'Tis a Good Day!

So, after a bad night's sleep and a hard day's work, I shlepped off to Tottenham Court Road and went to see if I could get a new computer (or at least, the tower and necessary components therein) without breaking the bank or buying cheap crap.

I neither broke the bank nor bought cheap crap. I just went into a little dingy-looking place that pinged up on my usually stellar radar (though to be fair, my radar is most often restaurant-oriented, but it has its moments on other bits of shopping), and ended up with a bunch of really charming Turkish guys staying past closing to assemble a computer to my specifications, and the prices weren't bad for what I got. So now I'm running Windows 7 on a fairly good motherboard, Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB storage and my nifty new graphics card. Now all I have to do is take a determined screwdriver to Hardison to get my old hard drive back (I think I see how to do it but it's like a puzzle box, seriously) tomorrow, and all will be well!

Of course, this one needed a name too, and I thought about it on the way home. From Goodge Street to bloody Tulse Hill. Lugging a PC tower onto and off of a bus, onto and off of a train, and through various turnstiles and crowds and roads and doorways ... yeah. Bit of a bitch.

...So my PC is powerful, useful, beautiful, entertaining ... and a bitch to travel with for any real distance. There's only one name that fits.

First Crudpuppy, then Frankenbox, then Eshu, then Hardison ... and now I have Morrigan.

In other news, does anyone know why a hundred-odd cyclists (emphasis on 'odd') insisted on rolling up Tottenham Court Road towards Camden at 8pm or so? En masse? It was kind of awesome to watch, but a little weird. And frankly, the drivers didn't have to be such dicks about it.

Open Letter to my London Friends & misc

Dear London-based friends (or anyone who might be in London before April):

There's a free exhibit on the evolution of the English language on at the British Library 'til about April. Anyone game to come with me to see it? Looks pretty interesting. But then, I would say that. *g*

So I finally slept reasonably well. This is a good thing, as I have Things To Do today. I have to go out and get some groceries, and a screwdriver. Then I have to ... erm, well, dissect Hardison. Want my hard drive, damnit! Anyway, after that comes the usual deal of reinstalling everything. So far I've got the essentials - Firefox, Trillian, iTunes, Avast, stuff like that. And I'm working on getting the Dragon Age 2 demo on here so I can see how pretty it looks with the new graphics card (and not have it grind to a slow crawl during some bits of combat - so annoying when it did that on Hardison) so there's that 'essential' dealt with. But I've got to put my Sims game and expansions on, and Dragon Age... As much as I'm hoping to be able to rescue the hard drive out of Hardison for my music and writing and stuff, I'm just as much hoping that I'm not going to have to go digging through the Sims 3 fan sites and Bioware forums for all my custom content. I will if I have to, but I'd rather not if I had my druthers.

Getting a new computer is really kind of weird sometimes, y'know? I bitch-bitch-bitch about how I don't really want to reinstall everything, but there's a kind of quiet joy and pride that comes out of getting it set up just as I like it. I'm not really sure what's up with that, but part of it at least was the setting up of my Windows 7 desktop theme. I really like this theme thing. I've got the whole thing set up to reflect my current Dragon Age obsession, and I'll be happy when I find another few good wallpapers to add to the shuffle. Sometimes good desktop wallpaper is hard to find! And the downloading is kind of sucky, but hey; when it's all set up, it just feels more or less awesome. Can't say fairer than that.

So now Dragon Age 2 has downloaded and so I shall install it. And then we'll see what we see. I have to finish my coffee and then I have to go dismember Hardison. (Poor Hardison; we've had to move to Plan M.) A busy-ish Saturday, then.