day of the $115

By coincidence I spent $115 today both at work and when I got off work. The work one was buying 600' of Teflon-insulated wire for the Mk. V circuit I've been building. Since I was the one ordering it I got to pick the colors, so I went with gray orange gray. (Bonus points for getting that reference.) For the Mk. IV circuit I got stuck with red and yellow, so it looks like a condiment bar.

When I got off work I went down to Best Buy and got a new car stereo. The old stereo may have been reparable, but I decided $115 installed is not a bad deal. Especially for a stereo that actually has a knob and a front auxiliary jack.

On an unrelated note, as I was coming back from Best Buy I saw an H2 on the road equipped with FLIR on a telescopic mast. I have no idea what that's about but it was kind of cool.

what

As not a hell of a lot is going on this evening, I googled myself, and I actually got a bit of a shock this time. Apparently I've been credited in a powerpoint presentation by a Polish materials engineer. This was in regards to my work on nanostructured copper in Tallahassee. I hardly broke new ground but I guess I do a good job explaining the fundamentals of things.

watching wind scalp the white off the waves

All of the clocks in my apartment are wrong. This is made more annoying by the fact that two of them are atomic and one is internet-updated. The atomic ones are wrong because they are actually just 'atomic' clocks, i.e. they get a radio signal from a real atomic clock. Which never gets picked up in my apartment. Meanwhile the clock in my computer's system tray is supposed to update itself by talking to NIST, but some firewall or other miscommunication issue means it never ever works. To add insult to injury, my car's clock runs fast. Also the CD player broke. I'm fairly certain St. Joseph wasn't even involved this time.

In other news the hard drive transplant has taken so far, and I have a red stapler.

Other news in brief: Apparently the G6 is getting a new variant next year but will be more about looks than getting more power. Bush is an idiot (OFN), this time for suggesting we shouldn't have left Vietnam. The new Katamari demo's framerate makes it feel like the game is being played on fast forward.

swiss time is running out

Best Buy had a ridiculous sale on some different Norton software so I picked it up. Unlike Norton 360, it's what I actually expected from the beginning. Unfortunately, not all of the stupid little 360 plugins got uninstalled. I could occupy myself chasing them all down, or finally getting around to the reformat Freeman so badly needs, but instead I have decided to get a new notebook hard drive with twice the storage space, which isn't even going to cost me $120 because I went to Newegg.

I have also been picking which parts I want in the new computer, and it's kind of amazing how useless Best Buy is in this endeavor. It's not just that their prices are way higher - they don't even have some of the upper tier tech I'm after. They didn't have the 160GB Western Digital notebook hard drive, for example. Fortunately Newegg is a good source and will even store the list of parts for later. So I can see all the parts come to about $1600. I'm going to wait a few paychecks. In the meantime I should be able to occupy myself with Freeman's HDD transplant.

but i was haunted by the idea that i remembered her wrong

I have been saving up a list of things to get on Amazon.com but when I tried to order them I failed miserably. I was going to get a bunch more Tribune daily crossword books but all the old ones I don't have are out of print, and somehow I don't fancy a used one. I was also going to break down and get the final part of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio plays after several years of wanting it, but it turns out it hasn't been released yet.

never trust robots

Norton 360 is really dumbed down. It won't tell me anything it's been doing. I have to go three or four screens deep just for it to tell me how many files it's been messing with.

Even more annoying is how it demands it be turned on 100%. I like having the firewall and antivirus but the stupid browser plugin crashes IE and all it does is detect phishing scams, which I can do myself because I'm not an idiot. Norton also demands Automatic Updates be turned on, but I prefer doing the updates manually.

if you're not a machine we're in business

I got fed up with Kaspersky and bought Norton 360. Unfortunately Norton has dumbed down their interface a lot since I last upgraded. At least I can find a screen that calls the firewall a firewall instead of 'Anti-Hacker'. The old stuff was better. I only stopped using the old Norton software because Symantec sabotaged it after they realized you could gimmick it to not require renewal for updates.

The most interesting part was installation. I decided to install Norton without first removing Kaspersky so I wouldn't go without a firewall, and also just to see if Norton and Kaspersky would pick a fight with each other. Norton mostly minded its own business, but Kaspersky decided Norton was a trojan.

The security swap has added to my computer's instability, however. Some Norton plugin now crashes IE every time I close it, producing no fewer than 21 popup dialogs about memory read errors. I am putting off a reformat until I build my new machine. That's going to require like $1600 in parts though.

Also among today's spoils are Lego gummis. I couldn't pass that up.

On another note I am annoyed at my cell phone's adaptive text prompts. It learns words if you type them in manually, but it apparently deletes them if they haven't been used in a while. This usually comes up in the context of swear words.