My Puffy Shirt Smells Like Bait
July 6th, 2009I’m Back
I am home from the sea.
We took Val Prieto and his uncle out again today. Sadly, the only fish we hooked while trolling got away. Val thinks it was a wahoo; I only got a glimpse of it. I love wahoo steaks.
We did a little bottom fishing and caught two groupers, but they were below the legal size limit, so we threw them back to die. I caught a few disgraceful fish not worth naming.
The boat has been vibrating lately. Val volunteered to go down and look at the shafts, which is great, because I hate driving with water in my underwear. Guess what he found wrapped around the left prop shaft? Some woman’s bathing suit. I realize Miami is full of perverts, so the skinny-dipping is not a surprise. But usually, you don’t expect them to remain naked all the way home. I’m glad she wasn’t fat. If her suit had been bigger, instead of making the boat shake, it might have stopped the engines entirely.
I don’t know what a woman’s bathing suit costs, but surely it’s worth retrieving with a boathook after you’ve had your fun.
It’s a tremendous privilege to get out on the water on your own huge private boat, regardless of whether you catch anything. Val’s uncle is fighting cancer, so it’s always good to learn that he’s in good shape and able to go. Val says it’s in remission. His uncle doesn’t speak English well, but as he left, he said that with luck, he expected to be with us again next year. I sure hope so.
Back to real life. My computer is acting up. I think it’s overheating. Intel supplies very cheesy plastic pins to connect this type of chip to the heatsink, and mine are so messed up, if you breathe on them hard, you have to take the computer apart and put everything back in thermal contact. I assume I knocked something loose when I installed the new burner. Let’s see what the CPU temperature is. It should be under 40° C.
Of course it’s 50. Time to yank a bunch of cables and clear space on the kitchen table. I swear, if I could get a C clamp onto the motherboard, I’d do it. Anything to hold that stupid heatsink on.
I smell, I need water, and my computer is probably about to conk out again. So goodbye.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:25 PM
It’s time for a mac, my friend!
July 6th, 2009 at 4:37 PM
Are you using a “stock” CPU fan? I’m using a big Blue Orb cooler and it works great. Be sure to use heat transfer paste, but not too much (blah blah blah nag nag nag).
Oh, and check your hard drives. Sometimes they get hot and start goofing up. I had a problem with that a while back.
July 6th, 2009 at 5:20 PM
Don’t wanna crow BUT… I used to be an Intel guy. Needless to say, my AM2 core temp is running around (goes and looks) 40C.
My CPU is a 45 watt AM2. Been thinking of getting a 65 watt dual. Probably have to increase the speed on the ceiling fan, eh?
July 6th, 2009 at 6:34 PM
I don’t know what an AM2 is. I have had AMD, Cyrix, and Intel, and none of them were anything to brag about.
The only thing standing between me and the inevitable Mac is the horrendous chore of moving everything and trying to figure out how to make the Mac run my Windows programs without driving me insane.
Of course, if Macs are good now, in a few years, they’ll be crap again, and then I’ll have to switch back to a PC. This is a fundamental rule of computing.
July 6th, 2009 at 6:59 PM
You’re not doing any serious computing, so an Imac would be fine. Plus, they have real (intel) processors and real video drivers, so they work well too. A nice side benefit is the way macs handle pictures. Very nicely. The good news is that OSX is mostly unix based so it’s clean and fast and doesn’t have a lot of DLLS and bullshit to make it slow down over time.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:24 PM
I always hated spending the afternoon reeling two or three poor edible fish up from 150 feet, seeing their innards balooning out of rear ends and mouths and gills due to the pressure change, and then throwing them back overboard because of government “size limts” so the Sharks and Barracudas can chop it into chum in the name of helping the species “recover”.
(I finally learned to at least poke their air bladder with a sharp awl and give them a chance to dive back down to the bottom.)
July 7th, 2009 at 3:52 AM
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=459781
Cheers