DINNER 99: Sunday, April 9, 2006
After closing night of DINNER WITH FRIENDS, we all went out for drinks and merriment. Wendy & I got to bed around 2:00am. It seemed as if I’d just laid my head down and closed my eyes when suddenly it was 9:45am, time to get up and go back down to the theater for strike. Strike is the process of dismantling a show — taking down the sets, returning props to their owners, and resetting the space for the next occupant. Fortunately, our set was sparse and came down very quickly. Our entire strike was complete in less than 90 minutes.
We went home to unload our stuff and met up with Robin & Dave. We decided to combine errands a bit… Wendy & Dave went out shopping for a suit for Dave and a few things for Wendy while Robin and I went to set up his PVR, a project I’ve been encouraging Robin on for a while now. So, we headed in our different directions — Dave and Wendy to the malls and clothing stores, Robin and me to their house.
As we were working on his computer, Robin complained that it wasn’t running very quickly. I examined the machine and discovered that it was old and with very little memory — it had only 128 megs! I explained to Robin that we’d need to get additional memory and a larger hard drive since the 20 gig hard drive (I told you it was an old machine!) offered only 4 hours of recording time within Beyond TV. So we went to CompUSA to check their memory prices. As it turns out, to get the memory Robin needed would have cost him about $300. Plus a new 300 gig hard drive for $100… and it was too expensive. We decided to check the memory prices at MicroCenter and found them to be the same. Robin suggested looking at a new computer and we found a nice machine — a PowerSpec 1406 (3.0Ghz Celeron, 40 gig hard drive, and 128 megs memory). He bought a 512 meg memory stick (for $30!) and we’re set. We stop by our house to pick up a Windows XP installation CD since the PowerSpec comes pre-installed with Linspire, which is a fine Linux-based OS, but not compatible with Beyond TV. Then it was off to their house to install and configure the machine.
It went reasonably well, albeit slowly since I had to identify, locate, and download the correct drivers for the various subsystems on the PowerSpec. When I left, we had a configured machine with only a couple questions remaining. The machine should be fully operational this week.
Dave & Wendy arrived at the house after we did — they had a good day of shopping and were successful in their missions. We had dinner with Dave & Robin, delivery from LaRosa’s. I had my usual — a steak hoagie, and Wendy had a cibatta of some sort. I worked for another half-hour on the machine before Wendy & I called it a night and went home, climbed in bed, and read for a while before turning out lights early.