Sara

If you had ever ever doubted that I am geek, behold:



Yep. I bought crocheted Cloak and Dagger dolls.

Hee.

ETA: These were made by the lovely Vox over at Vox Mortuun.

And now for something completely different.

Technology rant.

I need a new digital camera. My current one is the suck. It drains batteries faster than a cheap whore when sailors are on leave. It also has really low megapixels, which results in some pretty terrible picture quality unless you select "best" at which point you can shoot 33 pictures at best and that's with the 512MB memory card in it. It will not see larger memory cards. I have a 2GB that I bought all for it, and it can't see it. All in all, it annoys me and with digital cameras and photo printers finally starting to rival film cameras, I want an upgrade. I want an upgrade in time for my party, which means that I might be going to buy this spiffy Canon with 10 megapixel, 4x optical and 4x digital zoom. Here have a link. That's the one I'm debating. The second runner up was this baby, but it loses because it offers less megapixels, and only has 3x optical zoom. Not to mention that the second one only takes the Canon battery pack. That annoys me. I like to use AA's, thank you very much. I was really only tempted by the second because it is sleeker, which is something that I enjoy. It would fit in a pocket or purse better but the difference between the two really isn't all that substantial size-wise.

Deciding on a Canon camera was the easy part. I have three film cameras (although I cannot for the life of my manage to find the third one). Of the two I can locate, one is a Canon 35M point and shoot and the other is a Kodak APS point and shoot with a 2x optical zoom. The Kodak is newer but in no way nicer. The Canon camera takes beautiful pictures. The images are always crisp and clean, and it is old. It is old as in I got it for a birthday present when my parents were still together. I was probably in high school, but I can't recall. It's that old, and it works like a charm. The Kodak has questionable quality, especially when you zoom. The images get pixellated. I love Kodak prints. When I have film developed, I always go for Kodak if the place has it, but the camera itself cannot compare with my Canon. My third (missing) camera is another APS camera, which I loved. I cannot remember what type of camera it was. I know it was point and shoot and did not have optical zoom, but it had better picture quality than the current Kodak APS. I'm sad that I can't find it because I still have a few rolls of APS film I need to shoot.

Then we get the my photo printer, which was a present from my dad a few months after he got me the camera. (Well, more like half a year. The camera was for Christmas and then the printer was for the following birthday when he wanted me to print out the pictures I had taken with the camera when I was in England.) My HP Photosmart 245 worked like a charm. I never used it much due to the above stated fact of still preferring the quality of film, but it did its job. And then, suddenly, I went to turn it on and the damn thing won't light up. At all. I've done everything with it and the power cord that my troubleshooting skills can consider and nothing. It's DOA. I looked around to see if I could find a replacement power cord and those fucking things range from $35 to $60. I can buy a new photo printer that has a LCD touchscreen for cropping pictures, prints more sizes and is faster for $100. I think my decision is made there, too. Here's the printer I'm considering.

So, basically, I can drop a little over $300 and have a nice camera and photo printer set, which would be awesome because I would like to have both. I'd like to get myself back into photography. Well, amateur photography anyway, and it would be nice to have pictures of my current friends. I sort of stopped taking pictures shortly after college ended, which would probably surprise all my college friends because I was something of an annoying shutterbug.

That's enough of that rant. I'll probably be buying the camera and the printer later today because the party is next Saturday. That's not a lot of time.

The car place called yesterday to tell me that they had tried to start my car 25 times and, lo and behold, the damn thing started each and every time. They still needed to rotate the tires, which I had asked them to do since it needed to be done and the tires had been bought there anyway, and run the diagnostic to make sure the starter wasn't going out or anything. My first words to the guy when he told me that it had started were, "Seriously?" closely followed by the sort of frustrated laughter the mechanics and pc techs alike must be used to hearing.

So yesterday I had timberwolfblues take me to pick up my car, which has been starting since. Stupid thing. It does ride a lot better with the tires rotated, though. That might also have something to do with me not having check the tire pressure in a bit. And, yes, I am an evil car owned. I know, I know. The daughter of a mechanic should be a lot more diligent when it comes to oil and air pressure and washings than I am but really. It never interested me in the slightest.

In other news, I also managed to beat the issue I was having with my desktop. I bought four 1GB sticks of RAM for it. The motherboard specs said it was upgradeable to 4GB of RAM. I got a pretty sweet deal on the RAM and had wanted something to punch up the computer a little because I can't really afford a new one right now. The memory comes in. The old sticks of 512 come out. The new sticks go in. Three beep salute, no booting.

Two weeks and many diverse configurations of which RAM in which slot later, I have my computer booting with the 4GB of RAM. I did a BIOS update and then we went in and set the memory configuration to manual and then set it to 667 MHZ of RAM. Lo and behold, the beast works. Due to allocated memory for various things, the most memory that Windows will see if 3.5GB of RAM but still. I fought the law and the law did not win so it's aces for me.

Once I uninstall some unnecessary programs and finish moving things over to Benjy (the external HDD), I'm more than likely going to reinstall the OS on the desktop anyhow. It's more than time for that step. I also need to double check and make sure I have all my discs and .exe files saved somewhere I can easily get to them.

Woot!

I got Vincent and Gir to talk through Dexter. The thing that started it all off was WMP, but I'm not complaining because now I can stream my entire music library on Gir wirelessly to Vincent without filling up Vincent's mediocre HDD. (Yes, I consider 200 GB to be small. What is the world coming to?) It wasn't even that hard, but it is something I'd have to see to do, especially because a goodly portion of it was solved for me by the WMP program itself. Gir and Vincent have apparently been talking to each other via Dexter without me. Just like good brothers should.

...I just realized that almost all of my technical equipment at the moment is sporting male designations. Hmmmm. Actually just about everything with a name, other than my car, has a male designation. If I get an iPhone or a Mac, I'll have to work on rectifying that.

I am suck a geek.

With some of the Christmas money that I go, I am purchasing the first part of the Mythbusters season 1 DVDs.

We still need to buy a new DVD player. I have been considering getting one that is also a DVD recorder because, well, cool. Whatever we get has to do mult-format, though. All the ones we saw at K-Mart yesterday did either -R's or +R's. I demand one that does both. Sony has one that does those plus DVD DLs and the usual foray of JPEG discs and perhaps AVIs, which I am all for. I only have one rule: No More Panasonic.

( the haul )

timberwolfblues and I are going somewhere this weekend. Like gone gone from Friday until sometime Sunday. Like if you need me, call my cell but don't expect me to answer.

I'm also attempting to move all the data I want from Cronus' main HDD onto his secondary drive so that it can simply be installed into Gir. That's about the easiest way to move data. I will, of course, have to reinstall all my programs, which is the suck but I'll live. It's also helpful that I keep all my discs in one place and keep the majority of the install files for various web programs on my drive rather than delete them. This is very helpful with some programs that no longer seem to have the free version downloads available. Some things I'll have to have Jim replace when he gets back from his honeymoon because he set them up special for me, and I'm not sure how he did it.

Yesterday, my RAM and 200GB HDD for Gir game in. Wilbur went ahead and installed the RAM, HDD and my secondary CDR/RW DVD player combo drive. We're basically just waiting for my 3.4GHz Dual Core Processor (the 3.2 was sold out and upgrading to 3.4 was only $40 more) and my video card to come in. And, yeah, me to get the old comp in so Wilbur can switch my secondary HDD and my 4 port USB 2 card.

And I need to call the bank and get them to reset my online banking password (because they made me change it and I forgot it so now I'm locked out of my account) so I can transfer the necessary funds to pay for Gir from savings to checking. Everything is coming together nicely. Hopefully by the beginning of next week, I shall be squeeing happily over the splendor that is Gir.

ETA: Now I just need to figure out where Netscape keeps my bookmarks so I can save those.

Bloody hell.

I know I have it. I know it's here. I know I've read it.

So where the smeg is the whole X-Men/Brood sage from Australia when I need it for XR research purposes? Apparently, it's been eaten by my comic book boxes as some kind of sacrifice to the comic gods.

Oy. You know what this means, right? Complete and utter back issue blow-out. I'm gonna have to pull out every issue in all six of my long boxes until I find it.

...Or maybe see of Mile High has it in a TPB or something.

Oh, well, I needed to throw the new LSH run, Runaways, Strange Tales first run and the Cloak and Dagger second run into the boxes anyway.

Expect me to be spotty tonight, gang. I'm getting my geek on.

And now I just ordered a 512MB SD card for my RCA Lyra MP3 player because the 128MB of internal memory on it is getting a bit old.

The SD card was discounted $20 from Circuit City and then has an additional $15 rebate. So while I paid about $47 for it after tax, I'm gonna be getting $15 back, dropping my price to around $32, which isn't bad at all considering the other places I priced those cards at were between $60 and $70.

Yes, I have been spending more money than usual today.

I just don't feel very into my Excel spreadsheet, esp. since the rest of my projects are on hold waiting for feedback.