WhimsyLand

Well, I've spent half the day loading my new system.  I was just going to put this big Quad Duo 2 monster in my existing system, but owing to the incredibly stupid socket 775, I ended up ruining yet another heat sink + fan, and decided to just get another enclosure.  I also found that the ambient temperature inside my existing enclosure was too warm for the Quad Duo.  As CompUSA is going out of business, there were plenty of choices, including this giant box with an 8" fan on the side panel, a 6" fan on the front, and a 6" fan on the back, not to mention the monstrous finned fan arrangement that is perched on the Quad Duo and the fan on the power supply.  Let's hope they don't compete with each other and completely screw up the airflow.  I'm starting with 4GB of DDR2 memory and a couple of 150GB Raptor drives.  The latter run at 10,000 RPM, have seek and write times of about 5 milliseconds, and latency of 3 milliseconds.  They are, in short, bad ass.  I'm also biting the bullet and installing Vista Ultimate, now that they have Service Pack 1 out.  My video adapter is a relatively modest mid-range NVidia card.  I don't play games on this system and I just need hi-res support for the two 22" screens that span my desk.  Most of the work so far has been loading software all over again, which in turn requires me to find the various registration passwords and CD keys.  I've spent 6 hours loading already, and I'm not done yet.  Up and ready are Visual Studio 6.0, VS2003.NET and VS2005.  Also Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, Visio and Project.  I've loaded and tested a Keil 8051 IDE/compiler, Adobe Acrobat, and MySQL Maestro, Ethereal, Cygwin, Source Insight, PKZIP, VNC, and IDA Pro.  I'm probably going to stop there until I find out I'm missing something.  Keeping the old system up and networked will let me grab what I need anyway.

So, is it fast?  Well, yes, it is.  Outlook, which is a complete pig on my old single-core Pentium doesn't cause everything on the system to pause while it does something stupid.  Vista is supposed to handle multitasking and multiple processors pretty well, so that's helping.  Program startup is quick and anything that involves disk access is much quicker.  The system was surprisingly reasonable:  $250 for the processor, $150 for the Gigabyte motherboard, $120 for the video card, $69 for the fire sale enclosure, $40 for the DVD burner, $180 for the DRAM, and $7 for the floppy drive.  All the software was "free" if you discount the fact that we pay $2,000 a year for an MSDN subscription, which provides multiple installations of virtually all of Microsoft's products. 

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The March/April Poets & Writers (which I received a week ago, what is it about publications and their future publication dates?) has Tobias Wolff on the cover looking smug and somewhat lecherous.  Dan Barden pens "A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes", which he contends are occasionally useful but on the whole just the flawed spawn of the seminar, and also tells an interesting anecdote that involves Paul Muldoon.  I don't know if they always did this (I didn't think so) but the Page One section features some initial lines from poetry books now, this from Eavan Boland: "Liffey, tawny and asleep in the browsing dusk, / Clings to the dark, enchanted ovals / of the bridge".  Most of the rest of the examples were equally yawn-inducing.  Literary MagNet gives some props to Pindeldyboz (which I've never heard of) and Narrative (which I might have heard of) and Bellevue Literary Review (who has rejected me countless times).  Paul Graham follows the The Rilke Trail through Europe and reports the results.  Alexandra Enders has an article on The Importance of Place ("Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up, D. H. Lawrence under a tree. ... Ben Franklin wrote in the bathtub").   I guess my question is does anybody really believe such nonsense?  Can you imagine how wrinkled you'd be if you wrote, for example, Poor Richard's Almanac while soaking in 18th century water, cold as it probably was?  Mark Doty writes a pretty good article on A Poet's Approach to Memoir.  Spring Essence includes poems by "some of the country's most accomplished poets" along with pen and ink drawings of them (Jorie actually looks something like her age in this one).  Poets included:  Cornelius Eady, Jorie Graham, (the ever irascible) August Kleinzahler, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, James Tate, and C.D. Wright.  There were more fiction articles and the usual zillion ads and announcements.

See you tomorrow.