Busy Afternoon & Evening

I didn't want to make last night's post too long, especially since I wanted it to be solely about my focus on writing, so I made a separate post for the rest of the day and I'll publish it first thing in the morning.

The rest of the day began about noon and was pretty eventful in that since I figured it was my first day of work, I ought to shave. Granted, it was after I was done writing, but nevertheless, I shaved my head because my hair was getting out of control. After that, the UPS guy delivered my new power supply for my computer. The fan was dying and it sounded like a small aircraft was taking off in my apartment. I installed that with minor difficulties. Fortunately, I still had the driver disk to my motherboard so that I could check out the manual. I missed something because my floppy drive doesn't work, but then, I don't even own any more floppy disks; they didn't survive “The Purge”, so I'm not too worried about that. Now my computer sounds like a computer ought to sound.

Immediately after that, I raced down to the Hilton to place a last minute bet. I didn't stick around to watch the game though, I came right back. As it turned out, that bet won and the game played out almost exactly as I had expected. That is, my team won, but it was close until late in the fourth quarter. That was one of the reasons I hadn't wanted to watch the game. I felt it could be too close and I didn't want to get my nerves in an uproar. Again, I wagered $110 to win $100, so that puts me $200 ahead. For now....

As I was whiling away my evening, I downloaded and installed an open source program called Audacity. It is a sound editor. I wanted to install it so that I could create my own podcasts. Well, maybe not anything that fancy, but I figured if I had a story that was best told in a 5 minute .mp3 file as opposed to an insufficiently short blog entry, it might be neat to upload an audio entry for people to listen to as opposed to a written one.

Of course, it is an open source program and these are a mixed bag in my opinion. I think they are great theoretically, but they can require some TLC. The particularly nice thing about open source programs is that they are free and can be used on most platforms. This means my Mac using friends can use this program as well. Anyway, it didn't work after install, so I had to troubleshoot. Always a perilous task since you never know what the underlying problem is. I wasn't sure if it was the software or my hardware. It took about an hour of finagling, of which, I had to stop for an hour in the middle to field a phone call from my friend Cullen. In the end, I managed to get it working. It seems the program was trying to use the sound on my motherboard as opposed to my sound card. A simple setting change and it was fine. Over the next few days (after I get done with my writing) I'll play with it and see if it is a worthwhile program.

In case you missed it, that was your “new thing” for the day. I have been trying to introduce people to some of the things that I am enjoying and exploring whilst online, but I am sure many of you are looking for my ribald wit. As I get more comfortable with this style of writing, I am sure it'll be coming eventually.

Off to do the second day of writing....