You (Almost) Can't Have It - 21 May 2021 - Plague Journal Day 435

Micah 6:8
Psalm 37:1-4
Yes, your life matters.

We all are still sheltering in place, but I'm here to keep you sane and entertained.
One could hardly ask for much more than that, now could one?

My computer is getting old. It started with Windows XP, upgraded to Windows 7, then over to Windows 10. It's starting to show its age with its fairly ancient Athlon 4-core processor and massive(!) 4GB of RAM. So, I'm looking at what's out there for my next build (yes, I build my own machines - always have since my first 80486 tower), and it's a bit frustrating.

I don't want all that much, but what I want is what I want, and it looks like the industry thinks I'm wrong. (By the way, shout out to Mr. Twiddy for singing that song to his High School Biology class.)

I want a 6 or 8 core Ryzen with 16GB of RAM - that's no problem. I want Gb Ethernet - again no problem. I just want a decent video card - that's a bit problematic, as everything is more powerful than I need, more expensive than I'd like, and nearly unavailable anyway (curses on you, crypto-miners!).

But the hardest part - and this is crazy to me - is finding a reasonable case (mid-tower) that allows for an optical drive. I know things are available for download - I do that too - but I have lots of things on DVDs, and I actually burn discs fairly regularly, both audio and video. I guess I'm a dinosaur, but I think having a physical copy of things that I've purchased seems a reasonable hedge against internet outages and suppliers' going out of business.

It's not impossible to find, but good grief it's been difficult. Sheer lunacy if you ask me.

By the way, today is Gotye's birthday (you used to know him). Enjoy! (this one is even cooler)

Keep Calm and Stay Away.
I'll be back tomorrow.
The mental health issues related to our lockdown and the pandemic are especially hard for people with depression. NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, has a 24 hour helpline: 800-950-6264.

Some Current Projects

(from grandteuton.blogspot.com)

I'm working on a few things right now.  As I've finally gotten my great-great-grandfather's book published to Amazon (as noted here in a recent post), my thoughts are still largely in the literary vein.

• First, it's nearly November, and November brings National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)!  So, it's back to my in progress second novel, which I really plan to finish this year (as I have for the past few).  [I'm also wondering about getting my first novel up on Amazon, but that's something to think about later.]
• Next, apart from that writing, I'm also getting back to the revision of my Mass setting.  I really like much of it, but there are a few movements that just don't quite work yet, and I think I need to revise some of the accompaniment as well.  It's for small mixed  chorus, soloists, and organ.
• I'm also working on a cookbook - well, actually I'm working on two cookbooks right now:

1. I'm scanning and transcribing my Grandma's handwritten recipes from the [handmade!] cookbook her brother made for her as a wedding present; and
2. I'm compiling my favourite  original dishes, along with stories of their creation (or other happy occurrences related to their eating).

• A tedious (but likely useful) project is upgrading our computers to Windows 7 from XP.  The bad part is that it's not a direct upgrage - I have to back up the documents and reinstall all the applications.  The good part is that they should all be happier and run faster (and the disks will be cleaner, too!).  Microsoft seems to have done a good job with the latest version of Windows, and by offering the family pack - 3 users for less than the price of two - they're likely to get a lot of people going legal. (Not that anyone ever installed the same copy of Windows on more than one machine ....)  Well done Steve and company.

My new computer

is almost fully loaded.
(from grandteuton.blogspot.com)

Oh, it's running just fine, but I haven't had the time to finish loading all the software that I use, and it's still on the road to an upgrade to Windows 7 in the near future.  It's pretty darned nice, though.

4GB of RAM (DDR3 stuff at that), a Western Digital 1TB HDD, AMD Athlon II X4 (quad core) CPU, Biostar AM3 MB, a nice 24-bit SoundBlaster card, an old (extra) gForce video card, and a fun case with a nice orange accent.

I have more room on this machine than we had on all the other drives in the house combined - it's amazing how drives have grown over the years.  The first machine I used with a hard drive had a massive 5MB drive.  This one has a 1TB drive, that's 200,000 of those huge 5MB jobs packed into a space that's actually smaller than the old 5.25" Winchesters.

Pretty cool.  It will keep my techno-lust at bay for a while.