There's summer in the city

What a week. My folks came over on incredibly short notice - not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it made for a bit of a busy week. Do some chores and clean the room and get some flowers for my mom's birthday and a bunch of other odds and ends. We did some shopping and bowling and went out for dinner and spent some quality time together. Which included four rounds of five-pin bowling. My first round was a pathetic 83, two rounds at 127, and the final was 143. Which is good, I was aiming for 130 and the last round wasn't going so well. It was down to the last frame, and I used up a spare to pick up 20 points. Woo! I usually get 160 Wii Bowling, though.

iPod's been giving me mega trouble over the past two days. I did some browsing via the wifi, and turned it off at a half-charge and set it down. I came back to it a half-hour later, and the device was warm and the battery had dropped to 10%. I went home and plugged it in for an hour, and the battery didn't budge at all. I figured I'd follow some advice and do a restore/reinstall, and then all hell broke loose. The first two tries crashed the device - it turned off and would restart five minutes later in recovery mode. I tried restoring off of the old OS2 file I had on-hand, and then it'd crash and give me an 'Error 13' part way through the restore. I looked it up and that turned out to be some kind of connection issue, either with the port or cable. I tried my backup cable in another port and it installed fine. I left it on all night and in the morning the battery was charged up fine. It worked all day today without issue. Then about an hour ago, I plugged the new cable into the old port, and... The instantly dove from about 40% to 15%. I plugged it back into the other port, and it's once again charging fine. So I think, I think that this is all due to a crappy USB port. It doesn't explain the original battery drain, but... Hopefully it's related.

Oh, and hardware issue #2: The overheating graphics card. I took it into work and blew out the dust with the air compressor. I think I cleaned the heatsink and fan out pretty well. It was tricky to do - the compressor is pretty powerful, so I tried to keep the whole thing at arm's length from the nozzle so I don't damage any components. Anyways, it worked fine. Peak temperatures have dropped from 105c down to 80c. A significant chunk, methinks. Grid now works fine. I guess it's a good thing I decided to play that game on a whim and discovered the issue when I did. It hasn't manifested itself with any other games, but I surely would have fried the carder sooner than later had I not got to it when I did.



Lastly, I've decided to quit watching Joan of Arcadia. I was watching it with some friends and fell behind a few episodes... And I just couldn't be bothered to catch up. It's so teen-angsty and predictable. While some of the characters are written with some decent nuances and small-touches, the God portion is the only creative element of story-telling. It's such a... Brain-dead show to watch. So boring and under-stimulating. Feels like a total waste of time.

But I just started watching The Wonder Years (yaaaaay for torrents! I dunno where else I would've found it). I probably haven't seen that show since I was 12-years-old myself, and you know what? It holds up remarkably well. I'm about a quarter of the way through the second season, and I'm sucking it up. The narrative is so fresh, and the story-telling so unique and perfectly executed. And yes, I'm well aware that I'm replacing one teen-angsty show with another. But there's actual value to this one. It really isn't like the other assembly-line shows that are all over the place. It's just so original, the perspective is unique, and the delivery is superb. I'm truly enjoying it. I should probably wait until August before I download the other four seasons - I've been using up a lot of bandwidth this month. And, in my defense, a LOT of it has been legit (Yaaaaay Steam!)



August, ugh. What a scary thought. I don't care much for the warm weather or The Month That Follows. It's going to be a looooong 36 days.
-Cril

Summer in the city
Means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage
And I start to miss you
Baby, sometimes
I've been staying up
And drinking
In a late night establishment
Telling strangers
Personal things

Summer in the city, I'm so lonely, lonely, lonely

Regina Spektor - Summer in the City