When Video Cards Go KABLOOIE
Not quite sure how this happened (click to enlarge):
My sister’s PC stopped powering up last week. Upon opening it up and yanking everything, I came across the video card and its FIVE blown capacitors.
Guess it’s time to get my RMA on.
Ptiew Ptiew!
So, Friday morning I got myself las0red. I’ve worn eyeglasses and contact lenses since I was about thirteen, and my visual acuity has been stable for nigh ten years, so I went ahead with it. My ophthalmologist felt I was a good candidate, and I trust him, so there you go.
The procedure itself was pretty painless; you kinda just sit there and watch as weird things happen in your (blurry) field of vision, including things being folded out of the way and a cool laser-light show. The procedure I opted for uses a newer version of Lasik called Zyoptix, which removes 20-30% less corneal material for the same improvement in vision, and works on a larger surface area of the cornea to mitigate the risk of so-called ‘haloing’ in your night vision. There are also improved safety mechanism built into the procedure as well.
The most annoying thing with the whole thing has been dealing with the eyedrops, really, and having to wear these super lame-o sunglasses whenever I’m outside the house, day or night. Oh well. I’ve been updating via Twitter but at this point I’ve more-or-less gotten past the point where I’m putting in drops every hour.
No x-ray vision or ability to destroy mankind via laserbeam vision yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
Theme Change
I’ve changed the site to use the excellent Statement theme from BlogOhBlog!; I intend to make a few changes to it (well, I already have, but there’s more to come). Let me know what you think so far in the comments below.
Some changes that remain to be made include figuring out how to get all my links to show up and how to get the categories/subcategories in a nested list, as they should be; additionally, I think I’ll use a little more space for the main entries and pare down the sidebar a little. The social networks at the top right need to be tweaked a little as well.
Thanks for your patience during the, er, renovations.
The Ides Of August Update
I’ve been kinda off-the-radar here lately due to a whole lotta life going on. As I mentioned previously, I’m quite involved with an outdoors club at school and due to some rather, er, abrupt changeover of the executive (of which I’m a part), it’s been taking up a lot of my free time. But that’s not really a bad thing, as it’s been a blast so far participating and organizing fun activities, as well as meeting tons of cool new people.
So let’s see now… what’s new?
Well, I guess the easiest to remember is… new gear!
You might notice that at the top right of this site there’s a funny little box called "My Zune Card", which links to my profile on the Zune Social. I bought an 80GB Microsoft Zune a little while back and I love it. It’s a really neat combination of a great hardware platform (the MP3 player itself), software platform (the Zune software has become my media player of choice) and social networking. Last.fm did a good job of this last facet, but integrating it with hardware as well as a marketplace (coming soon to Canada, available now in the US) takes it to the next logical level.
Having sold my old laptop (I’ll miss you, li’l buddy), I’ve replaced it with a Lenovo Thinkpad X61. It’s a tiny little thing, 12.1" screen, and built like a little tank. I’ve always loved ThinkPads for their ruggedness and reliability. It’s a fine machine, despite some problems I was having with wireless networking. I suspect the problem is due to the Access Connections Manager software that tries to manage your networking — specifically, it seems to have a little trouble dealing with DHCP. Having given the PC a fixed IP both in my router and in a custom Access Connections location profile, the link to my home network has been rock solid. I’ve had it about a week now and will give a full review at a later date.
Also, I’ve now set up a profile at Twitter. I’m not quite sure why. I think it’s one of those services that’s meant for people that are obsessive-compulsive about changing their Facebook status updates — which, in fact, I have linked to my ‘tweets’. I’m looking into setting up a little widget that will show that on this site as well; maybe Jaiku. Their account are currently by invite only, so we’ll see how that turns out. I’m also playing around with a new theme because, as much as I like this one, it’s a little too common around the net.
I’ve got some other news and reviews as well, but I’ll leave that for another post.
