Wretched XS

[noodlenoggin]

That's Not White Chocolate

It's no secret around these parts that I like chocolate. Hershey's is good. (the secret is they use sour milk in their milk chocoloate. I watch "Unwrapped" on the Food Network.) Dove is better, Godiva is great. Lake Champlain Chocolates is like sex in my mouth. (not literally, but close)

I used to prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate. Semi-sweet, if you will. Bittersweet even. Now I find it gets quickly tangy on my tongue, and I need to drink a glass of milk to get rid of the taste. There's still a place for it...coat my truffles with dark chocolate, f'rinstance. Mounds bars are way better for having dark chocolate. But to eat a chunk of it? Naah.

My favorite is (and I guess it's always been) white chocolate. The non-chocolate of the chocolate family. All cocoa butter, no cocoa liquor. (again, thanks "Unwrapped.") The smooth, delicate flavor is heavenly. Unless. Unless the white treat I'm about to chew on isn't really white chocolate, but its dreaded b@stard cousin -- white melting block.

Oh, the horrors of "white melting block." It's white. It's sugary. It often gets labeled as "white chocolate" because it has much the same consistency.

But it isn't white chocolate.

You ever see a Ferrari 348 in a parking lot and get all excited? You walk up to it, you touch the paint and find out -- Eww! It's a Pontiac Fiero with a kit on it! Same bad taste in the mouth.

Please, stop the madness...no more White Melting Block mis-named as White Chocolate. I thank you.

[roscowgo]

Noodles back noodles back! quick...someone put out the fake choccie fondue pot.

[Shorts]

Pontiac Fiero....

[noodlenoggin]

More, or so it seems...

Y'know, I really appreciate people popping into my blog to say "hey, where's noodle?" and "I miss noodle," and "I want to carry noodle's baby." -- okay, that last one didn't happen, but if the ladies insist on posting their photos on-line, I can't be responsible for what my brain does.

Anywho, this would be the first blog, forum, newsgroup or anything where anyone's ever given a poop whether I posted, lurked, disappeared or picked my nose with a knitting needle. I do feel weird posting to a motorcycle forum when I'm not motorcycling, but that's apparently my problem, and I'll deal with it.

Personally, I'd like to jot down the menial details of my day...and some people can do that and make it interesting *cough*wolf*cough*blues*cough* but I feel like I'm dribbling tripe on my keyboard when I do that. I attribute it to the fact that my life is incredibly boring. My typical week goes like this: Get up, get ready for work, wake up my son, go to work, come home, help with dinner, wash dishes, get kids to go to bed, play on the internet, go to sleep...Tuesday: repeat Monday. Wednesday, repeat Monday, Thursday, Friday, Next Month, All Year, The rest of my 30's: Repeat Monday.

It doesn't help, either, that I simply don't have any friends. Don't read this as "Oh, woe is me, nobody likes me, everybody hates me, waaaah." It's just a simple fact....I don't have friends. Not one. I've been riding off and on for a long time now, and I've only been riding with someone else exactly twice. There's really nobody I'd ever think of calling up just to go hang out. I'm sure a large part of it is me...my idea of "keeping in touch" is dropping off an email once every few years, or sending a card a bit less frequently than that.

I dunno, I've been burned by this "friend" thing, too. Most of my college friends (there were two) did stuff after graduation that ended the friendships. I've tried to have friends from work, but when you invite someone over and they accept, the day comes, you call them and they say "Oh, I don't still have to do that, do I?" Well, you stop really trying to do that anymore. Add to that all the "We'll have to have you over for dinner sometime" and "We'll have to go riding sometime," or "I'll have to come see that fire-pit sometime" that people say...and then never call to follow up. A couple of those, and not only am I not inviting anyone over...I'm not trusting any invitations that people extend to me.

It makes me ecstatic to see my son -- my autistic (mildly) 7-year-old son -- who's made more friends in Kindergarden and 1st grade than my wife and I have after 60+ combined years of life. I'm sure he'll have a better time of things. Me? I know people get something out of friendships and other people...I just don't see it.

Bah, listen to me whine about my bed...I'm lying in it, or something. Next time, something frothy and upbeat, I promise.

[roscowgo]

It's the observations and the way you describe said groundhogdayish activities noodle

If it helps any, it's the same routine for me. Just with occasional bouts of hairy eyeballs and intent to beat my network users into submission with a polecat tossed in for seasoning.

[noodlenoggin]

Thanks, Roscow!

So let me describe the latest fire at work that's cropped up. We have a user...I'll call her "Kathy," and for all y'all know that's not really her name. Kathy works at home, with a hospital-supplied (I work in IT at a hospital, try'n keep up, 'kay?) computer, cable modem, phone line, etc. Well, on Thursday she called and said "I moved my office to a different room and need my wiring redone. I need to be back to work on Tuesday." *click*

Thursday...Friday....Mon--What the heck!? She gives us three days of notice? That'd be nice. So in the intervening time, she categorically did not return any voicemails, emails or other types of messages until she called us Monday to say "So when're ya gonna come hook up my stuff, huh?"

And our Help Desk passed this to me.

I called her, actually REACHED her, and asked her what exactly needed done...again, in the next 12 to 24 hours at this point.

"Well, I'd come prepared to start at the beginning," she said. (shudder) Apparently they moved her equipment, pulled it all apart, CUT her phone line because it went through the floor that they re-floored. "The silver thing on the end of the cable line" came off. (gads, lady!) And the best: "The phone and cable come up to the house."

I breathed. Inhale...exhale....

"Kathy, gee, we usually like to have a little advance notice before this kind of thing."

"Well, I called you last week, hon." I now have little devils on pinwheels turning behind my eyes.

"Um...advance notice for us is more like two WEEKS, not three days." I told her I'd have to find out what we could marshal together. We called our Communications guys to see if they could find time to drive the half-hour out to her house...and our comm works in terms of weeks rather than days.

So an hour later she called back for a status update. And an hour after that her manager called for an update. And that afternoon she called again. And her manager called again. The next day came...Tuesday. She called bright and early. And her manager, and her again. And Comm actually fixed (or as I like to call it: un-fvcked it up) the wires she cut and tore apart. And she called for an update, and left for the rest of the day.

So this morning more of the same... when when when, and we got a call to our Help Desk from Charter Cable, who received some "I can't ping this dizzy idjit" alarm at their office and called us. Probably because her cable modem is resting in a bucket somewhere in her basement, right next to her dismembered parakeet or something. One of my team-mates says, "Kathy? Doesn't she have a butt-load of stinky-a$s cats? I ain't going out there." Great.

On the upside, another team-mate went out there this afternoon, after I came home, because her house isn't quite as out of the way as it is for me. Not that heading west for a half-hour before I drive due-south to come home is out of the way or anything, but it's kinda inconvenient. I'll have to see tomorrow morning what happened.

[Shorts]

Give her a phone line and a dial up number - apparently the good stuff means nothing to her

[roscowgo]

Noodle....I feel your pain.

I have a user, I'll call mine....er....goofball. Goofball is a lovely person. Taken the whole hippie outlook and applied it to herself. friendly giving etc. also crazy as a loon. We gave her a new desktop machine. She complained it had a high pitched "screech". I went and listened..it didn't. Normal steel case fan noise at the very most. meanwhile goofball....is loosing her mind. I'd love to help her. But I can't exactly telnet into a crazy persons head and shutdown their ears.

She's running around holding her ears, actually weeping.... ok weeping. Alright, at weeping level the boss gets called in. Boss looks listens...tells goofball. I can't hear anything. sorry.

Goofball lasts two more days....and seems to settle down. Pass in the hall Hey how are you doing with that new computer, oh it's alot better now etc etc.

Then she calls me.... It wont come on. Goofball has stuck a Pencil into the power supply fan on her computer. This is the only air outlet on these cases. I felt like I was watching wild kingdom and someone had cornered a tiger. Thats the only reason I can think of that she would try to stab her computer into submission.

[Johnj]

roscowgo, you may want to pick up a sound power meter from Radio Shack or some place like that. Goofball may be sensitive to that frequency and the solution could be as simple as putting a different speed fan in the power supply. I bought some of those fluorescent bulbs, that are shaped like regular light bulbs, and when I use them I can hear them humming. You might be surprised how noisy the office environment really is, and how much of it you've tuned out.

[noodlenoggin]

Get HP
We get our desktops from HP at the hospital, and the cpu fan is throttle-able in the BIOS settings. There's a neat little slider bar, and it normally turns lazily at "1" but at "10" it sounds like a GE Turbofan pushing a 737 down a runway. Fun to play with.

Okay, forget HP
We seem to be in the market for a new computer at the noodle homestead. We do most of our internetting on a laptop that's relatively old, and the other morning I opened the screen to find a definite green hue. Also every other pixel missing. I wiggled it and it went back to normal. By that evening there was no more "back to normal." So right now I have an LCD monitor plugged into the extra video port and it's hogging up space on our little desk.

First, I looked up replacement screens on eBay. $180 for a used screen pulled from an identical model. $150 for just the LCD guts. Gad. Refurb'd laptop from the NewTigerEggDirect.com.net.buy.me website starts around $400 and travels upward. Desktop pc's...hey, now, I can get a nearly-3GHz desktop pc for under $300.

So I did some research on Tom's Hardware Page about current hardware and find that an AMD Athlon 64 X2 pc is about three hairs shy of an Intel Core2 Duo Extreme pc in terms of eyeball-blistering performance...but the entire system is about $300, where just the IC2DE processor is twice that.

So I can spend $300 and get a really fast computer...new, even. This blows my mind. I remember when we bought our first computer, back in 1987. It ran at a whopping 7MHz, had 256KB of memory and had no hard drive, no modem, no network, no mouse and ran in DOS version 2.11. I used it until I graduated from college in 1995. It cost us $1,100, with the snazzy daisy-wheel printer.

The next computer we got was our first Windows pc...we got a Wal-Mart special, a 486DX...we moved up to 66MHz and were lovin' it. We had a real hard drive, 8MB of memory, Windows95 and we paid $996 for it in 1996. We only used it for a couple of years before the next pc.

It was 1998, our old 486 was ailing badly, and I decided to BUILD a new computer. I made us a nice Celeron (like a Pentium II) running at an unprecedented (for us) 400MHz. I used good parts, and we paid about $1,100. We still have it. I've Frankensteined it up to a PentiumIII, running at 700MHz, using free parts from work that were destined for the scrap-heap.

So the realization (yeah, I DO have a point to all this! So nyah!) that I don't have to spend another grand for a new computer is like a soothing balm on a sunburn -- like a soothing kamikaze on a visit from the in-laws -- it's a pleasant realization, anyway.

So there we are.