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For months now I’ve been avidly coveting the Canon EOS Rebel T1i 15.1, oh, yes, I have desired to feel its heft cupped in my little hands, to buy it adequate glass & always treasure its awesomeness. To learn to be the photographer I wannabe behind its rotating viewfinder, yes.

And then I saw this:

The Olympus PEN E-P1. I know it’s the looks of this one that got me, I’m trying to say it’s the features & the size & the lens possibilities & the Live MOS sensors & a Micro Four-Thirds format for cryin’ out loud, but, let’s face it, love at first sight is way shallower than that.

I want to go everywhere & whip this thing out. I want people to see me whipping it out, and they will see, because the would notice, because it is so not one of those you-have-to-read-the-numbers-to-tell-which-it-is ones. No, no it is not. And oh, oh, I want.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

it didn’t say anything about this anywhere i could find easily, even in the manual, so i figured i’d put this on the internet if anyone’s wondering: to upgrade the memory in a Lenovo IdeaPad Y710: you basically take the whole bottom off. 7 screws (three big ones in there deep, four little ones on the surface that wobble around a lot when you unscrew them). expect to be annoyed.

i looked everywhere for this information – the manual goes as far as to tell you that the memory is a Customer Serviceable area, but stops there and doesn’t tell you a thing about how to get to it. it even goes so far as to imply that customer serviceable areas are doors that generally lead to only one thing (hard drive, memory, etc). this is a lie! the whole damn computer is under that big panel, which looks like it’s in two parts, but is one, big part.

but once you get that 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 200-pin SODIMM memory in there, and you rescrew it and flip it over and turn it on and see that gorgeous 4GB in the system properties, it’s allllll worth it.

If you have an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE , you probably want to install Windows 7. You may not even realize it, but trust me, you do. It’s easy, it’s safe, and it’s beautiful :).

For starters, I’m going to recommend you upgrade to 2GB of RAM, Crucial Technology DDR2 PC2-6400 Memory is what you’ll want for that. You could probably make do with the original 1GB, but you won’t be doing a lot of multitasking.

Have I mentioned how easy it is? Because it is, totally. There are a lot of instructions out there on the internets that talk about installing it from an SD card, but I tried that, and it sucked, so I found a way better way. What are you waiting for? The EEE’s roomy 160GB hard drive is already partitioned for your dual booting pleasure – for that is what I am recommending, dual booting. You’ll get the choice of which OS every time you start up.

“perhaps taking the spam somewhere else would be advisable.”

in response to a lighthearted hopeful invitation to something i’d been working on & have a strong desire to see succeed. in retrospect yes this was spam. obviously it was, it’s spam if it’s called spam & that’s that, right?  in context, arguments could be made that i’d always been relevant &/or at least on topic in communications with this accuser, and in this case … well i flat put my foot in my mouth, or at least the variant of that you do with fingers on keys. i was wrong in that way you know wrong after you’ve done it & while it still does not feel anything like that, yet, the consequences are clear.

that felt far more awful than it should have. there are no worse words i could be called, or have used in sentences that referred to my actions. none. they not only do not exist, they *can* not exist.

my head hurts.

and even though this is the first time i’ve blogged in howevermany months, the thought of linking to this from anywhere for any reason seems like … feels like … well what if there is a spammer in me, one i can’t see out of some blind stupid faith in my own pleasant intentions?

and yeah. i am overreacting.  yes i am. yes i know.

spam? yeah. spam.

edited: recently while roaming around my old TMobile gallery, i found this bad cameraphone picture of the iPod in question:

i told this story once but lost it in the years of blogging which disappeared during the dark days. i shall attempt to recreate:

when chris’s mom died, we got a little money, and as per my insistence, spent a good bit on electronics. there was my late, beloved ZD8000, and, there was my iPod. it was a … i forget which gen, it was a twenty gig with a monochrome screen, all soothing blue. i remember the day i bought it at target (pronounced tar-zhay), brought it home, and immediately had a fierce attack of buyer’s remorse — what, in the fuck, had i just spent (what was it) $300 on? but then i opened the box, and held the shiny thing in my hand, and all that melted away. it was like hand-candy, and i was in love.

i try to reserve the concept of hate for instances which are most deserving of it, since i personally disapprove of hatred, in spite of my own regrettable inability to  divorce my self from the actual practice of hating. hate is wrong, & yet i hate. i hate stuff all the time. such is this hypocrisy, mine.

i fancy my self an idealist, in iconoclast, a rebel with or without any particular real reason to exist in a state of rebellion. & yet i am the sort of person who will endure seven & maybe even eighteen years of ridiculously suppressive influence & make only the most abortive & pathetic attempts to prevail & escape.

<note: i was quite hammered when i wrote this. click more at own risk>

if only i were the wishing type, i’d be on about wanting to stay up even later, typing typing typing, or ideally involved in something else which would somehow still enable me to express my self without the tiny annoying tapping noises that might wake the sleeping forces outside of me keeping me now from saying, in fullness, what i am trying to say.

isn’t that a great name for a Supreme Court case? i thought so. 

what i thought even more amazing was this text, from the decision:

Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. 

and with that, in 1964, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was overturned, once and for all. the anti-miscegenation laws are now far behind us, but do you know that until 1991, we would not have had a voting majority to agree. i’m very glad that interracial couples did not have to wait until 1991 for the general public (who are notorious assholes, as a group) to agree that it was ok for them to have this ‘basic civil right’.

equal rights should NEVER be subjected to a public vote

quote, and Supreme Court case, discovered reading Robot Monkey Pants.