Today, I received the final piece of the new machine. I got the motherboard and some other stuff last week, so I had those installed in the case and ready for the processor to arrive. I finished assembling it this afternoon. Installing all the software is fun… 
(will update with more details later)
I decided to take advantage of the Boxing Week sales to start getting some parts for my new computer. Since I didn’t have the money for everything yet, I went with the most important parts to start with; the case and power supply. I got a Corsair Carbide 400R case. This case is a great value, and it’s not overly complicated on the inside. I liked my Antec P180 cases — both of them — back when I got them, but they’re complicated and heavy. The 400R is much simpler and lighter, and it has a great cable management system that is very easy to work with, and it prevents the old spaghetti problem. I’m very happy with the case, and it was a really good deal, too.
Along with the case, I bought a Corsair 750 Watt power supply. It’s modular, but not all the cables are removable. They only made the less commonly used cables modular, and that makes perfect sense.
I will probably get the rest of the parts in a couple of months. I don’t think I will be getting a Quad Core processor this time. A fast Dual Core will be fine if I get a ridiculous amount of RAM, maybe 16GB.
I convinced my mother to get a new printer, so I ended up ordering a Brother laser printer from Amazon.ca on Monday. It arrived this morning.
Our old HP printer had been causing a lot of trouble whenever we wanted to print something. I could always get it working after a few minutes of persuasion, but if my mother wanted to print something by herself, she couldn’t do it most of the time. When it didn’t crash upon powering up, the HP would often have stuck print cartridges or some other problem. When it did work properly, though, it was okay.
Anyway, I’ve been impressed so far with the Brother laser printer. It connects to the network and sleeps when it is not in use, so it’s always available without having to go turn it on. Although it only prints in black, the quality of the printing is better than the HP’s when printing text (no smudged ink), and that’s really all that’s needed most of the time. We’ll keep the old HP to print stuff in color when needed, but that’s rare.
I received a package today. Yes, on a Sunday! It was really surprising, but I guess Canada Post has decided to deliver on the weekends for a few weeks preceding Christmas.
When my mother told me she saw a Canada Post truck in front of the house this morning, I didn’t believe her. We don’t even get mail or packages on Saturdays here, so getting a delivery on a Sunday seemed impossible.
But it wasn’t so. When I opened the door, there was a package waiting for me.
I had ordered a couple of autoracks from Walthers recently, since they were on sale, and I rarely see them in hobby shops. I now have enough autoracks to fill an entire track in my rail yard. They’re pretty long, so they take about as much space as two regular freight cars. This means that they cannot run on all layouts, so that might be why I don’t see them in shops, but they have no problem running on my layout as long as I don’t push a long string of them (pulling is fine).
Since I was taking a photo of one of the new autoracks, I decided to take a couple of photos of the layout as well to show its progress. If you saw the yard in the past, you can see that it’s now completely changed and the turntable is gone.
I plan to build some kind of industry where the two unfinished tracks are on the square cork boards, possibly an Ethanol plant. We’ll see…
For the past couple of nights, I’ve been playing with my old Casio keyboard that I rediscovered in the basement. I had been wanting to do that for some time, but with all my other projects, it took me about a year to find the power supply for it. I had no idea where it was hiding. Every power supply I had found until now had not been the right one, as voltage and polarity are important.
It’s funny that something that I originally got about 20 years ago and treated mostly as a toy to make sound effects could actually have some real musical use now. I did like Van Halen and plugged the keyboard into guitar effects and and amplifier, which adds a lot more possible sounds to it.
While it was fun to play with it, I ended up realizing that it seems to be pretty easy to play the piano, and I should have tried doing this much sooner. Back when I originally got it, I didn’t really know anything about music or what I was doing, so my options were limited.
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. I will never understand the people who try all their lives to play just one song perfectly. They spend all their time practicing that one song over and over, when they could play anything else or compose something original instead. It’s much better to limit playing a specific song to only one time per day and do other things with the time, otherwise it’s like running in circles.
I went to the Canadian Museum of Civilization with my parents this afternoon. I wanted to go see the IMAX movie Rocky Mountain Express. I saw that museum admission is free on Thursdays after 4PM, so it gave my parents incentive to go. It wouldn’t give much time to see the museum exhibits before or after the movie, but we’ve seen pretty much everything already. Since admission would be free all day tomorrow, I figured that it would be a good time to go today instead to avoid the crowds, since most people would probably prefer to wait one day and have the whole day to see the exhibits. I was right, there were not that many people there, so it was good. Of course, admission for the movie wasn’t free.
Rocky Mountain Express was great. I really enjoyed it. It was really impressive to see the steam locomotive running at speed on the track, through tunnels, and the sound (although a bit loud) made it feel like it was really there. Running steam locomotives are not something you see every day, that’s for sure. It was filmed with a helicopter and a few cameras mounted on the locomotive itself, so there were different viewpoints throughout the movie. They also told the history of the railway line and the challenges it faced. I would definitely recommend it. My mother was going to buy the DVD immediately at the gift shop, but they will only release it later.
The only problem for me was that I was in pain the whole time, as I have been recently due to Fibromyalgia, but I would still do it again. I should have picked a seat a bit higher up in the theater, my seat was a bit too close and my neck was pretty sore in the end. Still, I’m glad I didn’t allow myself to postpone doing something I wanted to do (like I usually do), “until I feel better”, because it usually ends up never being better the next time — that is, if it’s not too late.
Metallica teamed up with Lou Reed to make a new album, titled Lulu, which will be released next week. They have a streaming preview of the entire album on this website. Now, I would recommend to not listen to it, because it’s so bad, but some people are curious. It might make you laugh or make you nauseous, so be warned.
Why is it so bad? Lou Reed’s voice sticks out like a sore thumb over Metallica’s (for the most part) reasonably good music. It really doesn’t belong with it at all. That makes me wonder why they didn’t just make an instrumental album instead. It would have been a lot better. Or they could have teamed up with someone more suitable to their sound, such as Henry Rollins. Now that would have been a cool album…
What’s next? Lady Gaga & Metallica? Celine Dion & Metallica? Kenny Rogers & Metallica?
Actually, although those are scary thoughts, they might end up being better than this album was…
I went to Home Depot today. I noticed that they were already putting some Christmas decorations on the shelves, which is still pretty early for that, but some other stores like Lowe’s and Canadian Tire have started doing that even earlier. I looked at what they had, but they had nothing interesting on the shelves so far. As expected, Home Depot skipped Halloween entirely.
After that, I went to Party Packagers. They had the Airblown Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on display this time, which was impressive to see. It looked better in person than the picture on the box, and it was pretty tempting.
But I didn’t buy Stay Puft. I decided to buy a large latex snake. They only had one left, and it was something I had always wanted to have since I was young. I had to dip into my savings for a new computer to get it, but it wasn’t that expensive anyway. Snakes are cool.
Snake on an amplifier.
Chickenfoot’s latest album, Chickenfoot III, was released today. I had preordred it one month ago at Amazon.ca, but for some reason, they still didn’t even have it in stock tonight. When I looked at the product page, it said it will ship “within 1 to 2 months”, which is insane.
I decided that it wasn’t worth it to wait who knows how long for Amazon.ca to get it, so I canceled my order and went out to HMV tonight and got it there. They had plenty of copies of the album, so I don’t understand why Amazon.ca couldn’t have gotten it in time. This isn’t the fist time this happens, and I’m starting to lose my patience with them.
Despite all this, I’m very happy with the album. It’s better than the first one in some ways, and they tried some different things that turned out great.