10/06/2004 Entry: "cat in lap"

It's hard to type with a cat in your lap, so I'm going to make this shortish. I've been working a shitload recently and playing with a few new toys. Due to severe instability issues with my 5 year old p500 system I upgraded to a used athalon 1.3gig system. I bought the motherboard and processor off Zach and a new case off newegg to fit the sucker and cool it. I kept all the other hardware with the exception of swapping out my voodoo3 for Mark's old G-Force 2 64 meg card. A bunch of reformatting later and I have what SHOULD be a stable system that sure is a shitload faster than what I had. It's not fast by today's standards, but the whole upgrade (with 512 ram) only cost about 200 bucks. That's not bad for almost 3x the machine. Unfortunately, it's not all that stable yet (running win2k) but mostly its only crashed with Firefox. The jury is still out on that browser for me. Avant Browser was really good to me (even if it was vulnerable to IE security flaws.)

About 6-10 months ago my digicam disappeared. I don't know what happened to it. (maybe fell out of my truck?) I finally broke down and replaced it with a Canon A75. It's a 3.2 megapixel with all the manual features my old one had, plus with decent video. I almost bought the A85 (4 megapixel) and the A95 (5 megapixel, fold out LCD) but I wanted to keep it cheap. Later when I have more money to throw around I'll buy my dream camera (again). The nice thing is that, with the exception of the swivel LCD I replaced my old $800 Nikon Coolpix 950 with a camera that has the same features and more megapixels for 170 bucks. Yea for 4 years of progress! (I'm still pissed I lost it, for sentimental reasons and for the 128 meg flash card that was in it and full of pictures)

So, I took some pictures and videos to share with you all, since it's been awhile since I've done a picture update. We decorated for Christmas today, complete with a live tree! (please ignore the irony of three agnostic/atheists decorating for Christmas) When I worked at the nursery last summer I was in charge of a group of four people (three dipshits and a good one) who trimmed all the Xmas trees at Ames Landscape and Nursery with me. Nothing like buying a tree you trimmed yourself months earlier! Anyway, on with the pictures (the quality is not the original, obviously):

"People:"
Qehndrah | Mark
Michigan | C'mere | Georgia Clinton, Esquire
Mark eats Dog | Dog eats Mark | Qehndrah and Dog
Qehndrah and my room. (half of it)

Christmas Preparations:
Tree | Fascinated Dog | Hot Chick with Tree
Mom would be proud | 10 second exposure

Videos (I compressed these into divx to make them download worthy. You'll need the Divx Codec to watch these. (if anyone knows a better place to download this codec please let me know.)

FISH! | Poorly lit cats fall down!!!