Saturday, January 3, 2009

stressful, yet economical day

I logged off around 0530~0545R, I couldn't sleep.... was around 0730'ish when Ma got up, and aroun d800 by the time the woke me up to start shuffling crap around; operating under the assumption that the maintenance guy would have to replace the entire water heater in order to deal with the now kaput elements. Managed to clear the forums a bit & get throuhg it. Then she decided to go shopping; I managed to get to BestBuy and Barnes & Noble.


Spent my gift card towards a (DDR-333) PC-2700 SO-DIMM, got my laptop sold 512MB one sitting on a dresser now. So far, it seems the system has become more processor limited, but hey, GNU emacs starts quickly now >_> (but I'm a vim user :-P). I also bought a little Jumbo LapDesk to replace the chestboard I've been using as a tray table for my laptop. I don't like the slippage, but it's sound enough when in 'use', but I wouldn't want to use it for storage though - for fear the laptop will slide off the lapdesk, off the table, and onto the hard deck lol. As a replacement for the chessboard, I miss how the laptop used to stick in place on the surface, I kinda wish that I got the wooden lapdesk for about $10 more, but hey... I'm a cheap bastard. The only reason why I'm replacing the chessboard, is because last week I was wondering why my left leg was hurting around the inner-side (Tibia?), when about 3 days later I found the edges of the chess board were starting to cut into my leg :\.


Found a much wider scope of books at the store then I expected, basically every kind of Linux (especially Fedora / Ubuntu) and Windows server book out there; VisualBasic, heck of a lot of ASP.net (barf), sweet stockpile of Java & JavaScript books, even C#, Python, and Ruby books; even PHP & MySQL. I didn't find anything I had *wanted* to find though, stuff like the works of W. Richard Stevens (especially those on network programming), or some of the books on LaTeX I have interest in (as opposed to flipping through webpages of documentation). not to much of a surprise though. I was rather disappointed with the amount of computer related and science books there, but alas, that's the world we live in -- I didn't really expect to find anything better then "Learn Visual Basic in 20 minutes" or something useless like that 8=). I did however find something worth buying, the llama, Camel, and the Cookbook. I hated to pay the price ($50), but I bought Programming Perl; hopefully it will come in handy someday.


I know both programming and Perl well enough, that the cook book doesn't interest me that much, not for $50 lol. Learning Perl, is good for refreshing my memory if I never touch the language for over a year or so... But I've never read Programming Perl, no idea where to put it on my book shelve yet either lol. The thing I'm mostly interested in, is not having to look for the manual pages / plain old documentation for various things and switch between windows back / forth while coding. Although, I do have both perldoc.perl.org and search.cpan.org on keyword access in Fx, it's a bit of a poor substitute for a few book marks hehe. I was also a good boy, I kept myself firmly away from the science fiction and fantasy sections.... I'd be to tempted to pick up good reading material, lol.


I almost never buy computer books really, most of the ones I have were $1 at a library book sale; since I'm the only mook around who would care, bought'em lol. That's actually how Java entered my skill-set, even though I often avoid writing Java code when I can. Most of the books I get, usually are Sci-Fi or technical material related to such topics >_>. On computers, I'm used to using documentation and reading comprehension to understand stuff.



All in all, I guess a fair day.... NOW IF ONLY I COULD GET SOME SLEEP !!!

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