Tales of a Trainee American

The RAM, after leaving Columbus, travelled to Parsippany, New Jersey, and via another stop in NJ it got to the UPS Farmingdale depot, which, as I've mentioned before, is just down the road (it's a ten-minute walk, not that you'd want to walk there from here). It left for delivery at around 6am yesterday, and arrived at the usual UPS delivery time in the apartment complex - about 6.30pm. The theory I have is that as we're the closest domestic deliveries to the depot, we always get done last. However I'm not entirely convinced that UPS should be allowing their drivers to pull 12-hour shifts (it'd certainly be illegal in the EU - however from what I've gathered, truckers and other commercial drivers putting in long shifts is not uncommon).

Anyway, it's in the PC now and it works a lot better, thanks. There's considerably less waiting time when switching users, starting Firefox, and the amount of paging it needs to do when I shut down Civ3 is significantly reduced.

Hmm, wonder if I should upgrade the GFX card, or just pull the card from my PC, so I can play Oblivion...?

I've ordered some new RAM for the PC I'm currently using - it has a rather creaky 512Mb right now. Once this RAM arrives, it'll be boosted to 2Gb. So I'm tracking it with UPS, as Crucial very handily gave me the UPS tracking number. It first entered the UPS system in Boise, Idaho on Friday afternoon. From there, it headed to Salt Lake City, Utah where it spent the weekend. Before even the crack of dawn this morning, it was tracked from Salt Lake to Commerce City, Colorado, where it spent an hour and a half before finding its way to Louisville, Kentucky. The RAM has been in Louisville since 10.13 this morning. That means that so far, it's been to four states (not counting those in between - from the looks of it, it would go through a bit of Wyoming between Boise and Salt Lake and must've flown from Commerce City, which is just outside of Denver, to Louisville, no way would it have been driven across Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana in four and a quarter hours - where necessary) and travelled 1,983 miles. It's quite an epic journey when you start to break it down like this.

It's a communal PC, with a decent-enough single-core 2.8GHz P4, otherwise sadly under-spec'ed. So far I've added a new sound card, the memory will hopefully make it work faster, somehow I doubt I'll be plumbing in a new GFX card unless I decide I want a new one for my own PC and plug in my old one. The main trouble is that due to user inexperience, it runs with fast user switching - which essentially means I've got a desktop-spec machine trying to run as a terminal server. I always disconnect other users when I log on myself. I also spent quite a bit of time tidying up the registry and services to get it to start up Windows faster (which it does).

The most annoying thing is that my own PC tower is sitting right next to this one, but I can't really use it because it's a pain in the arse to swap cables round and a decent switcher hub for the kb/mouse/monitor is really too much to justify spending the money on, and anyway I'd still have to switch the speakers around manually because hubs don't do that.

They're here. Well, as far as I can tell, they could've been here all day... sitting on the desk in reception... with NOBODY BOTHERING TO TELL ME THEY WERE THERE! (I don't normally pass through reception on my way in and out - I go in through a side door which has a keypad on it.) At least the goods are in my hands.

"Loaded onto vehicle" at the New Cross depot at 8:25:03 this morning. 4 hours ago. How long should it take to get from New Cross to City Road (making other deliveries along the way...?)

Now my home PC is refusing to boot. More alarmingly, the Windows install disc doesn't seem to recognise that the HD already has an NTFS partition on it and is determined to reformat the whole thing. Oh bugger.