the strongest knots’ the bowline. I also remembered one of the knots to combined to ropes together (I can’t even remember the type of knot!) So, I combined the ropes, and tied a bowline around the mattress.

I went up to the balcony, two floors up. I jumped the railing and got to the roof. Heather threw the rope up, and phew! There was plenty to spare. I decided to tie the rope to the railing about. Not entirely sure why. I wasn’t tied to it, and if the mattress slipped, it would still hit the ground, but hey, looked good!

Catrina, who is also a marine and has had firefighter training, was going to help me pull up the mattress. So we pulled and it started scraping and bending the gutter. That wasn’t good. So I had her stop for a second. I decided to concentrate on hold the rope out of the gutter (I had to lean a little bit over the edge). She started pulling again, and boy did she pull it up fast. I was also pulling, but had more strength going into making sure the rope neither frayed itself on the gutter nor bent the gutter in. As soon as the mattress left the ground, Heather came running up from below. We got it up so fast that by the time she got up to the balcony, we had the foundation on the roof!

Success! That completely made the whole moving of that day worth it.