Neil Gaiman – Coraline

I was wandering aimlessly through the bookstore when I happened across this thin-looking book touting Gaiman’s name. While the author’s name caught my attention, it was the cover art that held it. A girl and a cat, colourfully twisted between artistic styles, with the house innocently providing the background.

The story is quite brief, but equally compelling. I surprised myself with the intensity with which I took to the story. Coraline, not to be confused with Caroline, is a true adventurer. Exploration is her heart and soul. When she and her parents move to a new flat, she takes no hesitation to discover the magic and the mysteries of this new environment. Especially the mysteries. Such as the mystery of the door that goes only into a brick wall, and why she would get a message from circus mice that she should not go through the door.

Gaiman is a wonderful storyteller, but I think I found myself a bit disappointed that Coraline’s story is as short as it is. With fond memories for detail of American Gods and Neverwhere, I wish it could have been fleshed out just a little bit more, but I think that would change the target audience. I don’t think that it was particularly meant for the adult market, although many adults will love it just the same.

I can see a little bit of a computer componenet shopping spree on the horizon. Bits and pieces have been taking the downward spiral a little too seriously and are actually becoming problems.

Laptop battery

It is a given that all batteries will perform worse and worse over time. They store a little bit less power each time they are recharged. A workhorse that kept you running for 2 or 3 hours at a time might now struggle to give 30 minutes of love. I’ve had this one since August, 2002, but now the battery loves me no more. With the battery charger on, the light will flash, but no storage actually happens. There’s not enough charge to run from one power supply to the next. So now, the battery has been sequestered to the inside of the laptop case, only to be reunited with its host when power is already off.

I’m not sure how easy it is to get replacement batteries, or if it’s worth the expense. Currently, I’ve got a functional computer that sits in my lap as long as I’m within a certain radius of a power plug. The computer still runs happily, however. Used batteries might be an option, but I don’t know how much I’d trust one.

CDRom

The cdrom in the desktop was never mine in the first place. I borrowed it from the boyfriend of my first flatmate in Auckland as a means to get Debian installed on the desktop. It was a very old drive that made lots of noise, contrasted against the black front of the case and managed to work reliably for a little more than a year. Without warning, the drive tray refused to open. It makes a lot more noise now, whirring angrily, but with no other outcome. About the same time that the drive refused to open, I noticed a lot of errors getting dumped into the system logs about bad things going on with the cdrom.

Now it’s silent. I don’t ask for its help, and it doesn’t offer. It’s one of those silent mutual agreements; it want’s to retire and I want to retire it. Besides, I can get a DVD writer (with a black face, to match the computer case) for about $60 NZD. Given that my LCD display is actually better than the TV at the house, it might be better to watch movies on the computer than to go shopping for a DVD player for the house.

Planning ahead

Now that I’m living in Wellington, which has a bursting-at-the seams theatrical population, it might be nice to do some volunteer work with an amateur theatre group. I had a wonderful time working with Hidden Insanity back in Calgary, and I’d love to get back into that environment. Given the nature of my current job, it might be good to explore the state of audio processing under linux again. The desktop is a bit underpowered for it, however. Running a Celeron with 256MB of memory, I can’t expect to do a lot and keep it in real-ish time. Looking at the specs for the motherboard, I can put up to 2GB of PC3200 ram in there, which isn’t a bad option. That can be done for about $240 NZD right now. Another option is to change out the CPU for something with a bit more on-chip cache. That might be trickier, however. Socket 478? All of the price listings on pricespy are for socket 775 processors.

I think it’s a matter of evaluating the cost benefit. For roughly (I’m guessing) $300, is it worth changing processors? Or is it going to be necessary? Or will I find out, after puting in 2GB of ram, that I still just can’t do what I want it to do, but that it would have been cheaper to buy new than to upgrade the both (and the DVD drive)? I can only answer some of those questions before I do any shopping.

The DSL modem arrived faster than expected. I received the shipping box friday afternoon and promptly tore into it, and the spent the rest of the afternoon resisting the urge to configure it before I even got it to the house. It’s running partly configured at the moment; I’d written down the username:password combination provided by my ISP, but not on a piece of paper that came home with me. It’s not too important at this point, since my connection is not meant to be activated for another 4 days.

In the meantime, the little 3Com wireless DSL router is happily routing packets between the laptop and the desktop. Since the desktop is literally stuffed into a corner nearest a power supply, stacked upon its own boxes, it’s not the most ergonomically correct work station. For once, the laptop is actually more comfortable to use.