My Trivial Life

Thank You!

nightbirdsf — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:54:08 GMT

I want to thank all my friends whom let me cry on their shoulders, both figuratively and literally, over my recent breakup. Especially big hugs for Nicole (aka Natalie) and Jacki. I feel much better now. The pain is mostly over, and I'm ready to move on. Again, thank you all for your support! :.)

Sony SZ Laptop Ordered

nightbirdsf — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:12:58 GMT

I finally put in that order for the Sony SZ laptop. This will be a VGN-SZ440N14 with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, and a 160GB 5400 RPM hard drive. Other hardware includes a 22" Viewsonic LCD widescreen monitor and a Wacom Graphire tablet. And a computer desk. I haven't used a computer desk at home since I owned a Commodore C-64. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834117424&Tpk=sz440n14 As I mentioned before, it is the same size as the MacBooks. The advantage with the SZ is that it has better video, an nVidia Go 7400, Yes, it has Intel intergrated video, but you can switch between them. And it will be running Windows Vista Business. *blegh* God I fear that. As some of you already know, I have gotten heavily into Second Life. For work in SL I'm getting Newtek LightWave. It was a tossup between that and Autodesk Maya, but friends in SL recommended LightWave. Also Corel Painter for texture work, and Corel Paint Shop Pro for general image editing (along with the Open Source applications GIMP and Inkscape). I'm not interested in getting anything from Adobe. :p Actually, the Wacom tablet comes with PS Elements 3 for free, and I think I'll install it to use with a book on Digital Photography I have. Other software are M$ Office Professional 2007, M$ Project Standard 2007, and M$ Visio Standard 2007. The Office stuff is only to do work-work at home. All of this is at Academic prices. Yay! Still, not counting the furniture or the monitor, it still comes to over USD 3,500.00. Time to call my State Farm agent to ask for renter's insurance. :/ I'll also be getting a lot of Open Source applications, like GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, etc. In addition to building in SL, I'm thinking of contributing to the One Laptop Per Child project. They seem to need help with package management, and I think I can help them with that. For that I'll be installing VMWare Player to run Fedora Core AND Ubuntu. :)

Planning for New Laptop, Smartphone

nightbirdsf — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:43:21 GMT

I'm looking to replace my laptop in June, even though in the old laptop I recently upgraded both the RAM from 512MB to 2GB, and the hard drive from 60GB to 120GB. The laptop I'm currently looking at is a Sony SZ with Windows XP. This is similar to an Apple MacBook, with the same size screen, but with an nVidia 3D graphics chip. The MacBook not being able to run Second Life (Windows or OS X) is a deal breaker. Once I get that laptop, I'll do the same upgrades that I did to my current one before I first boot it. I'm having a lot of fun planning on replacing my mobile electronics. I'll write about my goals and constraints there in another post.