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the part of summer that happens in October
Wednesday, October 5 2011
Today felt like Indian Summer, with warmish temperatures and shimmering negative spaces of brilliant blue sky visible through canopies of dying vegetation. Had this been any other summer, that vegetation might have been brilliantly colored, but this year, as I've mentioned, it's shriveled and brown. "Indian Summer" is an interesting term in that it is of a piece with everything else white man has decided to grant to the Indians. "Here, native peoples, in exchange for the Carolinas and the Dakotas, you get to have the part of summer that happens in October."
I felt better today, but I also felt that my recovery was provisional. So I decided to launch into a caffeine fast, something I don't think I have attempted since 2006. (I also decided to take an additional day off from alcohol consumption, though that's more routine.) I thought I was setting myself up for pain, but as of noon I was still doing okay. Indeed, to the extent that I felt different, it was actually somewhat pleasant.
At noon, though, I took delivery of a replacement PCI Express video card for installation into Woodchuck, and of course the card soon proved to be a piece of shit. It had been advertised as an Nvidia Geforce GT240, and I should have been suspicious that it didn't look like a Nvidia Geforce GT240. Such suspicion would have lead me to research counterfeit Nvidia cards, and I would have found that such things are commonly for sale in the Ebay greymarket. Mind you, none of this would have bothered me had the card accepted Nvidia drivers, but all it would do is run XP's default slow-ass VGA driver. There might be some people who would find that acceptable, but not me.
Of course, whenever you find yourself ripping out old cards and trying new ones, unforeseen problems emerge. At one point, for example, I dropped a screw onto the motherboard and couldn't find it. I had to shake the chassis to dislodge it, causing wires to disconnect and resulting in the loss of a good half hour I'll never get back — just from one dropped screw. Then when I went to reinstall the PCI (non-Express) videocard, it "wouldn't start," suggesting the drivers had not been installed in precisely the right order. In the end, though, it turned out that the PCI Express videocard I had thought was dead (and which caused me to buy the one that turned out to be counterfeit) was actually perfectly fine. Either it had "recovered" (whatever that means) or it had never been ill to begin with.
By this evening, there was nothing I wanted to do more than take a nice hot path. The great thing about Indian Summer is that a day of it can collect a lot of hot water; the panels are tilted to work best at this time of year, and without the haze of summer time, it seems more sunlight makes it to the ground.
This evening I watched a new teevee show called Rocket City Rednecks. It's sort of like MythBusters, but with less science and more blowing shit up. Still, it has a lot of what I like from MythBusters, that is: shop porn. I love to watch competent makers doing their thing in a garage, particularly when they're working with old junk in hopes of achieving something truly ambitious. And the rednecks are nothing if not ambitious. The first show I saw had them building a submarine out of a plastic fertilizer tank, and the thing actually sort of worked (though the makeshift carbon dioxide scrubber almost poisoned them).
Part of the fun of the show is the attitude: it's part comedic, and they love to play to our redneck stereotypes (for example, dressing up an Iron Man suit with antlers), but they're also smart and occasionally a bit oddball. Best of all, they have an attitude towards safety that is refreshing in such shows: "Safety Third." Almost every show has some sort of close call in it, leading me to suspect that these are staged.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111005 feedback
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