Everything In Between

Yesterday was much better than the past couple of days, and today is turning out to be truly awesome.

• I was still angry with Danica when she came home, so few words were exchanged at first. Some time later, she went to the kitchen (omg, we have a kitchen) and ate some leftover Thai for food for dinner. That’s when I stopped fiddling with my computers and came to join her.

  We spoke a little, hugged, played Race (an Israeli card game), and generally felt better. I’m not really sure if we’ve resolved to “not fight” anymore, but there is certainly less emotional pollution in the air right now. That, if nothing else, makes my day.

• I didn’t go to sleep last night. Instead, I finished inspecting the other PC I have. This is the lower-end machine, so instead of merely look at the data, I actually took the whole thing apart and took out the CD-ROM drive, the floppy disk drive, some PCI cards, and disconnected the power supply. Yes, I was like a kid in a candy store.

  This may sound odd to some of you (it sure does to me), but I’ve rarely ever seen the inside of a computer before. So this was really a lot of fun to do. I had my trusty power tool so screwing and unscrewing various parts was a snap. If I could, I would have literally opened up the CD-ROM drive to see what it looks like in there, but I didn’t have the right tools.

  I went out to Radio Shack, the hardware store, and various other locales around my neighborhood when it turned to morning and after I had fetched Danica her morning pastries and latè, but no store had the right sort of screwdrivers. I tried my best to open the small CD-ROM screws with one of those eyeglass repair kits with the little screwdriver but I only succeeded in hurting my hands.

  I did, however, buy myself a Linksys Fast Ethernet NIC for the PC which didn’t have an RJ-45 port. I installed it on the PCI slot in the motherboard myself, screwed it in place and am currently sitting next to the open computer. I spent a good deal of time cleaning the innards with a can of compressed air and rubbing the casing down with paper towels. Hopefully that’ll do some good.

• I’m finally installing Fedora Core 3, the Linux distro that was most often suggested to me to try first. I’m actually paging through the installer as I write this, which is incredibly exciting. I didn’t even finish setting up my workspace, but it’s really just about damn time I had a Linux box. I plan on installing one other Linux distro one of my two remaining PCs, and probably FreeBSD on the other because it’s what Mac OS X was “based on,” or so they say.

  Oh yeah. And Danica’s excellent music collection is playing off of her computer on my speakers. It’s awesome stuff. Really it is.