Geekin’ so hard it hurts

A little warning: consider this a data dump, like pretty_dump_array or something. This is gonna be ugly and self-indulgent. My fingers can’t type, my brain can’t think, and my bones can’t stay together very well at all. About the only thing that’s working well around here are my computers, of which I have four, now. At work I have finally shelved the eMachine, which was a horrid little beast from hell that crashed repeatedly every morning until I poured coffee into it. We love the eMachine in that we hate the eMachine, in that it’s like in-laws or something where you don’t know what the hell you would do with your life if you didn’t have to visit them every weekend, because without those visits and awkward smells what would you complain about all week?

The eMachine wasn’t all that bad. It had an 800MHz Intel Celeron processor and 128MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 384MB with sticks I found in a junk drawer in our hot and sweaty server room. If sex is gonna break out anywhere at our shop, it’s gonna break out in that server room. Anyways. The onboard graphics card on the eMachine was so bad I was going blind… either from that or other reasons. Regardless, I upgraded it with a 16MB SVGA card I found in the closet. Perfect.

But the eMachine had personal demons that haunted its dreams and it would often find itself locked in infinite boot/reboot cycles. I drew the line when it started spontaneously rebooting when I was in the middle of work, so two weeks ago Jody drove me home so I could pick up my personal computer and bring it to work. It was like “Take your ingrateful children to work” Day without the screaming and boredom. And lemme tell ya, the kids didn’t have a very good day of it, either!

My home computer is (actually, was) as follows: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ 2.0GHz processor, MSI KT3-Ultra motherboard, 768MB Crucial PC2700 DDR RAM, 32MB GeForce2 MX graphics card, 80GB ATA-100 Maxtor hard drive, 3 port FireWire card, 2 USB 1.1 and 2 USB 2.0 ports, 802.11g wireless network card, SBLive Platinum soundcard with a LiveDrive that doesn’t work and is more for looks than anything else, 52X CD-ROM that sucks, and a TDK CD-RW that sucks so much balls it’s useless and chokes whenever I try to burn a CD. Oh, and it’s got a sexy blue paint job, too. And its name is Nonsense.

Last week the parts for my new computer at work arrived, and with Nonsense chugging away beside I started pulling together the pieces for Tribute. Tribute is not the greatest computer in the world, which was actually the eMachine and nothing like Tribute. Tribute is merely a Tribute to the eMachine, which, as soon as this leg heals, is going out to the cinder pits to get the crap shot out of it.

Tribute is as follows: AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8GHz processor, MSI A7N2 Delta-L motherboard with the nForce2 chipset and 333MHz frontside bus, 512MB Crucial PC2700 DRR RAM, 64MB MSI GeForce4 graphics card, 80GB Maxtor ATA-133 7200RPM hard drive, 4 USB 2.0 ports, DVD-ROM, onboard sound and onboard ethernet.

Nonsense and Tribute spent a good portion of last week together throwing files back and forth, mostly forth. Though the computers were right next to each other, Tribute had to suck data through our shop’s microwave ethernet connection while Nonsense channeled its guts through our wireless network. It was a roundabout way of transferring files, but it worked all the same. I haven’t even attempted to pull files off the eMachine, and if it comes down to it, I don’t wanna if I don’t have to. Too much poop in that soup.

Last Friday the remaining parts for my new personal computer showed up, and with Tribute finally on its feet I got to bring Nonsense home to piece together Foofaraw. Foofaraw is as follows: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.83GHZ processor (though that doesn’t sound much different from the 2400+ or even the 2200+, the 2500+ has the Barton core with a 333MHz bus and 512K cache), MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR motherboard (notice a pattern, here?), 1024MB Crucial PC2700 DDR RAM, 128MB DDR ATI Radeon 9600XT graphics card, 120GB Western Digital 7200RPM SATA hard drive, black Samsung DVD-ROM, black Samsung CD-RW, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 2 FireWire ports, onboard ethernet, onboard sound, 802.11g wireless network card, and a 3.5″ black floppy drive with built-in slots for flash/smart media.

It also has a sexy black paint job and the front panel lights up blue and there’s a plexiglass window on the side with an awesome swirl design and a fan that lights up red and six other fans and a 420W power supply. And its name is Foofaraw. And did I mention that it’s black?

Ahem… originally I had written more. I had written much more about what it was really like to geek out this much, and how much I hate Microsoft Outlook, absolutely abhor Microsoft Outlook, but then that fucking paperclip popped up and I tried to close his ass but instead closed the browser window where I was typing. Lost nearly half of what I had been writing. Things like that make me lose my will to live, so I’m gonna take a lot of pills and bleed myself to sleep.