start of the second verse

I mentioned awhile back that I was having the persistent, low-grade headaches. Dropping caffeine didn't fix the problem, turned out I really needed new glasses! So, now I have them, and all is well.

Thanks to everyone for the advice & encouragement. :)

So, tsaiko is away and I have two days off from work. Oh noes, whatever shall I do! .... :)

Alas, the non-fun answer is that I'm going to cold-turkey off the coffee. I've been getting persistent low-grade headaches, and I'm 99% sure they're linked to caffeine. If it's like the past, then I can 'reset' things by abstaining for 3-4 days, then go back to drinking it. We shall see! I've preemptively taken an alieve with my breakfast this morning, 'cause the withdrawal headaches are definitely incoming. Boy, I'm going to be a joy to be around today. ;-)

Now, I'm off to PetSmart to get litter for the kitties. Hopefully going in the morning means there won't be too many dogs there? Last time I went there was a very aggressive dog in the entryway, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. Do not waaaant.

10.6 is treating me fine, but my hardware is not doing well. :( The wireless card is getting worse, it now shuts off even when its not hot. Forgive some overuse of emoticons, but ... :( :( :( ;_;

So, I spent this morning looking at my options. I could get a wireless usb adapter for about $40, that would allow me to limp along for awhile longer.

If I went with a new laptop, I'd want to stay with a 17" screen. Expensive, but extremely useful. I'm always irritated when I have to switch to use the 15" screen on my work laptop. ( I usually have it hooked up to an external lcd, so this is not a day-to-day problem. )

Given the choice between the Intel Core i5 and i7, definitely the i5. Sounds like i7 has all the problem my current Core Duo has. :( :( :( If I went refurb I could get a Core 2 Duo for slightly less, but I think the i5 is worth it.

I'd want to go ahead and max out the mem to 8GB. It looks like Apple's prices for their mem is, for once, reasonable.

For harddrives, while I would like a solid-state drive, Apple's offerings don't have a good rep for performance. I would want an IBM X25-M. Looks like a 160GB drive is available for ~$400, 80GB for ~$200. For installation, I could:
- install it in place of the standard disk, keep that as a spare
- install is as the system disk, and install the standard disk in the optical bay, like Eric Cheng has done
- get two, and do a striped array, as Eric Cheng has also done. haha, ok, that's way too expensive. But how awesome!

I've had this laptop for five years, I think. What do you think folks, repair or replace?

Last night, I finally upgraded to snow leopard. Re-installed, really, I never trust an OS upgrade process. I'm hoping this allows me to eke out better performance, especially flash apps. Unfortunately I have a model that's known for overheating really badly, and when it does it causes the wireless card to flake out. During the backup of files, I found it also causes hard drive problems! Super, super fun. Luckily allowing it to cool off fixed that. I've never replaced a hard drive in this model before, although I understand it to be possible.

Now, to reload all my apps, and download Portal! :-D You've probably seen it a dozen places now, but portal is available until May 24th free. And there's a mac version. ♥

[EDIT]: Here's my todo, will update as I think of things. I'm open to suggestions!

• OS Software updates - done


• Firefox & No-script - done


• Thunderbird & configure - done


• xcode - wow apple, could this website be any worse? Finally gave up and installed from cd. done.
  
• wget - done


• Pandora app - couldn't download, site issue? succeeded on retry. done


• Portal - downloading in Steam


• Fluid, campfire & gmail configs


• Plants vs. Zombies


• Back up again

I keep meaning to pimp Pod Castle, since I've found a few good short stories there. The audio quality overall is quite nice, I think there's been only one that I had real trouble with. If you like weird fantasy, this might be your thing. I like to listen to them while I play games on the computer, or on long car trips.

I want to keep track of which ones I think my mother would like, so I can rec them to her. In the spirit of that, this one was pretty neat.

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Kristin with Caprice
Rated PG For Goats That Will Eat Pretty Much Anything You Can Think Up.

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Random thought:

How would Xxholic and Young Avengers change if Billy and Watanuki were swapped, AU, they've-always-been-there style?

I'm thinking, Xxholic would have 100% less tasty food, and YA would have 100% less sparkly blue light. Otherwise, it's pretty much a wash. Or maybe I like the thought of Billy suffering an apprenticeship to Yuuko a little too much.

I've been wanting to try one of the no-knead bread recipes, but they all seem to call for baking the bread inside a clay pot in the oven. I'm not up for that! However, the LifeHack.org no-knead ciabatta bread seems do-able. I may try it!

I haven't made bread for awhile. When I did it regularly , I used a bread machine. It always came out too crumbly for sandwiches, which I guess means it's under-kneaded? I could take the dough out and knead it by hand, but they why have a bread machine? (answer - so I'll stop burning the loaves, lol). You can also make it less crumbly by upping the gluten. I'm already using bread flour, which has high gluten content, but maybe I should start adding vital gluten as well. ( seems like cheating, but at this point I'll gladly cheat to make some better bread.)

EDIT: ack, my dw style has links in the exact same font as regular text. must fix!
EDIT2: done, much better. Turns out regular links are ok, but visited links are set to the font-color as regular text. I put in some css to bold all links in entry content, hopefully that won't screw up anything in the rest of the style.

EDIT3: One of the folks on food porn tried it and said it wasn't very tasty. Maybe I'll go with my old standby, which is the below minus the cheese.

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It's hard to start a post when I've been away so long ....


Anyway, it's time to leave LiveJournal. If you haven't heard about LiveJournal snooping your outgoing links through a third party, please read that.