Fwd: Friday, 29-July-2011 :: Event/s of the Day & Twitter Log

Event of the Day: A quick run to Park Square One and SM Makati.  The
former, for a look-see at the computer shops, with the end in view of
canvassing CPU prices.  The latter, for adding to the cat food stash -
the little monsters are, thank heavens, disgustingly healthy and with
appetites to match.  Though we are trying to control their intake in
order to prevent tummy upsets. *cuddles kitty family*

Found an interesting deal on CPUs at Asianic.  They had a unit running
as their shop server, so was able to see the configuration.  Will have
to compare pricing and specs on next visit to Cash and Carry.
Merienda at the SM Food Court - we tried PaoTsin and for the price,
the meals are quite satisfying.  Shopping was a quick and efficient
bit of business, even if I'm the one saying so. *grin*

Then home, to life as usual.

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06:29 My Two Bits: Thinking of change bit.ly/pJfHXX #

Fwd: Saturday, 30-July-2011 :: Event/s of the Day & Twitter Log

Event of the Day: Stayed home, and did any number of things.  Had to
do some tweaking to the Linux system to get it to display YouTube
properly; and that came about because I was trying to see a tutorial
video about one of the apps on Tabbie.  *eyeroll*
I've fallen into a routine that seems to suit me, maybe it's a
function of age - or having household staff?  I don't know.  But these
days I wake up at around 5am, help Ramon feed the cats and have
bonding time with hubby and cats.  Shower, then internet from about
6-7am. Back to sleep if my eyes start closing on me, then wake up at
around 9am; otherwise stay online till tummy rumbles for something to
eat.

Breakfast, then tidy the room, clean the litter pans, fetch and carry
for Ma who is having breakfast; get back online till lunch.
Post-lunch, either nap or continue reading feeds till dinner at 6pm.
Family bonding over the evening news, where various politicians are
reviled and the wardrobe of the entertainment news presenters are
commented on.  Ramon closes the house gates at 8pm, at which point the
inside cats are rounded up and fed and put in the kitchen.  Then the
last of the online reading (which online reading is interrupted
throughout the day and a good deal of the night by kitty demands),
Twitter time, and maybe even some writing.

In bed by 11pm, unless I get wrapped up in reading fic or writing it.
*grin*  In which case I greet my bed by 1am.
Then the whole cycle starts again.  It seems to be working for me;
with the netbook in the bedroom, it's easy enough to quickly scan
through stuff before going in-depth at the desktop.  Feeling much
better than I have in months, and that's a good thing.

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23:28 My Two Bits: *headdesk* bit.ly/q9MuxK #

Fwd: Sunday, 31-July-2011 :: Event/s of the Day & Twitter Log

Event of the Day:  I took the plunge and finally got myself a new CPU!

Sunday being medicine and grocery day, we started with a quick trip to
Mercury Santuario to get vitamins for Ramon and Ma.  The car felt
weird on the way out, so stopped by Petron Dasma and fell in line at
the air pump.  We were behind this guy on his high-end mountain bike,
who took his sweeeeeet time moving forward.  OK, so it's Sunday - but
there was a queue of four cars behind you, mister, I'm sure the gas
station would have liked to have had them move up a wee bit faster.  I
know I did.

So having got the proper tire pressure, it was off to Cash and Carry,
as usual.  Lunch at Teriyaki Boy was a bowl of ramen split with Ramon,
tonkatsu and a bowl of rice, also split with Ramon.  That is our usual
thing; we look at an order and split it, so I'm now eating half
portions of things now.  Also, it means that any eatery with portions
large enough to split, for the price, immediately is guaranteed our
patronage.

I found my CPU in a little shop just across the hall from the Cherry
Mobile store on the 2nd floor.  I've been in and out of the place
several times, and found their prices to be fairly reasonable for the
packages that they have.  The technician recommended a setup that has
a 1.8GHz processor speed; 2GB DDR3 RAM; a video card; a 500GB HDD
SATA; and a very pretty casing.  All for only 7.8K pesos on my credit
card, so that is a nifty thing to have.  I certainly don't need an
extra monitor, keyboard or mouse when I already have them, so why pay
for those?

So the nice low-key tech assembled the unit while I had my massage,
and to give him extra time, I tried out the little creperie stall in
the food court.  Plain sugar and butter, I like my crepes on the basic
side. *smile* Will go back and try their other stuff next grocery day.
Then after picking up the new CPU, off to the groceries, which were
accomplished in a leisurely fashion.  Home in the rain, via Andok's to
pick up dinner, seeing as how one of the maids was on her day off, and
I figured it was easier to have take-out rather than have the maid
fuss over what to cook for us.

Home, unloaded and put away groceries, enjoyed the take-out dinner,
and basically back to life as usual.  Didn't install the new CPU yet -
there's still some prep work to be done, like backing up all the data,
and figuring out just how to rearrange everything on the workstation
space.  I refuse to hurry this and risk deleting something that ought
not to be deleted.

On that note: does anyone really use DVDs any more?  Or are portable
hard drives the new mode of digital storage?  At some point in time,
all my photographs are going to need their own hard drive, that's for
sure.

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Fwd: Monday, 01-August-2011 :: Event/s of the Day & Twitter Log

Event of the Day:  Installation of CPU.  Which, as usually happens
with me, took longer than I thought it would.
Woke up to what looked like the promise of clear skies, and hauled out
a basket of laundry to run through the machine.  The bed linens,
basically; had them all done before lunch and on the line to dry.

After a shower and breakfast, I set about doing the prep work for
setting up the new CPU.  First off, disconnecting cables and moving
things about so that the cabinet top that I use as my workspace could
*finally* get a good dusting.  That was when I realized that I need a
small can of Pledge or similar for jobs like this.  As it goes, the
phone now sits on top of the DVR at the end of the cabinet farthest
from me.  Then the printer beside it.  Then the CPU in its tower
casing.  Then the monitor.  The keyboard and mouse are off the cabinet
and on a tea table, because of the height factor.  Connected up all
the cables, fired up the new unit, and everything worked *insert happy
bouncing here*.

So, comes the moment for installing Linux.  Tried out the live CD of
Mint Debian, only to discover that it hung during the install.
Regular Mint didn't work so well either - so I had to download the
latest Ubuntu image, which took three hours (spent catching up on
Clash of Kings and dinner/family relations), and worked like a charm.

*insert satisfied sigh here*

Turns out Ubuntu has prettified their user interface by leaps and
bounds since I last used it.  No more Gnome!  This is nice, as Gnome,
while an excellent desktop environment, can look a wee bit fugly at
times.  The Unity interface used by Ubuntu is a whole lot of eye
candy.  It obviously takes a bit of getting used to, but the learning
curve isn't that painful.  As a matter of fact, since I started using
Linux around 2004, the whole transition experience is way less painful
than it used to be.  On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for
learning how to work with the terminal and command line; it's like
knowing you have legible penmanship even though most of your writing
now involves a keyboard.

Thanks to my notes, I had my working config pretty much all tweaked up
in good time, and I am now the happy owner of a system that suits me
down to the ground.  *grin*

Tomorrow, some more tweaking.  Thinking of adding a couple of packages
to the config, but one thing at a time.  For now, enough to know
everything works, I don't have Windows on my shiny new unit, and all
the files migrated successfully. Yayz!

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