Improvisations on Reality

Today I went to J&R to see Euge Groove demonstrate Beamz Interactive, which is – no joke – one of the coolest pieces of technology that I’ve seen to date. It looks like a plastic/electronic version of Poseidon’s tripod, and in reality is a photocell-and-laser activated play-along/DJ system. Euge demonstrated it by breaking down his own tracks on a demo computer, and demonstrated how to work the various composite pieces of the track by hand movements. A flick of the finger will activate a single instrument track and keeping it there keeps the track playing, a swipe will turn that track on or completely off, and it has every possibility of being used akin to a DJ turntable.

My inner geek was happy like you wouldn’t believe. Seriously, wow.

Now, I had a day off yesterday, and did what I always do: get to walking!

I was originally going to head out to Philadelphia to hang with my ladies and see Boney James, but I was recovering from a case of pinkeye. Of all the times for me to get pinkeye, that had to be the absolute worst. Moreover, why now? I wore contact lenses for seven years without any issues whatsoever and now – hello, good morning. I’m grateful to whoever invented organic and antibiotic eyedrops.

But I digress.

My walk took me to Long Beach, the part of Long Island I love the most thanks to its 4-mile-long boardwalk, clean beach, and cheap-but-awesome diners. Two hours of baking in the sun and doing a full walking round on the boardwalk is my idea of heaven. And by the by, the shape-ups? They work. I felt like I did those two hours on the Stairmaster.

After this, I stopped by Queens to do some more walking there. That lasted two more hours, after which I hunkered down and buried my nose in the Kindle…and when I got up, I realized that having a facsimile of four hours on a piece of cardio equipment is not at all a good idea.

Whoops. Overkill.

No worries, though, because despite the aftereffects, it was truly a lovely Day Off. I got to decompress and relax, catch some sunlight, hear music, hang with friends, and generally relax. This doesn’t happen often.

In better news, because of the season, I can think of a few gorgeous NY neighborhoods (an *ahem* to a reader of this blog, you know who you are!!) that look stunning with the foliage turning colors. Before I go a-cruising, I will go a-photographing. :)

Wanderingly yours,

K.G.

Okay, technologically, my luck is a bit low.

Who’s got a spare charging adapter for a Powerbook G4?

I did some window-shopping and seriously weighed my technical options, as well as those accessible to me by finances.

I already set up my old desktop as my main machine. My music collection is stored on a remote drive, and backed up in multiple mediums. So I’m not worried about that, and my desktop’s RAM is the only issue. It ain’t cheap, so I’ll happily invest in one chip a month until I max out the 4GB capacity on the mobo. That’s enough muscle, and is Step 1.

Step 2: free up the hard drive on that comp. It is a 5-year-old machine and is SEVERELY cluttered. I have no idea how much crap collected on it over the years, and I’m sure I have program artifact on there that I don’t need or use anymore. Time to 86 the deadweight.

Step 3: Back to the RAM…for the Mac. Which is half the price of the Beast machine and why that is, I don’t know and am not particular to. The Mac is in solid shape, and can do some serious muscling if I do some cleaning and updating. It definitely needs more RAM, and it’s much cheaper to upgrade that, keep it running until that keels over, and then trade it in with an upgrading purchase, if such is possible.

Step 4: Keep the Dell breathing for as long as possible. If it doesn’t have another BSOD incident, I can take a nice deep breath and keep using it until I can use it no more. I will not replace it unless I have to, but if I will, it will certainly be with a Netbook. A Netbook as it is right now has comparable chops to my Dell and is literally half the size and weight. It is adorable and can muscle everything and then some. And, for a computer, it’s CHEAP.

My thing is, of course, finances. I have things I’d like to invest into that are not at all computer-related, and a new computer is NOT in my budget at the moment. So for now, I will maintain what I have, work with what I have, and MAYBE I will acquire something I would like when time comes along for it.

But damn, is it scary when a machine that took 3 hard-drive formats without a blink suddenly kicks you a BSOD over an external HD removal. *shudder*

K.G.

If you didn’t know this about me, I will say it now – loud and proud: I am a computer geek.

I can fix ‘em (and I do as a freelance technician, quite often), I can build ‘em, I can design ‘em. And it makes my heart sing to do it, from time to time.

So, in light of the BSOD incident on my beloved Dell, which I could have sworn would’ve gone on much longer, up until that, I got online today to, basically, hunt.

A replacement for my computer would run me approximately $1,300. Seems obscene? Not really; I souped that thing up, so not only would it haul like a mule, it would do so over a 7-hour flight without keeling over. The thing is, it’s not something I can afford to do at the present time.

However, what I can afford to do is do some surgery on my beloved Dell to either sustain it, or soup it further than I’ve souped it when I first acquired it. I have a bad habit when it comes to machines: I push them to their absolute limit….as evidenced by my equally beloved Mac nearly crashing when I worked on my newest show flyer. That was something new; the Mac is actually less equipped than the Dell, but hauled Photoshop with grace and ease, right until that moment. Then again, I can’t think of any program that would manage to work on a 190MB multilayer.

I digress, though. What I need, first and foremost, is to upgrade my RAM. The hard drive replacement is easy as pie, and considering that the hard drive I got back then was a pitiful 80GB, it’ll be extremely beneficial to get it anew. The problem is…try finding a brand. Hitachi I had as an external, and it hauled for a lovely 2 years before its power supply bit the dust. I now have a basic passport drive by Sony (I think…) and it’d handling just dandy. My current internal laptop hard drive is by Toshiba, and 4 years is apparently the standard life.

The Dell I want to hold onto for sentimental reasons as well: I wrote all my books on this computer, and there’s something very comforting about it. It survived my experiments with Windows Vista; it hauled like a mule when I downgraded and formatted the HD, it survived any and all experiments I ever threw at it. To suddenly lose it because of a flimsy hard drive? Nope. Not gonna happen.

So, on the menu is now to find out how much RAM it will hold, then swap that out. All the data was backed up already, and the backup drive lovingly maintained, so I’m solid on that account; and can migrate to my Big Computer at a second’s notice. Then, swap out the hard drive and reinstall everything, which, come to think of it, is the easy part. And then, add some more RAM to my Mac. Because that thing is obligated to haul Photoshop, 190MB file or not.

And so, ladies and gentlemen of my readership, welcome to my inner geek. :)

K.G.