The Blog: Laments From La Mancha

Every great figure needs a side kick.

Today, Quixote (my computer built into my desk) got one.

Enter stage right: Sancho.

Quixote is a wonderful machine. Even though it’s nearing two years old, it’s still pretty top rung in my book. A P4 3.06 HT, 2 gigs of ram, a little over ½ a terabyte of space, dvd-burner, ATI 9800 All-in-wonder, an ATI 9200, a cool little LCD screen, and loads of fun little hoo-ha’s to make glow and look pretty.

It works wonderful as a beast and work horse. Photo files, download speeds, burning, but it suffers in one area: Gaming. The problem is not the speed or the memory, but rather with my setup. Since I have two ATI cards in there the computer has a hard time figuring out where to display the game and doing the refresh hand all that jazz. Some games work flawlessly, but there are others that no matter what I do, they just won’t seem to display full screen or at all.

This is where Sancho comes in.

Bobby & Stephanie Rothrock (the fine folks at Computer Renaissance) were kind enough to help me out. Thanks to a little work for store trade deal I worked out with them they gave me an amazing deal on a new gaming system.

They hooked me up with an Antec Aria (fun little cube), slapped my dual-layer dvd-burner in there, 2 gigs of ram, 250 gigs of SATA hard drive space, an AMD 64 3800 and an NVIDIA 6800 PCI-Epxress for some hard core rendering.

I haven’t had a whole lot of chance to play with but man does it fly. I had XP Pro x64 on it over the weekend and that thing was just smokin’ fast. You should have seen how quickly paint brush opened.

However due to some driver issues (after all it is still in beta), I’ve moved back to XP Home (but I might go back once I know the system is stable).

All in all it’s a wonderful addition to the La Mancha network and everyone is playing nicely. Hopefully this will give me the edge at our next LAN party or free me up to actually have a system I can travel with.

So here’s to some happy gaming. Doom 3 Highest Quality, here I come.

It’s 2:15 am.

I hear this strange beeping.

Beep.

Moments pass.

Beep.

Maybe I’m just dreaming. Maybe it’s just the wind.

Beep.

It doesn’t sound often enough for me to be able to place it in the house. However, the rate at which it is occurring is enough to keep me from falling back to sleep.

Beep.

Fine.

I hate having to get out of bed in the middle of the night to find some stupid noise.

It’s not the iPAQ. Oh, I know what it is. It’s my phone. The battery is low.

Considering I have to be up in a little bit, I guess it’s a good idea to charge it and hopefully it will be ready to use by the time I go to work. I love my new phone, but the battery life is only several hours of usage and a day and a half of stand-bye. Oh well, time to head back to bed and hopefully I can get a little more sleep before I had to get up.

Couldn’t sleep; my brain has been chewing over the idea of a low battery. I think my internal battery has been beeping for a while and I’ve just chosen to ignore it. I think those around me can hear it though. It’s there in the tone of my voice, my sometimes strange shortness at times. I can feel spring around the corner so I’m biding my time until then. But for now, I need a quick plug in to get me through until I can recharge fully.

It’s time for a day off.

So, I think tomorrow I’m going to use some of that store up time off at the university and call in. One of the wonderful things about the university is that they give you vacation time and personal time. Note that they call it personal time. It’s not sick time, it’s yours to use as you see fit, no doctors note required.

I need some personal time to do nothing, catch up on my missed Stargates and just relax.

No man is a machine (even though I would like to believe that I am), and we cannot go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for long without breaking down. I know I’m not alone. Many of us have jobs, families, school work, second jobs, church obligations and a hundred other things. So listen carefully. If you hear that low battery warning its time to put in the plug and spend a few minutes recharging. I’ll catch you all later.

My buddy Tom Flammer asked me to slap him together a quick phpBB template for his new store site, Clems Collectibles in Lansing. So here is what I played with today:

I think I ended up linking the last one the most. Hopefully Tom will agree. I added that to a matching blue blackground and it really pops. You can see the work in progress if you click on the Clem’s link. Now I just have to do all the innards to pull those same colors into the rest of his theme.

Sticking in the same line of doing side design, I’ll be working with Regan to come up with a new template for “Pulling Weeds” and hopefully soon I will be flying down to Florida to work with my buddy Shane on a new site for their church. So looks like I need to take the time now and clean up my own site so I can devote my attention to working with them.

I don’t dream often, but when I do man, sometimes they can be strange.

I woke up early this morning with a strange one still floating around in puddles of cerebral fluid. The beginning is foggy but the end is very sharp; I was racing up a snow covered mountain flanked by huge pine trees. One of them had fallen and I was climbing over the branches like a ladder on ground while being chased by a Tyrannosaurs Rex, but it looked more like a cross between John Travolta and George Clooney, and he was big and green and I think wearing a tux.

What does it all mean? I have no idea, I’m not channeling the spirit of Freud or Joseph, it’s a mystery to me. But what did strike me how often we dream the same dreams at various points in our lives. I can recall having the same dream over numerous times growing up. You know the one where you are inside your house and there is a giant monster (like Godzilla size) outside looking in the windows for you and you’re hiding trying not to be seen.

Or one of my favorite ones, the falling down an endless stair well, or where you flap your arms hard enough that you start to fly.

I have to believe that dreams having means. They are our subconscious mind expressing our internal fears. Biblically dreams had means and often God used them to communicate to his followers (when angels were busy else where). So as I woke from my dream I started talking to God and in my surreal half awake state about what he was trying to tell me, to understand what it was that I was feeling or thinking in my inner places and honestly, I still don’t have an answer.

Maybe there isn’t one.

I know that I’ve written a lot over the past few months about being in a state of waiting. The good news is that the first step was taken this week to help get me out of this spot. While the answer might not be what I hope for, at least it is a step in a direction. I’m praying that God will reveal the answers to me soon (like this week or next week – probably too much to hope for). But I’ll keep you posted and reveal it all soon, but for now you’ll just have to wait like the rest of us.

“You’re kidding me right?”

“No sir, we only take cash or checks.”

“Isn’t it bad enough that my clothes are dry clean only, and now the dry cleaners only takes cash or checks?”

Sure enough, Troy Cleaners on St. Joe Center only takes cash. How odd is that? I mean honestly I never carry cash, never. I might have quarters floating around in the Element, and some times I’ll get fin out of the ATM at the newspaper to snag some chocolate milk, but everything else goes right on the old bank card.

In an era when you can slap down plastic to get your cheese burger and my check book is on check 27 after 4 years, I was totally taken aback that a business in today’s world could function without taking credit cards. Heck as an independent web designer, I took credit cards. Who knew?