Today is my wife’s birthday, so, if she’s out there somewhere reading this, “Happy Birthday!” See, she’s not here. I took the day off and had a huge party planned, but she chose to be out of town until Saturday some time, so I had to cancel everything. Worst part is, I couldn’t get a refund on the Chippendale dancers I ordered. On the bright side, they let me substitute some hoochie-coochie girls instead, so they’ll be over this evening around 8:00. I hope they like dogs.

My only real mandate was to “please feed the cats.” I saw them last night and gave one of them some food, but she didn’t eat much. The other one was outside and didn’t appear to want anything. I’m not about to beg, and they pretty much hang out outside all the time these days, so let ’em eat moles (or frogs; lots of frogs and toads out there). Of course I love the little dears, but I just don’t understand them.

Dogs, I get. They’re like guys.

Food? Good. Eat? Good. More food? Even better! :pup:

Cats?

Feed me.

Feed me now!

Not that. I don’t want that.

Give me that other stuff.

Give me that other stuff now!

I don’t want that.

Feed me. :billcat:

I may celebrate the day by cutting a hole in the bedroom window and sticking an air conditioner in it. Better late than never. I don’t need it, but if it gets really hot again at night, it’s nice for the dogs to have at least one place where it’s cool. The house has central air, but I’ve never turned it on; frankly the house is too damn big to keep cool, and I’m too goddamn cheap. If I get hot, I just jump in the pool.

I only wish I could get the dogs to do it, but no dice. If it was a filthy mud hole, they’d be all over it (see? I get that – mud is good), but the filthy mud hole is (as a guy I used to work with many years ago would say, if he was here – and not dead) “drier than a popcorn fart” and they don’t seem to trust the pool. Too clean – something aint right. I gotta get a mud-colored liner.

In other news nobody’s interested in, when last we spoke, I was kvetching about my computer’s power supply. After monitoring the voltages in the BIOS setup for a while, I decided to turn off the mo-bo’s anti-surge protection. In fact, I’m monitoring it now, and everything seems to be well within a 5% margin. Actually, within about 3% on the 3.3V side, and the 5 and 12 much closer. So I’m guessing the motherboard is just being stupid all of a sudden.

Of course, as soon as I was convinced that the voltages were fine and went to get more coffee, the damn thing crapped out on me again for reasons unknown. I suspect the on-board video, as the driver has been “crashing and recovering” on me. My only real thought it that I’m stressing it out by running two HD displays off it. This is part of the fun of building your own computer, and trying to do it as cheaply as possible (you never know if the day they put your components together, the Chinese salve laborers found out they were about to become organ donors and slacked off a bit). So, anyhow, I ordered a new video card (which helps to justify the new power supply, since I needed one with PCI Express power connectors).

It continues to astound me that a video card can have more RAM on it than my first non-Atari computer had hard drive space, and a way faster processor. I can remember being all excited to be able to upgrade my video card that came with 1 MB of memory soldered to the board by buying two .5 MB chips and cramming them in the empty holes. Not sure what advantage that actually gave me, but, by golly, it was sweeeeeet.

Ah, those were the days.

Of course, at this point in time, the computer is behaving nicely, and has been for quite some time now (overnight, anyway). I attribute this to the fact that it’s pulled out at an angle preventing me from sitting comfortably at my desk with the side cover pulled off (as we all know, things always work great until you put the covers back on). So, who knows?

Hopefully all this hardware type stuff will work itself out (there isn’t much left to replace), because it’s so much more enjoyable to use this than my other computers – including the MacBook Pro, which now seems tedious and annoying. Not that that’s a knock against Apple, it’s just that the MacBook is olden, has a crappy old 32-bit Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and a measly 2 GB of RAM. Oh, and of course the touchpad quit clicking a long time ago, and occasionally goes insane and insists on taking a nap for a few days. Plus it doesn’t have a real “delete” key. And I really don’t find the Mac OS (lion, tiger, bear, or whatever it is) to be all that compelling. As a laptop, though, it’s a shiny, pretty (in an aluminum kinda way), little bugger; I have to give it that. And the aluminum is a nifty little lap warmer.

Speaking of nifty little lap warmers, why doesn’t my Dunkin’ Donuts offer this (or do all I have to do is ask for “extra sugar,” in which case, can I put it on my DD card, and is there any chance I can get it to go)?

Well, golly. After six o’clock already, and I have a whole pot of coffee to myself, so I better get to work on it.