R.E.M. has done a new song to benefit Amnesty's "Make Some Noise" campaign! "Dream #9". 99cent download, and it's a very friendly download service they have set up. You have your choice of formats, and you can re-download things you've already bought later on. Not sure how the drm works on these if there is one, but I'm playing my happy lil mp3 copy in all sorts of bizarre Linux players so should be all good. :) Go get! It's pretty and sweet, and for a good cause.

In other news, there's a link on Digg this morning, to a picture captioned: "Someone who is gonna HATE going to work tommorrow". The title on the actual file is "applied geometry".

 
Good. Freaking. Lord.

I just dropped $200 to upgrade my system - Lawrence is starting to feel his age, and while all the reformatting and things helped, there's only so much you can do with a five-year old processor etc. So, my nice decent tax refund went towards a new motherboard + processor (BETTER THAN WHAT TOM HAS BWAHAHAHAHAAAA), and a new harddrive. Was debating on a harddrive or ram, but, due to the mishap with the reformatting the wrong drive, I currently have three chunks of 40gbs, and each OS can only read its own 40gb plus the currently-empty C:\ drive (maybe, I've saved that headache for another day). My music collection exceeds 40gbs easily. Soooo, I have no one place on my system that I can even store all my music. Therefore, I decided a new harddrive was a little more dire than more ram (which was pricier than expected anyway, I didn't want to drop even quite as much as I did). Luckily, Tiger Direct had some great deals floating around, and I landed a 200gb drive for $10 more than a comparable 80gb. So that was pretty cool.
All my delightful new things arrived much sooner than expected - I placed the order on Sunday, they were here today! woohoo! Tom grabbed my tower and plopped on the floor and proceeded to surround himself with circuitboards and screws.

An hour or so later, as the fight to tear the old motherboard out of the case paused for a moment, Tom realized something. I actually managed to help in spotting something to confirm his concern.

MY NEW MOTHERBOARD WON'T FIT IN MY FREAKING CASE.

Dell likes to make the inside of their cases..well, friendly for hardware-noobs like me, but painful for hardware-nerds like Tom. So while the harddrive bays are all nice and fun to slide in and out and all, my motherboard was screwed into this little tray-like bit with the edges bent up so that the motherboard it came with fit all nice and snug.
The motherboard that it came with being, of course, much smaller than my new one.
AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRG.

As it is! my one speaker finally conked out and good god is it impossible to listen to music out of only one side, so I broke down and spent $10 for a new pair of craptastic speakers at WalMart tonight. And then I came home and have to buy a new case, and, hey, a fan to go with it, because my little Dell fan is set up differently from everything else in the known universe apart from Dell boxes.

I'm starting to understand Tom's frustrations with Dell. ugh. So, there's another $40... and hey, what do you know, I have fewer hours at work this week and next than I've had probably since I started working there. >_<# No more even BROWSING. ANYWHERE. No shopping at ALL except food we are in dire need of until like next month. gaaaaaaahhhhhhh minimum wage sucks.

The one bright side: The new Lawrence is going to be freaking gorgeous. Look look! PRETTY BLUE LIGHTS EEEEEEE! I'm so excited. (The cheapest cases I could find anywhere were like $15, and going by the reviews, they're all pretty flimsy.. given that I have a cross-country move somewhere in the next year or two, I should get something that can manage a bump or two - for $10 more, definitely worth feeling secure. AND, it's so pretty! Not so big on the aluminum I don't think, but we'll see. I can always repaint. ;)