Fun of all sorts, birthdaylike and computerlike
Today was a better kind of fun. I went downtown to Wasabi Bistro for ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenshiemi and damienroc's joint birthday party. There were like ninety billion people there at our table, most of whom seem to be people who fall into the category of "people I see when someone has a birthday", ie theonlymegumegu, mitsunari, wooko, islandergirlro, etc. Which is kind of a shame. Maybe I will take up Wooko on learning that new version of Risk he talked about and stuff.
Anyway, Emi had the best idea to have happy hour dinner there, since despite the main menu actually is pretty expensive, the happy hour one is pretty good and cheap! Miso for $1, california rolls for $3, 4pc sushi for $6, shrimp&veggie tempura for $5? I can deal with that... totally stuffed myself even :) I talked to some people at the table who are part of theseattlesettlers community... oddly I have been subbed to that for like a year, and I always read their "come play on Sunday" messages, but I never go. So now that they aren't all strangers, maybe I will! We'll see.
After dinner most of us retreated to Dante's Pub up on Roosevelt, where we drank and played board games. Jeff had requested a 6-player Seafarers of Catan game for his birthday, so I brought my Seafarers stuff. We played the Greater Catan scenario and added in the volcano and jungle. (Hey CMU people -- how come we used to play that for 5-6 games, you could only build in interphase if the active player had built? It doesn't look to be in the rules). I managed to cut off everyone at some point in the game except Nate, who only spent like half the game there with us anyway (he had to go pick up his girlfriend or something). I cut off Brian early on, then later cut off a space Jeff and Pete were both going for, and towards the end when Wooko wanted to work around the northeast island, I cut him off then too. He was very very angry, though he ended up going after Pete for cutting off his roads instead of me. Hee. Anyway, I won the game eventually since I had gone for the jungle and just dominated in development cards and soldiers and stuff.
After that most people went home and I played a game of Burn Rate with Emi and John and Jeff, which Jeff won, though I came in second having never played before. I think people were just nice to me or something.
Jeff came back here with me after since he was drunk and couldn't drive home. We played PP together, kinda, more like we docktarted together. Then I introduced him to Katamari Damacy, which he sat playing for the last hour and a half while I played spades with Weaver on PP and listened to the Katamari music. Hehe. He's gonna crash on the couch, and I'll drive him down to Tacoma in the afternoon
That was the good part of the weekend. The bad involves my computer.
Saturday I went out shopping a bit. Got some stuff I needed from K-Mart and Office Depot. But more importantly I went to Best Buy and picked up a new HD. I came home and installed it later in the evening... or tried to. It was a disaster. I eventually got Weaver on Skype to try to talk me through looking up the bios and all this other crap. Sigh. I had to format the drive from my other drive, then install windows on it, since my computer wouldn't recognize it. Eventually I got it all done... installed PP... and IT LAGGED EVEN WORSE! I have no idea what the heck is wrong. My computer just seems really scuppered up. This morning when I went to work with it more, I tried loading sound files off a CD and the entire system HALTED. I'm not kidding. So I wasn't sure if it was the CD drive doing it, so I unplugged that from the IDE, and no, I booted from the new hard drive and it still halted (with some "NMI Memory error", I forget exactly). Ugh. I unplugged the new hard drive, unjumpered and booted from the old, and could get it into Safe Mode. So, it seems to boot okay from the old hard drive still, not from the new, but it's just... ugh.
I am debating just scrapping the damn thing and buying a new desktop. I mean, I could get a refurb from Dell or HP for like $350 that would be twice as good as my current machine (which is 3.5 years old) anyway. If I take back the HD I bought yesterday that'll be $100 back... it's really tempting.
I'm just not a hardware person, really. I don't know if I have any friends out here who particularly want to try to fix it for me, but I'm not sure I really understand what's wrong with it at this point. I also have no idea how often people usually replace computers, though.
I wonder if there's anything useful I could do with the computer. Like donate it to some sort of Goodwill. I mean, I don't know what's wrong, but I bet parts of it are still useful for someone.
tenshiemi and damienroc's joint birthday party. There were like ninety billion people there at our table, most of whom seem to be people who fall into the category of "people I see when someone has a birthday", ie theonlymegumegu, mitsunari, wooko, islandergirlro, etc. Which is kind of a shame. Maybe I will take up Wooko on learning that new version of Risk he talked about and stuff.Anyway, Emi had the best idea to have happy hour dinner there, since despite the main menu actually is pretty expensive, the happy hour one is pretty good and cheap! Miso for $1, california rolls for $3, 4pc sushi for $6, shrimp&veggie tempura for $5? I can deal with that... totally stuffed myself even :) I talked to some people at the table who are part of the
seattlesettlers community... oddly I have been subbed to that for like a year, and I always read their "come play on Sunday" messages, but I never go. So now that they aren't all strangers, maybe I will! We'll see.After dinner most of us retreated to Dante's Pub up on Roosevelt, where we drank and played board games. Jeff had requested a 6-player Seafarers of Catan game for his birthday, so I brought my Seafarers stuff. We played the Greater Catan scenario and added in the volcano and jungle. (Hey CMU people -- how come we used to play that for 5-6 games, you could only build in interphase if the active player had built? It doesn't look to be in the rules). I managed to cut off everyone at some point in the game except Nate, who only spent like half the game there with us anyway (he had to go pick up his girlfriend or something). I cut off Brian early on, then later cut off a space Jeff and Pete were both going for, and towards the end when Wooko wanted to work around the northeast island, I cut him off then too. He was very very angry, though he ended up going after Pete for cutting off his roads instead of me. Hee. Anyway, I won the game eventually since I had gone for the jungle and just dominated in development cards and soldiers and stuff.
After that most people went home and I played a game of Burn Rate with Emi and John and Jeff, which Jeff won, though I came in second having never played before. I think people were just nice to me or something.
Jeff came back here with me after since he was drunk and couldn't drive home. We played PP together, kinda, more like we docktarted together. Then I introduced him to Katamari Damacy, which he sat playing for the last hour and a half while I played spades with Weaver on PP and listened to the Katamari music. Hehe. He's gonna crash on the couch, and I'll drive him down to Tacoma in the afternoon
That was the good part of the weekend. The bad involves my computer.
Saturday I went out shopping a bit. Got some stuff I needed from K-Mart and Office Depot. But more importantly I went to Best Buy and picked up a new HD. I came home and installed it later in the evening... or tried to. It was a disaster. I eventually got Weaver on Skype to try to talk me through looking up the bios and all this other crap. Sigh. I had to format the drive from my other drive, then install windows on it, since my computer wouldn't recognize it. Eventually I got it all done... installed PP... and IT LAGGED EVEN WORSE! I have no idea what the heck is wrong. My computer just seems really scuppered up. This morning when I went to work with it more, I tried loading sound files off a CD and the entire system HALTED. I'm not kidding. So I wasn't sure if it was the CD drive doing it, so I unplugged that from the IDE, and no, I booted from the new hard drive and it still halted (with some "NMI Memory error", I forget exactly). Ugh. I unplugged the new hard drive, unjumpered and booted from the old, and could get it into Safe Mode. So, it seems to boot okay from the old hard drive still, not from the new, but it's just... ugh.
I am debating just scrapping the damn thing and buying a new desktop. I mean, I could get a refurb from Dell or HP for like $350 that would be twice as good as my current machine (which is 3.5 years old) anyway. If I take back the HD I bought yesterday that'll be $100 back... it's really tempting.
I'm just not a hardware person, really. I don't know if I have any friends out here who particularly want to try to fix it for me, but I'm not sure I really understand what's wrong with it at this point. I also have no idea how often people usually replace computers, though.
I wonder if there's anything useful I could do with the computer. Like donate it to some sort of Goodwill. I mean, I don't know what's wrong, but I bet parts of it are still useful for someone.
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