Earthquake!

I've apparently experienced my first earthquake, 7.0 on the Richter scale off the coast of Eureka. Absolutely nothing happened, and the tsunami warnings for further up the coast never came to anything. In fact, the first I heard about it was when it was on the news just now. It was a bit anti-climactic, really.

Like this entry.

Bits and PCs

To keep me occupied during the times that Whitney's working at the garden centre, I've been fixing some computers at her dad's offices. (I should probably refrain from using the word "job", because I'm not technically allowed to work here yet).

When I come to think about it, it's the first time that I've been helping out with something that remotely relates to computer science - finding the specifications of computers, pulling them apart, putting them back together with bits left over, and using those bits in other computers. So far I've almost assembled three competent machines from a selection of four aging scrapheaps and a gigantic ex-server that's about three feet tall. The average speed of them is just under 1GHz, which isn't exactly up to modern standards, but they're decent for what they're used for.

It also gives me the opportunity to see a bit of how the lawyer's business works - I was taken to the recording office before lunch, where I was temporarily promoted to Attorney to gain entrance to the library. During the half hour that I held this position I was in charge of a stapler which failed to drive staples through paper (which is a fairly vital property as far as staplers are concerned).

The recording process consisted of waiting around until our number came up, as if we were at a delicatessen counter, then going through to an office and waiting for ages more while the woman behind the counter checked through the forms. About halfway through, the most typical Californian convertible driver in the world swaggered in wearing a tank top, shorts and a pair of gigantic sunglasses and started talking at great length and volume with the employees about his cars and motorbikes. This delayed the process even further, because Captain Cyclingshorts was obviously a regular and the woman serving us considered his conversation a higher priority than property transfer papers.

I tried to save the more technical bit of this entry until the end of the entry so that you can just forget about it. Windows 2000 is an awkward thing to use, though. I had actually expected to be able to swap hard drives directly, but this just produces a terrifying blue screen and the message "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE", in all caps and with underscores instead of spaces to make it look more threatening. "Hardware Malfunction", that was a good one as well. Still, it's an adventure to try some more hardware-based things than I normally do, especially as it doesn't really matter if I manage to break them.