Personal Dork Assistant

Getting out of the House

Decided to head up to Costa Mesa to check out the computer fair at the Orange County Fairgrounds. Main reason was to check out the Zalman low-noise CPU cooler/heatsinks and power supplies. Besides, at a place like this there's always plenty of other random computer junk that might catch my eye. And the car can use a little exercise, too.

The fair was a bunch of tables and blue partition curtains set up in a barn of a building. Most of the vendors were Asian mom-and-pop shops. Some were more like mom-and-pop-and-son-and-daughter operations. In some other time and some other place, we might've been dickering over bok-choy and live chickens instead of DIMMs and motherboards. The prices weren't very impressive for the name-brand stuff, although I was tempted by the white-box SoundBlaster Audigy for $60. The real gems are the parts and pieces from obscure brands with the badly translated manuals. Found the Zalman guys and tried to get a package deal. Unfortunately they wouldn't deal unless it was cash. Didn't feel like making an ATM run so I sucked it up. The heatsink is pretty and the the quiet fan and PSU were as advertised. In a small apartment, the lower noise level helps a lot.

Picked up a replacement of the HandTrack trackball for the PowerBook. My last one broke under excessive clicking, and Fry's was out of stock of the USB version. The new one is upgraded so that all three buttons are separately programmable, which comes in real handy with USB Overdrive, which is about the last piece of software I need before I migrate to MacOS X. The real deal of the day, though, is the VGA switchbox I found from a big rack of old equipment. That plus a couple of VGA cables was seven bucks, compared to almost $100 for a real KVM switch. You can't beat that with a stick.

Wanted to get some rounded IDE cables, too, but I was out of cash and their prices weren't a whole lot better than Fry's. Since I was in Costa Mesa anyway, I went down the road to the Women's Club. Yep, they were still playing Magic there. The crowd was actually quite good, since it happened to be a Pre-Release Tournament for the new set (isn't there always a new set?). Dan Gray was still in charge, and there were a few other familiar faces, but nobody recognized me, which was probably just as well. It was too late to get in th sealed tournament, of course, but they were running the usual 8-man booster drafts, so I jumped into my first game of Magic in 1.5 years by drafting cards I've never seen. At least nobody else had too much experience with the set either, this being a pre-release and all, so I wasn't totally out of it. Drafted a solid but unspectacular B/U deck. Beat a girl wearing a USC sweatshirt and her mono-green with my fliers, and lost to some generic Magic-playing teenager who had more creature enhancers in his B/U. Was pretty happy with my play, but my draft skills let me down, which was nothing new. The whole deal was a deja-vu experience, and it was fun, but I'm not going to be sucked back down that black hole.

So four games of Magic managed to kill three hours. Although to be fair the drafting took an hour out of that. It was going to be late by the time I got back to SD, and I skipped lunch. So as I cruised down the 405 towards the fork, I was lured off the freeway by the blazing neon of the Edwards 21-screen multiplex and the mall it anchored. As I walked into the Irvine Spectrum Center, I had an oddly familiar feeling, even beyond the fact that it was just a mall. Then I realized where it came from. The whole place was just like the shopping emporia in Vegas, with the carefully designed yet easily fabricated buildings. It wasn't just a mall, it was an integrated entertainment destination. There were a wide range of restaurants, entertainment from the megaplex and an Improv Comedy Club, and the usual litany of stylishly corporate brand names filling out the place. Even the Food Court was not immune, as the only non-chain place was the Chinese fast-food place, and I simply was not in the mood for bad Chinese food. Anyway, I got a plate of something to refuel and sat in the food court. If this is the future, then we are all doomed. And I'm not just bitter because I was probably the only person by myself in the whole mall. The place felt like a wringer designed to extract money from the flow of people, and as an unfortunate side-effect take a little joy with it. The hordes of teenagers were happy enough, fresh sponges still saturated with life and disposable income. The parents, who seemed weighted down (credit card bills?), were there because there's nowhere else to go. And the few grandparents seemed slightly bewildered. I was glad to finish dinner and get back on the road.

Anyone need an extra ATX power supply and an Athlon CPU cooler?