To Do, Or Not To Do

Well, to do, I guess, as I've knocked another item off the Big List of Things To Do (TM).

Now, I must go take my remote controlled helicopter downstairs for the girls to play with before they explode...

Malled

I took Katie and Julie out to do some Christmas shopping for daisy_knotwise this afternoon while Gretchen went out in another direction to do some different shopping and decompress for a bit. Once we'd acquired the item of interest, I needed to decant Julie back into Gretchen's care so that Katie and I could go shop for Julie. I figured we could meet at Golf Mill Mall, which I used to go to a lot, as it was roughly in the middle of the search pattern and quite close to the Toys 'R Us that I'd targeted for the post-Julie segment of the expedition.

The food court has changed a lot. The only constants were McDonald's and Panda Express. Taco Bell and Arby's were both gone. We stalled there for a while as the girls had frozen yogurt and I had a pretzel. Then Julie became bored and wanted to go back to the car, where we waited for Gretchen to arrive.

After handling off Julie, Katie and I drove across the street to the Toys 'R Us where parking was completely impossible. Rather than continue to circle looking for a parking space, I headed home, arriving only moments after Julie and Gretchen.

And then Katie and I found the perfect presents for Julie on Amazon.

Thus do we gradually kill off brick and mortar shopping, although not for lack of trying...

A Brief Update on George Washington's Computer

My current desktop computer is one that I built in April, 2008. It's running Windows 7 Ultimate, 32-bit, upgraded from the original Windows Vista. I somewhat regret the decision to put a 32-bit OS on it now, but changing it out to a 64-bit OS would require reinstalling all of the software, which is a process too time consuming to contemplate on a computer that is still working.

I believe it is on its third set of mirrored hard drives now. The original video card and power supply have been replaced, as has one of the case fans and the heat sink fan. The memory card reader stopped working some time ago and I never bothered to replace it.

Heck, this thing still has a floppy drive.

All that said, I originally built it out with a quad-core Intel i7 chip and 4 GB of RAM and those have, thus far, proved sufficient for my needs.

Here's hoping I don't need to build a new box for quite some time. :)