From one of my siblings

This link is hysterical. We happy few!

A bit of bread, a cup of wine, a stick of memory .... and thou

No, the post does not involve bread, wine, or thou. You probably guessed that. I'm staying at my mother-in-laws house this week, which is not bad (I have a cool mother-in-law) and as a result am using her computer. Ah, I do miss LB2TR! All the more because this box, which we shall call The Box That Time Forgot (TBTTF) is an 8 year old work horse with, no kidding 512MB memory. Note to non-computer folks: Windows XP requires I believe 256 MB memory and that is if you want it to do no more than turn on (very, very slowly). If you want to, say, run a program you need at least 512MB. She has that. But when I say "at least" I do mean at least. It took no kidding 7 minutes to boot the machine up, and it would take a minute or sometimes several to load any program. It is oft said, quite truly, that if all you want to do is browse the web, email, and edit documents you don't need a high end machine. It is oft said by me. But you do need a machine with enough memory to recall your name in the morning. This particular case was even better because the mobo has an integrated graphics chip which uses system memory for graphics, meaning that her available memory was about 342MB. As I understand it, when Windows hits this situation, all it can do is start writing a bunch of stuff to the hard disk ("virtual memory") that it has to keep track of so it has room to think with its actual "physical" memory. Problem being that virtual memory is slow, especially on what I assume must be an IDE 5200 RPM hard drive. Hence the glacial speed of, oh, everything she was running. (even Facebook was painfully, dreadfully slow).

So, being the nice son-in-law that I be, I ran out to Best Buy, bought a ridiculously overpriced stick of 1GB memory, and popped it in. The difference is truly startling. TBTTF won't win any contests, ever, but it will boot and run and she (and I) can even do things online without going crazy during the wait. The nice thing is, if we hadn't done this, she probably would have thought she had to buy a whole new machine to get faster apps. Now TBTTF is indeed all you need if you want to do browsing, word processing, and email. I feel so useful.

Creditors at BAM

The Brooklyn Academy of Music is my new substitute for going to London.  They bring a lot of British theater offerings to Brooklyn, and a ticket on the LIE is a lot cheaper than a plane ticket.  Not to mention that I haven't been able to afford and/or procure tickets to a lot of the productions at the Old Vic the last few times I've been in London (some things where I was willing to pay the ticket price were sold out, and some things were just too much for me).  The Donmar Warehouse is one of my favorite London theaters.  They do great stuff, and the theater is an incredible space.  The BAM is importing a recent Donmar Warehouse production under the direction of Alan Rickman, so I bought my ticket first and asked questions later.

 

Admittedly, after I bought it I noticed some adjectives that give me pause, although given the Donmar's personality I'm not exactly surprised.  Adjectives like "Swedish," "dark," and "fiercely modern."  But my enthusiasm is undaunted.  I have Googled and Wikipediad, and apparently August Strindberg, the playwright, is someone I previously should have been aware of, and Creditors is a battle of the sexes, which almost makes me wish I could see it sooner.  What an opportunity!  Sometimes Brooklyn just really rocks.

Now All I Need Is a Fire Extinguisher

I do really like this idea, and I do have Peeps, a gas stove, and a skewer. But since I don't have a fire extinguisher and since at one point I actually set fire to fish, I think I'll pass.

There are lots of wonderful Peeps photos on flickr, including a particularly tasty-looking peeps smore and an ingenious peep joust (it involves chickies, toothpicks, and a microwave). There is also a photo of the peepmobile.

Looking back on the blog, I realized one thing

I wanna live in a castle. As long as I can have it wired for DSL and satellite, and I can get a garage door opener (probably for the drawbridge or something). Oh, and there are no ghosts. Castles probably tend to have ghosts. From all the dead people who died in the castle. And no ancient blood stains or anything. That'd be gross. It goes without saying there would be no ancient curses or anything. And carpet. It'd have to have some carpet. And it would have to be well heated. I'd say it has to be roomy, but hey, it's a freaking castle, so I figure somehow or other it's roomy. A fitness center would be nice, but if it was without, I'm not picky. So provided all that's true, I want a castle. Now all I have to do is discover a hidden talent for writing some of the best selling books of all time, and make sure that they can secure me some sweet movie rights, and I'm set. I'll, errr, get right on that.