The company I worked for bought another company... and now is laying people off in Poland, Colorado, Pennsylvania... and here in Des Moines ( Read more... )

jmaynard , you might find this of interest:
Charles Johnson Blames Right-Wing 'Bigotry' and 'Hatred' for Leftist Non-Profit Employee's Attack on New York Muslim Cabdriver
Read, as Glen Reynolds would say, the whole thing.

OU's Athletic Department has decided that, starting this year, they will charge $5 for parking at Lloyd Noble for people going to the Norman Medieval Fair. The folks who run the Fair had nothing to do with this decision, and are getting precisely $0 of the money from the parking fee ( Read more... )

XM radio is running Hanukkah music on channel 28 for the duration of the holiday. There's a surprising variety of music--some of which will break your heart, some of which is a total hoot ("Shalom, Y'All", or Hanukkah music in the style of Elvis, anyone?). Check it out.

Gigabyte asks whether I've tried installing Windows on the computer.

No, and I'm not going to unless there's some version I can legally install without paying money to Microsoft--and as far as I can tell, the Windows 7 release candidate download isn't available any more.

So... we're at home, and I doubt we'll be heading out again until late Wednesday or early Thursday. It's pretty darned grim out.

"Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn from Twilight"

Not sure whether I should list my mood as amused or nauseated...

So, here's the story. We started out with the following:

• Apevia X-QPACK2-NW black micro ATX case w/500W power supply
• Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H micro ATX motherboard
• G.Skill 2 x 2GB DDR3 1333 RAM
• AMD Athlon II 620 Propus 2.6 GHz quad core CPU
• Western Digital Caviar Green 750GB SATA hard drive

The positive airway pressure device has flaked out, and here we are in Oklahoma for Thanksgiving. Fortunately, we're able to rent one from Norman Regional Home Medical for a month--and given the vagaries of insurance, we might be best off just buying it.

So here I am, or rather, there I was (it was last night), trying to put together my sister's new computer. I ordered the parts and had them shipped to her place the preceding week.

Graphics cards these days are at the high end of the "wee, not so wee, and FRIGGIN' HUGE!" scale, largely because of the humongous fans that they have for cooling. The ( Read more... )