Bloody exhausted

It’s been an amazing past few weeks in Melbourne. The hot weather (46.4 is the hottest reported in more than 150 years), the bushfires that killed 180+ people in townships nearby Melbourne, the days of orange skies and smoke drifting across the city. The plants and trees that have all lost leaves due to stress. Then there’s been a family event or two – us Vandenbergs held a reunion in Fawkener that was a little lacklustre perhaps, but mum was happy because she got 6/7 of her kids and kin to attend – better than any of the other families. Kim’s mum has just started weekly chemotherapy and daily radiotherapy for a few small cancerous spots on her lungs, and thankfully isn’t feeling many ill effects yet. She still smokes a couple here and there, but doctors have said within a week or two her throat will be so red-raw from treatment, that it will be almost impossible for her to continue that habit.

On the work front, things are getting a lot busier and that’s a blessing as the days go faster. I’m managing to ride to work twice a week, and run in my lunchbreak once or twice – so sleep is better generally. Frustrated by bad lag and screen freezes in WoW, we bought new PC’s last night, and are hoping that they will solve some of the problems, as raiding in the new guild we joined last week was difficult in battles that required fast reflexes. We wiped the raid a few times on Heigan due to a 1FPS screen refresh rate. The PC salesman recommended industrial-sized PC cases, complete with garish blue LED lights that just horrified me. I managed to get those disabled, but the multiple huge fans are still a bit of overkill. The wonderful thing is that if you leave the system unattended, it appears to turn everything off and hibernate. Fantastic! To help myself feel good about the 4k I just spent, I compared Kim’s PC with the 3DMark06 scores before and after the upgrade. I’m still installing my one.

Kim before: 2901 After: 14927.
Darren before: 3247 After: ?????

I had some issues with the onboard NIC drivers not working but I seem to have gotten over that hurdle now. Unfortunately there’s still a bunch of applications that need migrating (Itunes, Readerware, Fraps etc..) which have special license codes or that need special attention in some way. It’s going to take another few days to get all that sorted out, so the weekend will have to be sleep catchup time. I’m bloody exausted.