jc

I was planning on posting my first annual Valentine's Day LJ Rant yesterday, but I think lightningbaron covered it pretty well. I'm not bitter. Honest. Really. Uhm.

Currently watching an autopsy on a severed body part which was found inside a caught shark on CSI: Miami. Seems that five did good to displace CSI from its Saturday 9pm slot to Tuesdays in favour of its new import, as Miami pulled in an impressive 3.3m viewers for its first screening, while CSI retained 2.2m viewers on the Tuesday night. Now we just need Law & Order: Criminal Intent and L&O: Special Victims Unit, and I'm all set.

The folks are away at the cottage for the weekend, which leaves me with the flat to myself. What worries me is not that I'm alone, but that this is the first time Mum has taken her new mobile phone with her to somewhere where I won't be around to help her out, when she can't figure out what to do with it. It's almost been a month since she was given the phone, she's had to practically be pushed into a newsagent to buy her first top-up card (which took a whole thirty seconds) and she has up until now refused to read the manual. She has it with her though, so here's hoping the absence of many distractions will spur her into trying to learn, at last.

Further to my saga on installing OS X, I decided that 160MB of RAM just wouldn't cut it in the new world, so I invested in a 256MB chip to finally replace the original 32MB chip. This involved jumping through a lot of hoops in itself, as there are so many different configurations of memory modules that, even after you figure out what type will suit your computer, you're bound to buy the wrong chip first time. Therefore, after buying a 256MB, 144-pin, PC100, SO-DIMM, SDRAM module (that's five different configuration attributes, people) and installing it, the computer accepted the chip quite happily, but only saw the first 128MB of it. This meant that with a 128MB chip in the lower slot, and a 256MB chip in the upper slot, by buying 256MB extra memory I'd increased my total memory capacity to... 256MB.

Great. I'd messed up on one of the configuration attributes, so the next day I replaced my 256MB, 144-pin, PC100, SO-DIMM, SDRAM module with a 256MB, 144-pin, PC66, SO-DIMM, SDRAM module. This slower module cost me 50% more than the original, faster one. Gotta love the logic.

I would have constant uptime on this computer were I not always installing software updates which require restarts afterwards. OS X has proved so stable (so far, touch wood) that even Winblows Media Slayer Windows Media Player managed to stream my favourite Icelandic radio station for eleven hours straight before my Internet connection died. And that was due to service upgrades at the ISP level which knocked some services off-line. Astounding.

In OS 9, the Player Slayer was so shoddy that it constantly froze all background activity while any application was in the foreground, thus rendering it unusable while attempting to run anything else. Why oh why can radio stations simply not stream MP3 instead? I can answer that myself: people generally use Microsoft stuff because it came with other Microsoft stuff. It's convenient, everybody uses it, so you should too. Sad.

And no, I'm not saying anything about today's anti-war demonstrations around the world. I want to keep this journal free of any serious political comment, if at all possible. Thank you.