Almost Flipped Out

Last night I charged my RAZR flip phone to full, and this morning I was woken up early. Since I use my cell phone as my alarm clock, I turned the phone off and went about my day. However, when I went to turn the cell phone back on (about an hour later), nothing happened.

My first thought was, “OMG I have forgotten which button turns my cell phone on.” I usually leave it on, and I haven’t had to power it off in months. I tried just about every combination of buttons, and nothing happened. My second thought was, “WTF another electronic device failing arrrrrrrggggggghhhh.” It was a mental groan of despair, but I was pretty upset.

I finally looked up the manual online and found that the power button was exactly what I thought it was (the red, end call button). I know this sounds silly, but the buttons aren’t labeled. Still, nothing happened. I finally looked up some posts and found many other people had had this problem. I think it might have something to do with the phone mistakenly thinking that there is no more battery power left and refusing to wake up. I can relate, because sometimes I feel this way in the morning. So I took the battery out, waited about a minute, put the battery back in, and tried again. It took a little longer than usual to turn on, but this did the trick.

Goodbye WoW!

Last night, I rather abruptly cancelled my World of Warcraft account. While in many ways, this was influenced heavily by Bunky, I have to admit that it is probably for the best. While I was still enjoying the game, I think I could see a bit of the end of the road, especially with the new content provided in the expansion.

The main thing I’m sure I’ll miss from WoW is the great social interaction with my OOM guildmates. Partying with Octos, Molridia, Penda, Faalena, and Truflight was highly entertaining, and we had some great conversations over Vent. Hopefully they will be able to progress to bigger and better content, and I have to admit to feeling a bit bad for taking my level 70 priest out of the mix. I had been playing my current characters for about a year or more, and so I had grown attached to them (especially to Rozamystica and Sariana).
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Computer Armory

For my own future reference, here are the specs of the recently ordered computer:

Case
Cooler Master Centurion 5: I like how it looks, although I do worry about the possibility of having to clean a lot of cat hair out of the foam… I like that the internal bits can be swapped around without needing tools. The one I ordered supposedly has a window, which is nice. I swapped out the under-powered 350w PSU that comes with it, per Velius’ (and other peoples’) suggestion. The new PSU is a 550w Legolas Logisys. I hear the cheap ones can fail just as easily as the really expensive ones, so I went cheap.

Motherboard
Biostar I945GZ-M775 mATX with Intel 945GZ chipset and 8-channel audio: Pretty much the cheapest motherboard that would give me a PCI-e 16 slot and hook up to an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Only supports 2×1GB of DDR2-533 RAM, but I’ll probably need a new computer by the time I need more than 2GB RAM.

CPU
Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz processor: I really didn’t want to get a Pentium D, and I am a little shy of AMD this time. I like what I’ve read about the Core 2 Duo line, so I got the cheapest one…

Hard Drive
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 250GB: Nothing too special, although it’s amazing how cheap space is these days. I more than tripled the amount the HD could hold for $30.

Memory
Corsair Value Select DDR2-533: I got two 1GB sticks of the stuff, and I’ve read that it’s a reasonable bargain without too much performance loss.

Graphics
nVidia GeForce 7100GS 256MB: Not really very good; supposedly the 7100GS is just a reworking of the GeForce 6200. Oh well, what’s the point of paying much for a DirectX-9 card anyway?

Audio
Random onboard 6-channel audio: I never splurge for a sound card.

Optical Drive
Random CD/DVD thing: I already have two reasonably new CD/DVD Read/Write drives.

I didn’t bother getting a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or OS because I already have all those things. I’m going to wait on Vista, as per Catnip’s suggestion; perhaps the Vista purchase will accompany the purchase of a new DirectX-10 GFX card in the future. Other than that, I totally cheaped out because I’m finding more and more than computers are becoming disposable after only a few years.

I Thought YOU Were Bringing the Dungeons

This morning I entered the office to find that the temperature had dropped to sub-zero levels. The A/C was cranked to max, and I had not brought a jacket. However, I just assumed my office-mate felt the room was very warm, since he is much farther from the A/C than I am and so I didn’t say anything. About 2 hours later, my supervisor came in to tell me some news and remarked, “Um, are you guys trying to make it really chilly in here?” I can’t see my office-mate from my desk and so I was surprised to hear him say, “I’m freezing. I have my jacket on.” Apparently it was warm this morning so he had turned up the A/C and then thought I wanted the A/C turned up high. So basically we spent the entire morning freezing for no reason.

Speaking of freezing, I went ahead and ordered a new PC from Directron (the one with the Cooler Master Centurion 5 case). Shipping was a bit expensive at $80, but there was no tax. The computer came to $594, since I went with DDR2 533 after reading more about the motherboard. Hopefully it will arrive by Monday or earlier, since I’ll be out of town from Saturday till Tuesday afternoon.