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a better way to watch computer files Sunday, July 25 2010
Gretchen left for the city today to engage in several days of nonstop socializing and also to attend a women's basketball game at Madison Square Garden.
Not long after she left, I went out to my tomato patches (which I do several times each day) and saw for the first time that a tomato in my first (southmost) patch was beginning to change color from green to red. The tomatoes in this patch are all grown from seed from vine tomatoes I'd mostly used for vegan BLTs back in the spring. The tomatoes vary somewhat in size and shape, indicating that their mother plants might have hybridized with pollen from several different strains.
With Gretchen out from in front of the teevee, I could set up the new entertainment computer (an Atom-330-based PC housed in a tiny case and running Debian Linux). I had a small keyboard that communicates via infrared, though I didn't have a cordless mouse, so I had to set up a mouse on the end of a USB extension cord. This sounds a little clunky, but it ended up being a joy to watch .avi files this way, and I didn't even find the unfamiliarities of the GNOME desktop distracting. It's much more pleasant to watch hardrive-resident movies this way than it is to try to watch them from a swivel chair 20 inches from my monitors, an environment too conducive to multitasking.
So I ended up watching the second half of Requiem for a Dream after making myself a wild multi-ethnic curry using fake Chinese duck meat, blackeyed peas, and vindaloo paste, all of which I ate with torn bits of Mexican-style multigrain tortillas. This was a variation on a staple I've been eating regularly for months.
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