California stuff

In California for two weeks, leaving this Saturday. I expect to be in the Bay Area late the second week, and I'd be interested in meeting up with people there; let me know if you're in the area and want to get together.

Hopefully FCRC will be reasonably interesting; there's been some talk of MIT vs. Stanford paintball, to prove who really does have the dominant streaming architecture. Then some wandering with my parents across the Southwest. Then "home", at which I've never lived. (Aren't parents moving great that way?) Then back here.

I wonder if I should go meet some of the Debian people in San Diego. I've never really thought of it as a terribly social project, but it also seems like it couldn't hurt, and it does give me something to do for an evening out there.

The watertown question

My desktop machine (named watertown; it makes sense if you know the naming scheme) is about three years old now. It feels a little pokey sometimes; its processor is a 700 MHz Athlon, it has 256 MB of RAM, it only has a 20 GB hard drive. There's this thought that I'd be happier about the machine and I'd use it more if I replaced some of the crufty components, and each of them individually would probably be well within my toy budget.

But wait. Now I'm buying a motherboard/CPU, and memory, and a hard drive. I have a spare video card. Now I'm a case and a network card away from having an entirely new computer. Maybe I should do that instead. And then I could either sell the old machine or use it as a backup Windows box to play games on.

So now I've decided to spend a moderate amount of money on replacing my desktop machine. But wait: I don't actually use that machine very much. Part of it is that it's a little slow, but another part of it is that I have a work-provided laptop, and spend huge amounts of my life in front of other computers anyways, and so having a good desktop machine is only slightly appealing. Something to play Black and White and Train Simulator on is useful, as is something with a real keyboard and two real screens, but that doesn't seem worth spending that amount of money on.

...which takes us back to the incremental thing: I can more easily justify spending a unit of money here and there to myself if it makes me happy. Aaagh. Decisions...