in meiner minor mode
All right, stallions and scallions. I am still in Reno, working a lot and drinking a lot. That's about it. The original plan was to go back to Portland in a week, but I have just discovered Oregon's cheerfully socialist income tax statutes, so maybe in two weeks. Just in time for Lupercalia. The answer to the obvious question is: it has subsided to a dull ache, and I have filed it with the other dull aches. I can't go on, I'll go on.
Somehow I have fallen into the software design business. I am creating an application designed to track unpatented mining claims, and honestly this is funny because I am a terrible programmer, though I am able to follow the basic coding convention of brewing an entire pot of coffee and sitting in front of the screen for fourteen hours at a time until my eyes turn red. Aside from that, I climbed a mountain in Mexico and nearly fell off a nasty sheer face, and I silenced my computer. If you are the owner of a newish-model desktop PC, you have likely noticed that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. So I ordered a new fan and heatsink, and when that failed to satisfactorily reduce the noise I took the box apart and discovered that some intelligent person had designed the main air intake as a hundred-odd perforations in the back plate, which because of their proximity to the fan were causing the vacuum noise. "Siren effect" is the term, and I suppose my aerodynamic-engineer dad could explain it. So I unscrewed the fan, pulled it an inch back from the plate, and duct-taped it to the bottom of the power supply. Voilà—silent machine! Now I can hear my music. Tomorrow I will do the twentieth-century Eastern European classical roundup.
