Recently a coworker was telling me differently, that you are not allowed to cross the double yellow lines at all. Somebody was obviously wrong. It took a great deal of research to find the answer. Plenty of material said yellow lines are not meant to be crossed, but nothing explained the purpose of the white line.  Finally I found this:

Section 21460 Double Lines
The purpose of the solid-white single line on the inside of the double yellow lines on buffered HOV lanes is to permit vehicles to legally drive to the left of the double yellow lines as defined in the provisions of this section.

In earlier readings I understood that double yellow lines also signify the division between opposing sides of traffic. So technically it would be illegal to be driving in a carpool lane without that white line there.

That’s just stupid. Use double white lines instead. Duh.

Basically, it’s like this: Vista is great and fairly solid on machines that were designed to run it. Vista is an unstable dung heap on computers that were upgraded and not originally running Vista.

My laptop, which isn’t a year old yet, came with Vista on it, and I have yet to see it crash once. Well, it sort of froze during a shutdown once, but that’s it. Everything I’ve plugged into it (which admittedly isn’t much) has worked flawlessly and without the need for external drivers. Aside from having to re-learn where everything is in this operating system, I’ve been fairly happy with it. This was my first and only experience with Windows Vista at the time, and overall it was quite positive.

Enter my media center project. I upgraded my 7-year old Dell Dimension 4300 - gave it a faster processor, better graphics card, etc. You can read all about that in prevous posts. The last thing I did was install Vista onto it. Now, it doesn’t crash constantly, but it’s nowhere near as stable as when I had XP on it. The good thing is that the Media Center software (part of Vista Premium) works beautifully, and we are able to play Netflix streaming movies (which wouldn’t work with XP Media Center 2004 SP3). HOWEVER it seems to freeze a lot during the Netflix streaming. What the hell is Netflix doing that is causing so much grief with the latest OSes? Or maybe it’s my video card… that’s possible too. I’ve also seen Vista crash for no apparent reason from normal operations.

With all that going on, there’s no way this media center is going to replace my Tivo. So for now I just load movies into it and we use it as a movie repository as well as a Netflix streaming movie player. Later on I’m just going to go and buy a pre-built media center. It’ll save me the trouble of figuring out all the stupid things that go wrong when I’m trying to build it myself. It really is a time-suck, not to mention causes me to ramble on incessantly about the process on this blog.

To end on a positive note, I was surprised at how much more readable text is on the TV screen when using Windows Vista. On the same screen resolution using the same video card, it was barely readable in XP. It’s nice to do computer operations on it without having to get up and walk over to the monitor at the desk. At some point we can probably get rid of the monitor altogether.

I was only 10 minutes late today. Not bad for oversleeping.

The downside to this is that on Mondays they ticket everyone still parked on my street between 9 and 12 due to street cleaning. I totally forgot about this because I’m usually gone by then. Another $35 down the drain…

I was at work. During my lunch break I decided to just play some video games at the office instead of going to the gym. I wasn’t feeling quite like myself, but I thought it was just diarrhea. Towards the end of my lunch break, I was feeling increasingly worse, like I had something uncomfortable going on in my bowels or something. I had already gone to the bathroom once, and it didn’t help anything. The pain was steadily increasing, so I got up to go to the bathroom again, only to become instantly dizzy… to the point of nearly blacking out.

I fell to my hands and knees, smacking my shoulder and head on a chair along the way. I sat there for awhile, leaning against the doorway of the room I was in. I knew I needed help, so I tried calling a coworker on my cell phone. No answer. I was feeling really weak, woozy, and a little nauseous, so I curled up on the floor, intentionally half out in the hallway so someone would find me. I think I was hyperventilating due to the pain because my hands were tingling badly. I was contemplating who to call next when a coworker found me and dialed 911.

I told him I felt like throwing up, so he ran and found a large bowl for me just in time for me to heave up my salad and french fries. Wow that stuff was green. The paramedics soon arrived (someone later said there were like 6 of them standing around while one worked. Dude, I’m not a whale. Two is enough to carry me.) They asked me questions while I grunted out answers. My hands were past tingling and had begun to seize up. That’s never happened to me before, it felt so weird. I couldn’t move them, it was like rigor mortis in my hands.

The surrealism started when they lifted me up onto the gurney and wheeled me to the ambulance. I don’t even remember the elevator ride. I’d never been on a gurney before, whee. That ambulance was the bumpiest thing I’ve ever been in. The paramedic had the potholes memorized and was warning me to brace myself at the right moments. I managed to joke to him that Caltrans should work together with paramedics. (Caltrans refers to the California Department of Transportation, who is responsible for fixing the streets.)

In the hospital I laid in the gurney in a hallway for at least 20 minutes while they sorted out emergencies. Apparently I arrived during a large wave of emergencies. At that point I was feeling better. Whatever my problem was had eased its grip on me. They eventually wheeled me into my own room, hooked me up to some monitors and took some blood for testing. The ER doctor poked and prodded me while asking a battery of questions for diagnosis.

I recently watched all four seasons of House MD, one of the best shows ever. In this ER, I felt like part of an episode, which added to my sense of surrealism. This helped me to be one of the most patient patients they’ve ever seen. The nurses were surprised, I guess because most people are cranky and want to get out as soon as possible. I just wanted them to find out what was wrong with me.

I was told I was going to have a CAT scan, which I actually looked forward to because it looks so neat on TV. Then I was told that they needed to give me an enema by filling my bowels with a contrasting fluid, so they could see my appendix better. Oh. Okay… well… a good cleansing is good for you… right? The surrealism stopped when they jammed the tube up my sphincter and proceeded to pump a cold bag of reality into my bowels. Oh my god it was the most uncomfortable thing EVER. It was like my worst case of diarrhea times 100. I was in agony and had to wait until they were done imaging before they drained me. Holy fuck. People PAY to get this done to them voluntarily?

They were expecting appendicitis, but didn’t see any of the associated inflammation. However they instead found a huge cyst on one ovary. An average ovary is around 3cm… that thing was 9cm! They said it was likely a bleeding endometrioma, caused by endometriosis. Endometriosis is the condition of having some endometrium, which is the stuff that belongs inside the uterus, growing outside it instead. So whenever the hormones signal the uterus that it’s time for a cycle, all endometrium cells start to bleed, regardless of where they are located. They informed me that blood in the abdominal cavity is extremely painful.

After a sonogram, I was finally released at 2am. My next step is to get laproscopy done, which is where they knock you out and stick a camera through your bellybutton to see what’s actually going on inside. This will probably be followed by surgery of some kind.

Basically it was a lot of waiting around. The story-telling sounds more dramatic. But one thing is for sure… it’s a damn good thing I had on clean underwear!

There’s actually a dating site for people with herpes. Um… well that’s good. This is one kind of love you don’t want to be spreading around. I wonder though, will there actually be people who want to broadcast that they have herpes?

The office where I work is planning another company event. They’re still making it after work hours, but at least they’re letting us out an hour early this time. I hate it when they want you to bond with your coworkers on your time. Hello I have other things I’d much rather be doing than spending even more time hanging around the people I work with all day. You know, like clipping my toenails. My socks are getting holey.

It’s a company-sponsored dinner… at some place called Union Cattle. WTF. My first thought was, “They’re taking us to a cattle ranch?? Did they forget I’m vegetarian?” I looked it up and it’s supposed to be an “elegant” restaurant… with a mechanical bull. Right. That’s classy. They said they went last year and had a blast. I guess they were drunk or something. You’d have a blast picking up freeway litter if you were drunk enough.

The thought of riding a mechanical bull was intriguing at first. How long would I be able to stay on? After more thinking, however, I became less and less curious about it. I just can’t seem to find anything redeeming about hopping up onto a mechanical bull in front of all your coworkers, flailing about like a rag doll while you desperately cling to the pommel with one hand and feel your shoulder about to pop out of its socket, and eventually flying to the floor, landing on who knows which body part, and crumpling into an ungraceful pile… all in front of people you’re going to see again the next day.

The next day? Yes, this blessed event is happening on Monday night. So those who feel inclined to get blind, stinking drunk will still have to crawl into work the next day. I feel closer to my company already.

In today’s misadventure I’ve decided that 1.6Ghz is wimpy. Nearly all the system requirements I’ve looked at for my options have specs that my system is barely able to meet. Which means, although the things will run, they will run slowly. Video processing is pretty CPU intensive, so a CPU upgrade is in order.

The first thing I learn is that my Dell Dimension 4300 uses a socket 478 motherboard. So, like a blindly charging bull in Pamplona, I order the fastest Pentium 4 CPU I can find that will fit. I’m feeling good about it because it’s a pretty good price for 3.2Ghz ($60 shipped). Then… yes, and then I wonder if there are speed limitations I need to adhere to. Why do these realizations come to me so slowly? Hello, basic research would’ve yielded that information, right?

I found out later after only five minutes of browsing through the Dell forums that my system can only handle a processor up to 2.6Ghz and 400FSB. I totally forget what FSB stands for now, but the one I had ordered was 800. That’s two things that’s incompatible with my system. It’s possible I could burn out my motherboard trying to stick that thing in there. Stupid stupid me.

I emailed the vendor, but I doubt they’re going to offer me a refund. Ebay bids are binding. Oh well. I’ll just resell the thing and hopefully recoup my money. These old processors are getting harder to find, so it shouldn’t be hard to resell.

Learn from my idiotic mistakes. Get detailed information about what your motherboard can handle before you rush out and buy something that could potentially fry your old system.   

Initial installation was easy, but configuring the thing is a huge undertaking. Media Portal (MP) is tons more flexible and customizable than Microsoft’s Media Center (MC), but the actual configuring takes a lot of time and research to figure out what’s going on. I’ve gotten to the point where MP is useable, but annoying. Trying to fast forward an AVI movie causes it to skip huge chunks of the movie. It’s most likely something I need configure on the remote, but damn, I’ve spent days on this thing and I’m still not all that happy with it.

Free is always nice, but so much of MP feels like features that are hacked together and barely work. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart. It’s got lots of possibilities and a lot of people actually do prefer it over MC. However I’m starting to wonder if it’s really worth all the time I need to put into it to make it act as good as my Tivo. I read that it took one person about six months to configure MP to be stable and exactly how he liked it. Good grief. If I ever have to reinstall the thing for any reason, it would take another several months to get right again!

It’s made me think about shelling out the dough for Windows Vista Premium, with Media Center already built in. I’ve used it on my laptop and it seems very stable, and extremely easy to use. My only concern would be the sytem requirements. Vista wants at least of 1Ghz processing speed and 512MB of RAM. I’ve currently got 1.6Ghz and 1GB RAM, so it’ll run… but how well? Vista includes a feature called ReadyBoost where I can use a USB flash drive to add extra RAM cache, so that could help too.  I’m also looking into upgrading the CPU to something faster.

What I’m thinking of doing is installing Vista alongside XP as a dual boot, in case Vista proves to be too much of a drag I can still go back to my XP installation without much trouble. Problem is, if I do decide Vista is too slow for my setup, I can’t get my money back for it. I’ll have to think about this some more.

I hate fireworks.