fitting in

Contrary to your first impressions, this post is generally not about computers. Ok, a little bit.

I went to the computer store this afternoon. I got a computer from a friend who had upgraded and moved away and claimed that this old box was too old and slow to be of much use.

Well it turns out that this computer is actually about as powerful as my current machine, and I figured that I could get linux or some such working on it with minimal fuss, and it would be good to have a machine around that could manage torrents while I was away with the laptop, and host more regular backups, and so forth. In short order I got Ubuntu, but quickly realized that I would need a monitor¹, a wireless card, a bit more ram, and so forth.

So after a bit of hemming and hawing I finally went into the computer store today. There’s this local independent computer store in town that has used gear and what not, which is great if you’re in the market for something specific and don’t need the fuss of comp USA or some such. We’ve been going there for years and years and it seemed like the ideal place for this kind of task.

I got there and this very young looking (I wonder at what point we start identifying the people who help us in stores as “young looking”) guy came up to help me. Short. Thin. Emo. Obviously knew what he was doing. And so I let myself be the customer for once. “Yeah, I need this,” and he was able to do it, pretty much without a hitch.

I told him what I needed, he got the wireless card (last one) told me that flat panel monitors where in high demand and didn’t last long on the shelf, but quoted me an acceptable price. I looked at the CRT monitors, but didn’t get one. He husseled about trying to look for the right kind of ram, but didn’t find any.

It was at this point that I realized that this fellow was me. Sort of. I mean, I have a better fashion sense (gawd, the emo.) and taste in operating systems (he was using vista!), but other than that, here I was. It also struck me, that at this precise moment I was very not queer. Geeks are already a bit off of norm, and in casual interaction, it doesn’t come up/make itself apparent. Which is all together an odd feeling.

Anyway, so I brought the computer in, he put in the card and took out the modem, which was convenient, and then I left. We made small talk about operating systems, I was like, 10.4 it’s good stuff. He said something about the Air, I shrugged, and then left.

I didn’t get the wireless to work off the bat, and I’m currently reinstalling the OS (last time when I installed, I was able to disabuse it of the notion that I had a turkish keyboard, which complicated the login process.) With luck, I’ll be able to get the wireless to work after this is done. There seems to be confirmation of this wireless card working with Ubuntu, but we shall see.

Anyway, I’m going to tinker more, and knit some this afternoon. I’ve not been doing enough knitting, or writing for that matter.

Onward and Upward!