Teleidoscope

Tue, Apr 08, 2008

Errands

Posted at 10:25 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

After work today I ran some errands. I stopped at Costco to refill my prescriptions, then went up to Nanette's to say hello and pick up a dozen eggs.

We ended up going out to dinner at the "Maharaja" restaurant on 28th Street in Boulder, where we had the dinner buffet. All of the food was excellent, with well-balanced spices (and good spices rather than just heat). The naan that came with the meal was tasty, and the chai was very good: nicely balanced spices again (lots of chai blends have more cardamom than I prefer, or maybe more pepper) and nicely sweet without being sticky.

Then I began my quest for King Arthur Flour and vitamins and St. John's Wort.

I found the Bluebonnet Vitamins that I can actually swallow at the Boulder Whole Foods. They are quite expensive, but they replace three additional supplements besides the other multivitamins I was taking, and they have iron, which I need.

But it looks like Whole Foods are no longer carrying regular All-Purpose King Arthur Flour, just the 100% Organic variety, which is much more expensive. The only regular All-Purpose flour they offered was their house brand, which I don't want.

And they don't carry NatureMade St. John's Wort -- I suppose as a national brand it is too mundane for them.

Vitamin Cottage stocks only an occasional token bag of flour, and doesn't stock NatureMade herbs.

The Barnes & Noble between Whole Foods and Vitamin Cottage in the same shopping center had a couple of books I'd been waiting for: including the third book in Karen Traviss' second trilogy.

The big Boulder King Soopers a few blocks from Whole Foods had both organic and regular King Arthur Flour. I hope they are not just finishing off theirNext time I get low

They also had NatureMade herbs, but only the time-release kind, which I don't trust for herbs.

I think I am going to find an on-line source of the NatureMade St. John's Wort. The postage won't be any more expensive than gas for special trips to Walgreen's where I don't usually shop.

On my way home I stopped at my mailbox, which is 1/2 mile from my house. There was a package from Amazon in it, which I didn't remember ordering. It turned out to be a gift of a Mario Batali cookbook that I didn't already have, and some cute little Mario Batali brand mixing bowls. This was a total surprise and very nice.

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Not a Good Sign

Posted at 10:25 pm MDT to Technology

Today my big laptop, sophia, overheated and shut itself down a little before noon. I don't think the processor fan was working: that part of the case was very hot to the touch. When I rebooted it, the fan must have started up, because a little while later parts of the case that had been too hot to touch were back down close to room temperature.

I immediately started a full backup of my /home partition to the big server.

The last time I had a laptop motherboard start flaking out, I tried to nurse it along for a few months before I finally replaced it. We discovered last fall that the master copies of some programs I had written were corrupted by the memory problems in that failing laptop. I still need to recreate those one of these days...

I did my taxes yesterday, and expect a fairly hefty refund in the next 10 days or so (electronic filing and direct deposit), so I ordered a new laptop, with second day delivery, from LinuxCertified. (They were having a sale until 4/12.) This will be my third laptop from them.

The new laptop will be a little smaller than sophia, for easier travelling. Actually, I think it is the follow-on model for 'bastet', the laptop sophia replaced, which was a nice little machine, and good for multimedia. (Sophia's speakers are hopelessly inadequate.)

It will have a dual core Intel T7300, which will be handy for running virtual systems. A 32 bit operating system instead of 64-bit will be useful,too: I seem to be running into more and more business needs for Java which is very poorly supported on 64 bit Linux. I ordered Ubuntu 7.10, which is what I've become used to, but may reconfigure to Fedora 8 after the machine arrives.

I didn't competely max out the processor this time, (the T7300 was about midrange of what was offered for the chassis I chose) so maybe I can avoid frying this motherboard quite as soon as usual. (Running the poor things 18 hours a day doesn't help...) I did max out the memory and hard drive, and get a dvd-writer and wifi.

I also ordered a spare power supply. If I didn't suspect that sophia's days are numbered, I would have inquired about a extra power supply for it, too. The pinout on the power connecter is peculiar, and not supported by my Targus emergency laptop supply. The power connector on the new machine may turn out to be a standard plug like bastet's was (so the Targus connectors would work, but I don't want to gamble on that.

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