Computer Troubles

Today is day 6 of the liquid diet, and it's officially gotten old. Today for dinner, I mixed curry paste with my cream of chicken soup and dumped in my veggies to make some sort of neo-laksa. It was about 5% as good as the real thing, which is about 100 times better than anything I've eaten lately. I'm eating a sugar-free snack pack of chocolate pudding as I write this, while Bernie is entertaining Fio and James at a Chinese buffet.

I'm trying not to think about chinese buffets.

Earlier this week, my computer decided to start randomly rebooting like it did when it was new and needed warranty work. Since it is now long out of warranty, I made an appointment at a local repair place (thereby losing my geek card permanently). After disconnecting it, I realized I should probably clean up any sensitive information on the hard drive first, and then I discovered it wouldn't boot up at all. So much for that idea.

Anyway, it turns out the power supply is toast and the video card too. The video card was probably the cause of the reboots, because it continued to cause them after the power supply was replaced. Once it was removed from the equation, the system was stable again. The repair shop replaced the power supply for me ($75 labor, $25 part).

In the meantime, Bernie's new PC arrived (this was a Christmas present, which I don't feel like wrapping, so she gets it early), and it needs a video card, so we drove down the street to a computer shop that the repair guy recommended. I bought two video cards, and decided to expand my system's memory to 2GB so I wouldn't be too far behind my wife's new PC, which has 3GB.

It turns out the guys who run the place are Chinese, and their parents are Malaysians who moved to Hong Kong, then moved the family to Charlotte 15 years ago. This probably marks only the third time we've run into Malaysians (I consider them Malaysian, even though they were born in Hong Kong) in Charlotte in the last 3 years, and all of them own their own businesses. Bernie got to chat with them in Cantonese, which made her happy.

So, to sum up, I've lost about 15 pounds in a week on the liquid diet, which I'm getting tired of. I have my PC working again with more memory and a better video card. Bernie has a new PC. Fio and James are visiting us, and we met a couple of Chinese Malaysians from Hong Kong in Charlotte. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot - the Christmas tree is up.