Deadline days

Today was a good day. I skipped writing this morning because I needed to write something for work, and I knew it would take me a while. A one page promise that turned out to be three. I said I would need more time if I was going to make it shorter. A maxim I picked up somewhere about good writing. I was actually happy with the result; I’m not to bad a writer sometimes, I’ll admit.

I have another deadline tomorrow, one that I’m dreading a bit more, only because it’s a bunch of data validation that requires significant attention to detail. Not my strong suit. But I made promises to the community so I need to get it done.

I ran six miles after work. I’ve been listening to a Rich Roll interview on the Tim Ferriss pod and it’s speaking to me. I’m already mapping out how far I need to get up to miles seven through ten.

I got back and the neighbors were over, Missus had ordered pizza, which I kinda intuited that she would, based on the fact that we were woken up this morning by Younger coming into the bed, unable to breathe through her nose. I’m sure she was dragging ass today, and she was on a work or union call at 4:30, so I texted her “going for a run, see you in an hour” and took off.

My boy Ed G. came by yesterday, he brought me a 3070Ti card for my gaming rig. It’s a loan. I gave him my Oculus CV1 and cooked him dinner. Tarkov, Cyberpunk and FarCry all look great, but I’m down to one relatively tiny 19″ monitor instead of the three I usually have, so I broke down and bought a couple adapters as well as a $150 pair of wireless headphones. Ed tried to get me to buy a $350 30″ monitor, but I told him I was working through my budget and had too much going on to redesign my new build. I don’t just have one monitor, I have three upstairs and two downstairs, so I got a lot going on. Still I’m thankful that I can play on ultra settings now, it’s pretty nice. I’m just glad I didn’t pay $1300 for the pleasure, I would have been disappointed.

Now $1300 on a 49″ monitor, or even better, a $1400 Vibe 2 Pro with 5K VR… that might be awesome.

I’m working a budget though, setting aside $1000 a month toward these discretionary computer upgrades. And the rule is that I can’t buy anything without getting rid of something else. I may have a spare GPU now, but I got the Oculus out of the house. I’ve got a MacBook coming in toward the end of the month, so I’ve got to consolidate. Right now I’ve got:

  • ancient laptop I gave to Elder that has been unused for months
  • eight year old work laptop with dock that is getting replaced by the MacBook
  • newer Alienware laptop that I’m using now and like to travel with
  • Elder’s desktop (my last gaming machine)
  • Missus’s desktop (repurposed client machine) that she uses and that hosts our home entertainment torrent videos
  • current gaming machine
  • mining rig (which has blown another power cable and is only running with 5/6 cards…)

That’s a total of seven monitors that I’m using, plus a 47″ Samsung TV that were all manufactured around 2008. I already operated on the TV once a few years ago. A capacitor burst and I replaced it with my soldering iron.

I didn’t quite mean to turn this into a minimalism post, but here we are.