July 1, 2014

This morning I woke up earlier than usual and went to my banks to move some money around so I could buy a laptop today. I am perfectly happy with my desktop but I am pretty sure I'll need a laptop for grad school. I'll be able to take it to my weekend classes and work on school work at the theater on the weekends I work. It will also come in handy for stuff I work on at school during the year, like spreadsheets and the slideshow, if I do that again.

Today at work I read books, including a new book I started because why not. I probably spent an equal amount of time ingesting movies and trailers and then building and transferring movies. Fun stuff. The tech was there fixing stuff and I talked with him for awhile. He has been there several times and he is much more personable than the other one. He was mainly there to fix the dead Doremi screen for one of the theaters and to fix the dead automation on another theater. I mentioned the fact that on one of the theaters we have to shift the picture back and forth between 2D and 3D movies and wanted to know if something could be done. Usually we just have to turn the zoom part of the lens because 2D and 3D movies are different sizes. But on this theater neither seemed to be centered so there was no winning, and we frequently have it double-booked with 2D and 3D movies. It became quite annoying having to shift the lens back and forth, when you remembered, and hope it didn't look too bad. He went in and tweaked some stuff that re-centered both types of movies, so now we should be back to just adjusted the zoom to get the right size. That will be nice.

After dinner I watched today's World Cup games. The United States played second and normally I would have fast-forwarded through the first game but Argentina was playing and I wanted to watch Lionel Messi play. He had a fairly uneventful game, as did pretty much everyone else, but it was thanks to him and his propensity to get surrounded by and distract players from the other team, when he got the attention of three or four guys before passing the ball to a wide-open teammate who scored a goal. It took them until the extra thirty-minute period but I'm glad it didn't make it to the penalty shootout because I wasn't feeling very confident with the Argentinian goalkeeper.

The United States game was disappointing and the World Cup has now lost some of its excitement. The United States relied on their defense most of the game, especially their goalkeeper, who ended up having the most saves in World Cup history (since they started keeping track of that stuff over fifty years ago). They managed to keep the score tied at zero but shortly after the thirty-minute extra time started Belgium scored, and before the break they had scored again. The United States managed to score in the second fifteen minutes, and were very forceful in their attack for the rest of the game, getting close to scoring on numerous occasions, but they just weren't able to do it. That really sucks. And now I feel about Belgium like I do about Ghana. And Italy and Spain and Portugal and the Netherlands. But those last ones are just because they spend so much of the game trying to draw fouls and yellow cards. It's a different kind of dislike but Belgium is now on the list. Argentina better beat them in the quarterfinals.

While I was watching the Argentina game I did the last little bit of research on my laptop, making a few changes to my build, and then bought it. I went with CyberPower again, the same place I got my desktop because I liked all of the customization. There is more with desktops but with the laptop I was able to pick the CPU, RAM, hard drives, and a few other things. It is going to be a pretty badass little laptop, better than any laptop I would have gotten somewhere else, and a lot cheaper at the same time. I'm excited about it. I know there are horror stories out there about CyberPower computers but my previous experience was a good one. My graphics card was a lemon when I got it but it was really easy getting another one sent to me to swap it out. So I am confident with the build quality, and if something is wrong, that I can get it resolved quickly.

Randomness. I recently rediscovered the rapper K.Flay. I like her voice.

And now I'm going to go to bed. It is much too late for me to be awake. Although it could be quite a bit later so I can't really complain. Which is a strange sentiment considering immediately prior to that I just said it was “too late for me to be awake.” But maybe it's just late enough for me to start typing ridiculous things.