Mostly Harmless

I received my Zyliss Comfort Food Chopper from Amazon today.

The blade is scary, wicked-sharp. I have not yet removed a limb, accidentally, or on purpose, but the potential is there.

One item to note is that the “Comfort” version of the Chopper is the newer version, it opens up so it’s easy to clean — in the open configuration it also becomes a lethal self-defense weapon, with it’s steely blade exposed.

Sadly, some baby carrots had to die for the inaugural “chop,” as I have nothing else in the apartment that even resembles a vegetable.

I’m considering buying an onion, and I’m pretty sure that I will dice it, or maybe even mince it.

A whole new world of fast and easy chopping lies ahead of me now.

For those of you who missed it, the record temperature set today — in Minnesota, in April — was 91 degrees.

This weekend I was thinking that the A/C in my car was in need of a recharge because it wasn’t kicking out much cold air. I tested it tonight, full-blast: 55 degrees. That’ll do.

Bring it on, bitch.

Weekend recap:

On Saturday I saw “Changing Lanes,” starring Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson, and a bevy of other good actors. A good flick, to be sure, but spoiled somewhat by the numerous times the lawyer (Ben) is such a dick. Just give the dude a ride, problem solved.

After returning from the movie I went out to a bar-b-que at a co-worker’s house. Mainly to see the house, as he’s thinking of selling it. I’ve got first dibs but I think I’ll pass, it being on the upper end of my price range. It is terribly close to work though (1.5 miles or so).

There was some discussion, at the bbq, about how those who are married, with children, never get out to see movies, due to this apparent babysitter shortage or something.

I thought about that a little more on Sunday when I was at the movie theater again. What they need is a movie theater with built-in daycare. Give ‘em a couple of bucks to watch your kids while you watch the movie in peace. How tough is that?

Sunday’s movie was “The Sweetest Thing.” I thought it was great, despite the morons on the radio calling it “stupid.” Yeah, it was a little stupid, but it was a lot funny. And you just can’t go wrong with Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair in their underwear.

Sunday was also SMG’s 25th birthday. Someone in the fan newsgroup posted a link to this. (shockwave) It has nothing to do with SMG, but I suppose it could be construed as a Happy Birthday sort of thing…

What else… oh yeah, it was freakin 76 degrees on Sunday. What the fuck is up with that? Soon I will be roasting in my apartment and in serious house hunting mode. I thought I had another month or two. Damnation.

I will soon be faced with the decision to spend $300 once, to get a good A/C for the apartment (I fried last summer, seriously), or pay an extra $500ish every month, forever for a nice house with central air.

If only I could get people in this country to buy something, I’d be able to (easily) afford a decent place within 20 miles of work. I got a $60 order on Friday, from the UK, but I can’t sell stun guns to the UK because some postman got robbed of his letters at “stun gun point” so now they’re illegal.

I suppose they’ll outlaw heavy sticks next. And put a tax on tea or something.

Happy tax day.

My car had a busted headlight lens when I bought it. It’s still busted because the quote to fix it was about $380 and I have this opinion that that’s way too much, so I refuse to fix it out of spite. Plus I am too lazy to find a junk yard.

Over the last year I’ve managed to get a couple of small chips in the windshield. Nothing big enough to have to fix, but irritating. Plus there’s the accumulated pitting of the windshield over the years. (I’ve never had a new windshield (or car), but I’ve seen new glass, it looks nice.)

On Saturday the car got High Speed Rock Hit #4. It was a decent sized rock and it had places to be; it couldn’t be bothered with going around my car and instead tried its damnedest to go right through the windshield. Happily it failed, because its next target would have been my right arm. I don’t think it would have taken the arm clean off… but I do think that the rock would still be lodged in there.

So after the “Holy Shit!” I let out a “Woohoo!” because I new I was going to get a new windshield, for FREE, thanks to 100% coverage on glass. Weee!

Today I got the new windshield installed, as well as the answer to “Do they need my car keys to replace the windshield?” (The answer is no, of course, they just yank the window out of the car and open it, setting off the alarm.)

I thought they were supposed to call me before they came over… oh well.

So now the windshield is brand new, almost spotless, and entirely pit-free. It’s wonderful. You can see through it and everything!

But I noticed, when I parked the car in the morning, that my left front fog light lens was freshly broken.

Nice. Thanks. ‘preciate it. Apparently these rocks travel in small groups… like a gang, breakin’ shit.

When I eventually fix the lens on the headlight, sometime just before selling the car, I suspect, I’ll put on something like these headlight shields.

Maybe I should do that sooner, rather than later, before a freakin Rock Monster attacks the car.

Where can I find a file server with about 500 gigs of solid-state storage, cheap?

I get all tingly just thinking about how freakin fantastic it would be to have a server that was immune to hard drive crashes, and so tremendously fast that the users would never complain (ha!).

Speaking of hard drive crashes… our one month old Snap Server 4100 lost a drive tonight. It’s now running on three drives with no redundancy.

It could run like this for years, or minutes. No way to tell. I’m hoping for at least a week because I probably won’t see a new drive from Quantum til Monday.

I found out tonight what drives it uses: Quantum (duh) FireballP AS60.0. Some of you may recall that particular drive model is a little “funky” (and not in a good way).

If I knew I could just stick any ol’ 60-gig drive in there I’d buy a drive locally and just slap it in there. (Of course we don’t have a cold spare, silly.)

While I wait for a replacement drive I’ll re-sync the data (85 gigs) back to the original server, where I haven’t deleted anything (because paranoia is good); I will also cross my fingers.