I would like to take this time to plug my brother’s vacation blog. Check it out.
I would like to take this time to plug my brother’s vacation blog. Check it out.
There are people whose thought processes resemble trains. I’m not one of those people. If I had to take a guess, mine is more of an amoeba of thought, with data pseudopods going every which way until I decide something is interesting and then just go that way. Of course, all this occurs silently, in my head until I decide to say something which may appear to be non sequitur, but trust me, it makes sense.
So videogame flick The Wizard is coming to DVD this August, relevant to me because of all the video games. So I check out IMDB to see what the cast is up to.
Of note, sidekick girl is now a musician. She’s Jenny Lewis and reminds me of a breathy Aimee Mann, at least, on the two songs I heard. I’ll do more uh, research and see if her album with the Watson Twins merits a purchase.
Like the following:
Stir, and you get what’s known in Brooklyn as an “Egg Cream.” Mine end up resembling fizzy Yoo-Hoos with a superior flavor. That and they don’t have the rest of the stuff that’s in a Yoo-Hoo.
Is a movie based on a musical based on a movie which centers around a fictional play named “Springtime for Hitler.” Got it?
The movie came out Christmas of last year, and if you didn’t see it, you missed something special. You can rectify that by picking up the DVD at your local retailer. I managed to see it Christmas Day and it was good fun for everyone in the theatre. All eight of us.
It’s a Mel Brooks comedy, but it is also a love letter to the movie musicals of bygone eras. You’re looking at dance numbers, dress changes for no apparent reason, fancy lighting, and people bursting into song at the appropriate moments.
Not a dry minute, either.
When a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of. . . Building a new machine.
I have no idea what I would do with it. I started out thinking about just upgrading the motherboard, processor and video card.
But then I thought, “Well, then I’d have this perfectly good motherboard, processor and video card not doing anything.”
Then I priced a case. Then I remembered I had a gigabyte of spare RAM laying around. And a hard drive. So I priced a DVD-Rom drive, because they’re really cheap nowadays.
At some psychological root level, I just want to build one.
I enjoy building machines because it is something physical, something tangible. I have spent over two decades shifting bits, tiny ones and zeros. Insignificant and yet immeasurably significant to our daily lives.
I have seen it come full circle in terms of transferring information. I used to bring plastic magnetized disks to a friend’s house. After that, it was dialing up to an electronic bulletin board. Suddenly it was over wires to a server. Then the wires were gone.
Now, I carry it around on a disk no bigger than a stick of gum that I bring over to my friend’s house.
On off on off. It’s so silly and incomprehensible and magical at the same time.
I do not even pretend to understand how it all works—I merely believe.
Which is why I enjoy building new machines. It is a time to ground myself and put all the parts together. It’s a time to set master slave, to connect a power source, to firmly seat RAM, to connect wires, to screw a motherboard into a case with brass fittings (although not necessarily in that order) and finally end up with a computer that boots up and passes POST.
At the end of every workday I produce no tangible “product.” For me, producing a physical manifestation of my trade is very satisfying.
That, and it can serve as a home theater PC.
That would be totally awesome.