picks of the month:
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Finally got a haircut yesterday. About damn time. I was beginning to look like 59th Street Bridge-era Art Garfunkel. Not where I wanted to be. I also got SLANN running at home again, and he likes his new RAM. I am but a humble servant to the Mage Priest. When I was buttoning up the Scout on Wednesday, after looking at the blue Scout, I was thinking about how relieved I was that it wasn't the truck I was looking for. I shouldn't be spending money on a truck right now, but I'm committed to buying the right truck if it comes along. Just as I was coming to this realization, a longhaired dude in an old-style Grand Cherokee drove down Lakewood Avenue and gave me and Chewbacca the thumbs-up. That made my day. Thanks, longhaired dude. I'm posting a few pictures of the basement in progress today: these are all older shots from when i was just getting the framing underway. As I get the film developed I'm going to post more in progress shots. Here also is a picture of the the Scout at Assateague with Jen in June. | link 
I found the above picture of Farrah on the web this morning on somebody else's site, and remembered that we had this very poster up in the basement of our house in Hackettstown. It was up in the old coal room under the front stairs, but you could see it from our playroom in the basement from just about anywhere. I remember looking at it and wondering what was going on under that suit (mind you, this was when I was about 7) and liking the fact that it was sexy, even though I really didn't know what that was all about yet. Loaded the RAM up into SLANN last night, and he puked all over it. Today I'm going to try a few different variations at work and try to get him running. 12:31 - Update: After trying the new ram, which works on its own, and the 64MB original chip together, I have a usable and functioning 192 MB of RAM- plenty. SLANN is pleased. No virgins will need to be sacrificed. | link Let us all pray today goes better than yesterday. I reread the log below from yesterday, and whew! What a venting session that was.
Today I'm looking at the Scout mentioned below- the guy has it in Baltimore this afternoon, right on the way to the house, so I'm going to cruise down there and take a peek. He says he wants $1900 for it. My finances are about a 2-year low, which means I could buy this truck if I wanted to but be dangerously low in the cash reserve department-not where I want to be in this recession/downturn/correction/assfuck we are all trudging through. It sounds great, although he says it has some rust; I wonder how bad it'll be when I see it. I was able to walk away comfortably from the '80 a few weeks ago when me and the guy pulled the tailgate out from the passenger side floor and looked through the hole to the weeds below. I hope his one is either a basket case or a (relatively) cherry truck so that the decision is an easy one. Just recieved my RAM - 10:33AM. Kingston value RAM- very nice. Can't wait to put it in SLANN. | link Today I'm actually doing something interesting- character modelling in 3D Max. We'll see how far I get in this tutorial today- I'm hoping to do the whole thing if I can. I'm also burning CD's to give to Jen. The new machine they gave me here has a burner, and it's about 4 times as fast as mine. This morning, I locked my house, looked down and found that some jerk had dug out 6 of the geraniums in the pot out in front of my house; these plants being the only reasonably attractive thing in the front of my house, I was very pissed. I replanted them, and they will most assuredly die, but it was annoying. Looked like somebody had pulled them, been caught and dropped them, because they were in a pile on the ground. Perhaps somebody is making a statement about the long-dead spruce in the whisky barrel next to the flowers. My RAM shipped today- hopefully it'll be here by Friday. pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease... 4:35PM. [expletives deleted] This stuff better start making some sense, or recession or not, I'm not staying here to mess with it for long. | link Here at work with no Greycube server- Dan is out of touch and I can't reach him. His cellphone is not picking up. 1:35PM. Server is back up and running. I got 10 IHC-Digest notes but nothing else from anybody this weekend. Feeling sad about that. Let's see here- Jen and I went thrift-store shopping again this weekend, and bought some plants as well; I got a set of Martha Stewart sheets fo' the bed at K-Mart as well- they are nice. I like my clean white sheets. Sunday Jen helped me in he basement and we got the rest of the window wall framed out; I'm going to have to get creative above the window with where it meets the cieling- that whole section is a bit messed up right now. I'm also gonna need to add a bit of insulation up there before I close it up so that the ductwork stays dry and cool/hot. We put up more drywall, and I'm going to have to go out and buy at least another two sheets or so to finish, but I'm going to make a major push this week to get it done. 11:30PM. Just came upstairs from the basement; I got half the wall in the closet done, and the bottom sheetrock around the bottom front of the room. I'm down to a 4'x4' sheet of drywall, so I need at least 2 more to finish, probably three. I was able to tape and mud the joints in the front corners, the area where the closet meets the wall, and the inside front edge of the closet. There's a LOT more taping and sanding to be done, but it should go quick once the final drywall is up. Now the only big obstacles are figuring out how to finish off the cieling above the front window, and installing a junction box by the computer circuit to run upstairs. Got an email from a guy tonight who says he has a Scout: In the office today after our company summer picnic. All the muscles in my legs are now feeling like somebody put them on a winch and torqued them about 30 feet or so. It took me 5 minutes to climb my stairs. However, we had a good time yesterday; I wish Jen could have come but I knew that there was no way she could take off after only two weeks of work. We played some touch football, some frisbee, and then a game of softball- I think it was the football that did me in. Gary Condit did his interview last night with Connie Chung. What an evasive little jerk. They should run this guy right out of Washington. Jen and I, talking last night, agree that the word 'slacks' is unnecessary and ugly. I ordered 128MB of RAM for the NT machine- the total, with second day air shipping, is $30. How unbelievable is that? I remember when 8 MB of RAM was $400. What an incredible drop in price. Now I need to seriously look for a monitor. he RAM should be here next friday or so- it's on backorder by 2 days. Meanwhile, Access Micro has barebones systems- case, power supply, motherboard, proccessor and 128MB of RAM, for somewhere around $450. And that's Pentium 4 chips at 1.4Gig speeds. Add a hard drive- $120 for a 30 gig IDE and another $100 for a CD/RW, plus a good video card- like a Geforce2 for $150 or so, and I've got a pretty decent basic system. I'm going to see what my Dad can put together for me with a good chipset and processor and see if he'd like to build me a system in the next few months. | link Loaded up Urban Terror on the home machine last night- sloooooooooooooooooooooowwwww. I got it running, but a few things are in order- I've found that 96 MB of RAM is entirely too little. I think I've found a company online that has cheap RAM for what I need but I'm still confused. The motherboard manual says I need 168-pin DIMMS of SDRAM, and further explains that for true error checking I should buy true 72-bit parity-type DIMMs. So I find a chip online here and I'm wondering how I know if it's 72-bit parity? All the others listed are non-parity, and it says so. | link I had a fantastic night at the figure drawing class last night- I got a bunch of really good drawings out of the evening, and we had a great model to work with. I'm going to scan some of them and post them today. It was one of those evenings where I felt immediately like I was in the groove, and I never came out of it. A very good way to leave this summer's series. I'm looking forward to the fall series. sketch one | sketch two Slann is up and running again and looks & sounds happy; it's incredible to get 1280 x 960 on that monitor. Time to go hunting for a 19" with a shallow footprint- if such a beast exists. Here is a quick (5 min.) sketch of my girl Jen; she was on the phone with Tracy, her best friend, and planting in a big ol' pot on her deck. | link Click on the link below to see what all the dudes said about my thermostat. Apparently I just need to be really careful about which wire I hook up to be the ground. So I'll wait for a few weeks to fool with that- but first I have to make sure it's compatible with my Bryant unit. After all the trouble of putting that unit in, I'm terrified that I'll fuck it up. Hmmm. Last night Jeff Curley and I rode up to Guitar Center in Towson; he was looking to fix two of his guitars and I was looking to see if they had any Steinberger strings, which are harder and harder to find these days. I got my strings- $30 or so, and Jeff bought a nice Ibanez acoustic guitar. That place is huge. I got home, took a leak (was dying) and pulled the Crate amp out, dropped Siamese Dream into the CD, and played 6 of the 10 songs or so. Saw a girl and her boyfriend fighting in the parking lot of the Rite Aid, where I usually have to park the fleet after 10 on weeknights. She was an upset blonde and he was an angry shaven jock-type. They argued for a while; she was apologizing, and then he shut his car door and left. She got in her Neon and left too. I was strining to hear what they were arguing about but I couldn't hear anything. Next time, speak up so I know what you're fighting about, OK? (this is the shameless nosy parker in me coming out.) Last night I also booted up the 7100 running MKlinux and browsed some pages using lynx and then the browser that shipped with Xwindows. For some reason i had a problem seeing .JPG files- I wonder how old the openStep browser is in that install. A few days ago I got PhotoVista reinstalled on the NT machine and ran it to update the vista pictures I took with the Cidera camera lo, these 2 years ago- they're up now as applets and don't need a plugin anymore, as long as you have Java installed on your machine. --> vista1 | vista2 | vista3 | vista4 I'm hooked on the subwoofer concept for computer stereo, at least; I have a Boston Acoustics BA735 here at work and it is awesome. Next paycheck I might have to invest in a subwoofer system for the house (providing I get the NT machine up and running again.) 11:27 PM Happy to report the 3dfx card is properly installed with the correct drivers and is currently powering my Sony 15" monitor at a comfortable 1280 x 960 pixels. DAMN it's nice. I brought up Quake2 and set it on first the default OpenGL drivers and then the 3dfx open GL set; the standard drivers were very dark (not helped any by the rapidly deteriorating tube in this monitor) and the 3dfx drivers were lighter but smoother- it seemed like a lack of detail was evident. I'm going to purchase a copy of Quake3 this week and we'll see how that runs on this machine. The Best Supporting Tehnician Award goes to Jeff Curley for his help. Now I need to look at some 17"-19" monitors next paycheck.... And the Best Actress in a Laundry or Drama goes to Ms. Jen Lockard, for her work in Last Sunday Afternoon. | link Well, let's see. This weekend Jen and I went thrift store shopping on Saturday and were able to find a bunch of very nice clothes for very cheap- I found a few Banana Republic shirts, brand new, for about $4 total. Jen also found me a great hipster short sleeve button down shirt, probably about 30 years old, for $2. I found a beautiful tuxedo jacket and pants that fit me well (well, not the pants) for $70, but I couldn't justify the price. Also found a revereware fry pan for camping for $2 and a few books- $1. Jen found a few real nice blouses for work, but we didn't stop to pick up her jeans, so there will be another trip down to Laurel in the near future to get some pants for her work wardrobe. Saturday night we went to see The Others with some old friends fron Cidera; it was a lot better than I thought it would be. Very creepy, good story, and a kicker ending. Sunday Jen and I hit Hope Depot to pick up my window, and I found a Honeywell programmable thermostat for $50 on sale. I need to do some more work to see if the rumors that it blows up furnaces is true. We got back to the house and I was able to install the window up front in a relatively short while- it was really easy and went in quickly. I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to get the old one out in time, but it came out without too much fuss. I need to go and buy some nonexpandable foam to seal the edging, and some vinyl or metal flashing to cover the wood box I installed it in. It's really cool to have a window up front that is level and new- I think it's going to really cut down on the cold air up front too.
I managed to blow up Slann last night trying to install the 3dfx Voodoo 3 card; they got bought by nVidia, and don't have a complete list of drivers online for the card, so I installed the 2000 drivers and rebooted. Now the box just continues rebooting itself; it gets to the NT load screen and then restarts. Repeatedly. So I'm going to ask Jeff here at work to look at it. I might have to buy a card after all. I did find new drivers for it though. Let's see. Here's the first thing I found worthwhile on the Binder Bulletin this morning. A list of parts up in Pennsylvannia.
Here also, is a picture of the lifted Traveller I looked at over in Ellicott City. It had reasonably good parts on it, but A. was a Traveller, meaning I couldn't swap the frame with my Scout, B. had fiberglas fenders and quarters, only the fenders of which would fit my Scout (and weren't even in that good shape- lots of bubbling and waving), Bushwhacker flares, which were in good shape, a springover conversion that was done poorly, and loads of rust. I figured that for all the work to pull the fenders off, I'd destroy them and negate the cost of buying the truck. Somebody paid him $1300 for this thing. The rockers were gone all the way up to the seat bases, and the pillars were totally shot- worse than my truck. At this point, because she talks so loud on the phone, I know that Amy here at work does not like her landlord because she is afraid he is videotaping her secretly. Spooky. | link I was up last night writing Jen some racy fiction, so I'm kind of tired today. She says she's exhausted from her job as well, and it sounds like she's having fun, too. Let's see- I loaded up the MacPPP software on the SE/30 at home; I think the only thing I need to pick up now is a network card from someplace like MacResQ or Shreve.
Here it is, straight from Appalachia to us: The Dancing Outlaw. Lorie and Ty showed Jen and I this video when we were in Houston, and it's sort of stuck with us since then. Here is Jesco in all his dancin' glory. I think the blowup of this picture is poetic in an unintended, purely coincidental way, which trancends the filth of the surroundings; it has a certain beauty in its bleakness. "If you wanna get to Heaven, you gotta raise a little Hell." Curiously, the Blockbuster page linked above lists thse two titles as "related movies": Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, and Kudzu [no description available]. | link Had a very productive night last night. I went shopping for a new video card, but found the cost to be prohibitively expensive right now. So I bought a sound card for the home NT box and got it installed with minimum fuss-thank god. I also got the drywall in the basement sanded and second-coat mudded; it's coming along pretty well so far, but I need a few items to continue properly:
Have I mentioned that Toadnet sucks big moose butt? They're down again. Major big smoking, feces-covered moose butt.
A couple of weeks ago, I did a search on Google for Gamma World, a role-playing game TSR came out with in the late 70's and early 80's. I spent one summer completely immersed in this game, in between 7th and 8th grade, when a few guys from my new school got me into D&D and other RPG's. I got a copy of Gamma World and D&D for my birthday, i think, and Mike Parkin and I played these games constantly. He went on a two-week vacation that summer, and I obsessed over the game and creating new maps and worlds based on what I knew (which was, pitifully, nothing.) Being trapped on the side of a hill in Ridgefield with nothing to do but swim, eat and play Gamma World that summer, naturally all three blurred into each other. I dug out my Gamma World books that night (yep, still got 'em) and read through each one; it took me back to a two-month period where I was completely lost in my imagination. That fall, I went to the Ridgefield Middle School, where once again, the gods of bitter irony prevailed and I wound up in none of the same classes as anybody I had become friends with that previous school year. I went through 4 months of total isolation there, and then we moved to Mahopac, where I went through another year of isolation before I made friends with anybody. Jesse is going to sell me his old Voodoo3 card fr $20, so I'll have something better than an Apple 8/24 in my PC at home; This Is Good. Now I can concentrate on saving up for and finding a good 19-inch monitor, or a reasonable 17-inch LCD display for the NT machine. (side note: new Voodoo3's are going for about $40 online- bonus.) Additionally, I may be heading to his place for 3D Max lessons on Sunday- a BIG opportunity to get some knowledge for cheap- a 12-pack of Guinness might do it. | link Last night I had drawing class, and it went rather poorly. For some reason I couldn't concentrate well, and I got a bad start- nothing came together. I was able to pull about two drawings back from the dumpster, but the rest were pretty crappy. I had to resort to erasing last night- the first time in a long time. On the plus side, I found out that we have an extra day of drawing added for one day where the models didn't show up. Downloading a driver for the UMAX scanner at work they gave me- a 2200. I'm going to see how well it works. I'm going to scan a few drawings and see what happens with them. OK, here are a pair of sketches scanned in with the software. This is a pretty nice scanner- fast, quiet and small. sketch one | sketch two I was looking at other log sites last night, and went to an old favorite, kottke.org, and through him found another that I really like, dooce.com. People with amazing design talents, heaps of free time, and a lot of the same interests I do. I obviously need to start popping PCP or some crystal meth so that i may stay up four days straight at a clip and learn how to design as well as these people do. Or write as wittily as they do. Or even feel as young as they do. There just ain't enough time in the day. I was talking to Jen about getting in and out of the zone in context of drawing class last night. My buddy Tim and I were talking about this a few monts ago, and he brought a parable into play that I thought was very fitting for the subject. He said that when he was pitching in Little League, the trick to pitching a whole game well was not to get into the zone, but managing the chaos that ensued when you fell out of the zone- and then getting back into the zone from there. I was thinking about this last night as I scribbled in my sketchbook and kept fucking up stuff I knew I could draw; the more I thought about falling out of the zone the worse it got. Sometimes I am able to work through it, other times I am not. Ha-ha. This is really funny. | link
Jen and I had a really good night together last night; we went out to the thrift store up the street, came back to the house and made dinner, and spent the evening together. That was needed by both of us. Jen bought a few dresses, one of which is beautiful, and I found a few books and an old Mac SE/30 for $7. I went online today and in about five minutes found all manner of resources for getting an old Mac online- I'll post the info a bit later, and hopefully get the time to upload some of the files to my machine. | link Back at work on Monday. Jen and I did a real nice dinner for her birthday on Friday night; we worked out what was going on with us and really came together for a good weekend. Saturday I cleaned the house and straightened up everything so that Kate and Dan could come into town and have dinner; we took them to Henninger's and had a real good time. Sunday we drove in the Lockard bus up to Longwood Gardens to meet Robby and his girlfriend, and her whole family; Jen and I had to keep our shit together to survive going into the giant sucking maw of the Pennsylvannia Clemson booster family. Both her parents had matching Explorers with Clemson tiger paw stickers on the fenders. Can I vomit here and now? Would you mind?
Today is a bit brighter, even though I'm tired; I'm two days away from being paid, and I can't wait to be able to pay bills and not get behind, or take money out of the savings account. I looked at the Visa bill this morning- ouch. It's going to be a while before I do any silly frivolous spending, I guess. I want to get that paid back down and start saving some cash reserves back up, and quick. No computer for me, and probably no Scout unless I find a sweetheart deal somewhere close that I can't pass up. OK, this is messed up. If this was one of my daughters, I'd flip out in a major Mike Brady sort of way. Yikes. Very hard to concentrate on work today. I'm running through all the things I want to do in my head and it seems overwhelming. I really want to start working in Perl again, and I haven't even started looking at the stuff I need to yet. I'd really like to get this log online as a perl script and pull all of this stuff out of a text file as a script as well; the page format would be an HTML file the script would read, a flow in the template info, and then do a foreach loop through the text file until it reached the end of the content and then write the footer information. 12:29 am - I found a new typeface to use online- Tahoma, which i just set this whole page in, from one of the sites mentioned in the Salon article above. Very nice. We dig. | link Internet is still down. Stupid Toadnet. [expletives deleted] ...I looked at the two Scouts last night, an '80 Scout II and a '78 Traveller. They were right over in Ellicott City, and being sold by the brother of Mark, the dude who works at the IH dealership there. I should have known they would be rocky just because of that fact. The Traveller was lifted about 4 inches, on a set of Super Swampers, and had a light bar, bumper, and fiberglas fenders and quarters. On the minus side: The rockers were absolutely shot. The rear floor was rusted but covered over with sheet steel, and the underside of the tub was like the surface of the the moon. It ran, after sitting for a year, and sounded rocky but steady. The '80 was in a much worse state of decay; the rockers were gone, the passenger floor had been cut out completely from A to B pillar. The rear floor was OK but both tailgates were rusted through at the bottoms; the passenger door was clean but the drivers' was chewed through on the outside. The motor was is a 345 and sounds pretty clean; it has a 727 and (from as far as I can tell) a 300 transfer case; the diffs are 44's. The body was just so far gone I wasn't interested. I told him that I'd be interested in parts if he was parting it out; the engine, seats and passenger door would be cool to have; the fenders were OK, and I'd also take the front clip (radiator, hood, etc.) but the rest of the truck is a basket case. I drove Chewbacca into work today because I wanted to feel good about something. | link Here at work looking at the Antietam screens for the fourth day. They are boring and annoying and ugly. I'm looking forward to being done with them for good. I'm getting pretty sick of the interface work as well; I need a better idea of what the game is supposed to do, which means I really need to get involved with the programmers and creators to figure out what it does. I can understand why nobody likes doing interfaces here. Sierra Online is apparently gonna lay off 300 people- they make Tribes 2, Half-Life and a bunch of other really cool games. If they are in trouble, what does this company have in the wings? I'm afraid again. I'm talking to Jeff Curley about him teaching me C++ by doing Quake mods, which would be very cool. Apparently I need Visual Studio to really figure out what I'm doing and to compile quickly. C++ frightens me but I have to start somewhere. I also should really get back to Perl as well- I was doing some work with it but pretty much slacked off, and it's time to increase my marketability fast. That's also gonna take some serious work in 3D Studio Max. On the Hopeless Consumer front, the Scout 2 will be in Ellicott City tonight, so I'm gonna go see that. Maybe it'll be in great shape, maybe it'll be a mess. We'll see. I do know it has no rockers, passenger floor, and the quarters have been cut too. If it runs smooth, has a Dana 60 rear and 300 transfer case, and the body is straight, I'll consider it, but that also means I need a place to put it- the big problem. I'd have to flat-tow or trailer it to Aurora and leave it somewhere- but where? Renie no longer has the barn. Brian might be able to store it for me, but I don't know just yet. And it's $1300, which cuts into the Emergency Fund by 1/2, and I'm STILL not paid yet, and I'm getting very thin. Bill didn't transfer funds to his checking account, so now he's overdrawn and charged $30. Dummy. OK, I just found out that the Austerlitz stuff just got immensely worse. Infintessimally worse. Outrageously worse. Ugggghhh. That's it- I'm learning Max immediately- I'm NOT getting stuck doing the interface stuff here any more. Meanwhile, I'm typing this out on a machine that's not connected to the internet- Covad is down and ToadNet is telling us 4pm or so. Sure. Whatever. | link Suge Knight is being released from prison. Oh, boy. What else is happening? The entire US is butt-hot. Thank god again, for my AC unit. I'm going to call the dude about the Scout 2 tonight; it's in OK condition from what he says but the floors and rockers have been cut out. Hmmmm. I'm going to post to the Binder Bulletin tonight to see how I can identify a Dana 60 and a 300 transfer case by sight. | link Ha ha. Aeron madness. Funny shit. I still want one. | link Saw an ad for an '80 Scout on the Binder Bulletin site for $1300. 345, 31's, 2" lift, automatic. I'm gonna call and see if this guy still has it, and go out to take a look. I wonder if it's the '80 I saw about 5 years ago up in Ellicott City with that guy Mark- that thing was a beast but very rough. Let's see. I got 5 sheets of drywall for the basement and began installing- there's sheetrock on the walls up each side, on the east wall of the closet, and on the right side of the closet door. I also got sheetrock up on the framework above the stairs and began to spackle it. I need to straighten out the bottom panel but otherwise it's looking good, and more importantly there will be no more dust down through the stairs onto the basement floor. I'm still waiting on the window for the basement, and that will be coming it at just the right time- this weekend coming up I'm spending a day installing that, and then I have to figure out some fucked-up way of finishing off that front wall. That should be entertaining. Unfortunately I'm thinking that the basement will be at least another month in finishing, but my ultimate goal is to have it complete by the time the fambly comes down for Thanksgiving- should be plenty of time between now and then. Really, the next steps are pretty easy, with the exception of the window and that front wall. The only other major issues outstanding are:
Apple/ Motorola G3 333/167 1MB ZIF Card From Mac ResQ. Hmm. I wonder if the 8500 is even worth the $79 bucks? OK, last night I figured out (through using EasyCD Creator5) that I can take all the burned copies of each of the CD's that I got while at Supon and transfer them back to album-format CD; this means I don't have to buy copies of stuff like UNKLE, Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, and Underworld. Very cool. I've also freed up a bunch of space on my drive at home- I should be able to get off an additional 1.5 gigs of worthless MP3 files and clear some space. That should save me a ton of time and money. I'm gonna spend another two days this weekend just burning CD's and clearing off that drive; I also have a copy of the new Photoshop 6.0 to drop on there for work. That will be a relief- I haven't had that or any of the Office products on there since I got the machine. I'm also going to work on getting the sound card to work, and then hopefully in a few weeks I can work on getting a video card- probably that Geforce card. Found this article about Gr8. Says they're going to reorganize as 'Boldhaus.com.' | link Monitor switchbox. $20. No power adapter. Very cool. | link At work this morning, and I'm missing web design. It feels like it's been forever since I've built something and seen it grow. I miss working on a team. Supon didn't have any of that feeling for me- it was all very individual, and that was a letdown. System Source, while being a freak show, at least gave us the latitude and space to be able to work in teams to create websites. I miss working with Jason on large projects, and then cruising to Fletcher's for beers after work. Speaking of, they finally launched their new website. So I'm off the web page for good now. Good thing I archived it- that will be fun to have for posterity's sake. I need to get in touch with Jason Sweeney to tell him congratulations, and see if he's about to kill himself yet. I'm very tired right now, and I'm feeling a drain on my own resources- I should be really excited to come into work (shit, I've only been here 2 weeks) and I'm not, and that bugs me. I was thinking about some friends who have made a better go of things in my field- Tim, Jason R, other folks. I'm wondering where I got sidetracked. That is weighing heavily on my mind right now. I need to get my center back. OK, I'm coming to some realizations: I'm going to need to beef up the home system first before I go buy a Mac of some kind. In talking with Jesse (who has incidentally offered some tutoring in 3D Studio Max) I found that I'll need to upgrade my video system first and foremost. This means a new video card, and definitely a new monitor. He suggested a Geforce2 or 3, probably the Pro or a little bit lower. They should be somewhere around $200 or so. Then, I'll most likely have to bite the bullet and pick up a 17-inch monitor; I was hoping to wait another 6 months to a year and buy a 17" flat-panel, but that will probably have to wait some. We'll see. | link
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