Personal Dork Assistant

Buying Random Shit

Picked up Rita Calypso's latest not because I loved it at the listening station, although I did check to make sure that it's not totally unlistenable. Main reason I bought it was for the title. When we had the House Meeting to pick the theme for the year's OPI, it was a small tradition for someone to suggest Apocalypso. You know, with steel drums, post-industrial construction, not to mention the end of the world and all that. Heck, I always voted for it. Anyway, it's a perfectly pleasant piece of music, so what the hell. Funny how the Chinese title is "西班牙旅行三部曲番外篇" which has nothing to do with anything, aside from the fact that the CD came from a Spanish label.

I can hardly live on one CD alone. Thankfully, with the introduction of Apple Lossless Encoding, and the Friday sales at Fry's, I picked up a 250GB hard disk and stuffed it with almost my entire CD collection in bit-perfect form. The hard disk was easier to stuff into the luggage than my CDs, but it's not much good unless I had a computer to go with the HD. Spent a couple of weekends wandering Taipei's computer-marts, dragging the GF behind me (yeah I'm a real sweetheart), but it was a real pain to pick out good deals from the horde of indistinguishable storefronts. Plus the crowd and requisite haggling didn't really put me in a buying mood. Then came the Taipei Computer Applications Show at the convention center, and I couldn't resist walking over with my still-virgin Taiwan credit card. The show was brutally crowded on a Saturday, mostly filled with lusers out to gawk at the latest displays. The floor was dominated by the big boys like the various Taiwan motherboard makers, Japanese electronics giants, and comsumer electronics chains, all out for a piece of the action. Fought off the proles for the knick-knacks, but a couple of CD wallets was about the best I could do. Wasn't really interested in the packaged systems, so I hung around the fringes looking for cool random peripherals and DIY parts-sellers. Found the BioStar distributor booth on the edge of the hall in a standard small booth. What really caught my eye was their small-form-factor Athlon64 system, for the price of regular Pentium 4 and Athlon XP systems. Of course, by the time I read the fine print I noticed that they'd cut so many corners that by the time I upgraded the parts to resonable levels it would command the premium that one would expect from a cutting-edge system. Nevertheless, they did get my attention, so I talked to them, and talked myself into picking up the NForce2-based AthlonXP barebones iDEQ instead. Now I've committed to a system, I could start gathering the rest of the necessary peripherals. Couldn't do much more shopping while lugging a steel box (even if it's relatively small by PC standards), so I didn't do much more than buy a DVD-CDRW combo drive before lugging the stuff home. The optical drive was a Lite-On, which I was embarrassed to be bringing home, considering their original business. Still, I was missing plenty of necessary parts, like, um... a CPU. So it was off to the rat-maze that was Nova after having lunch with the GF and her family. It was painfully tedious to go through each and every vendor and wade through pages of fine-print to compare prices on an OEM Barton-core AthlonXP 2500+ CPU and a 512MB stick of DDR400 memory. Of course, after all that, I ended up buying everything from the very first shop right by the entrance, plus a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse set, and a USB wireless adapter to get it online. All in all, it came out to just a bit more than NTD 18,000 to put together a pretty solid mid-range system, and the prices were just a smidge less than US prices. It also just happened to be almost exactly equal to my July salary (for a bit less than half month's work). Oh well.

The system didn't seem like much of a bargain at first, though. Stayed up to put the pieces together even though I had to get up early for work the next day. For some stupid reason (i.e. it works for Macs!) I thought I could just throw my old Windows XP installation onto a totally new hardware setup and have it work. Of course, it hard crashed before the Windows bootscreen even comes up. Thankfully David had brought his original XP install CD with him from the States. Managed to get Windows installed the next day, after bluffing my way through Microsoft phone monkeys to get it activated. I skimped by not buying a video card, hoping to get by on the built-in GeForce MX400 graphics of the nForce chipset. However, I was getting crud pixels on the screen even at startup, and the machine would crash as soon as I tried to do anything remotely graphics related. It was dying under both Windows and Knoppix, so I was thinking I was fucked hardware-wise, and dreading the prospect of trying to get my money back from random Taiwanese shops. Thankfully, the helpful iDEQ forum at SFFTech noticed the release of a new BIOS from BioStar. Managed to keep Windows stable just long enough to flash the BIOS, and all was finally well. Even got the graphics card to do a pixel-perfect 1280x768 resolution for the plasma TV that I was using as the monitor, once I installed the latest Nvidia drivers. It survived the PC test gauntlet (memtest86, prime95, and 3dMark2001), and I could finally enjoy surfing from the couch, and having my entire CD collection available again. Still have to reinstall the Chinese input methods somehow, since XP thinks it's installed by won't let me actually use it, but maybe I'll let SP2 hit before I fuck with my installation.

Good thing I enjoy tinkering with this stuff for fun. Would hate to have to do it for a living, not that you could make a living as a tech monkey these days. If nothing else, I was reminded why I paid the big bucks for hardware that works. I brought my mini-grinder and the remainder of the BlueBottle coffee from home. I even bought a French press, before discovering the Melitta drip filter that had been gathering dust in the upper reaches of the cabinetry for ages. The Melitta is convenient enough for me to make a cup of coffee on the run on work days, so I finished off the coffee beans faster than I expected. Mom had mentioned that the coffee place down the street seems to sell fresh-roasted beans, so I went by after work to check it out. The bean roastery and warehouse was actually down the alley around the corner from the retail coffee shop. The big roasting machine was reassuringly up-front, and there were bags of green beans as well as packed roasted beans for sale. Got talked into the membership plan, where if I prepay $1800 I can get the coffee at 50% off, which makes it only a little cheaper than good old Peets. So in exchange for paying a fair price I have to get locked in to their store. Oh well, at least the location is convenient, and the product is decent. Now if only half&half existed in Taiwan.