I realized today while pricing out potential replacements for my dying PC (and considering seriously limping along indefinitely) that while for years I’ve resisted buying a newer car because I hate how much money they lose in value, I realized that the PC parts I’m likely to replace have lost ~85% of their value since I built this thing. If I’d bought the car I was thinking about, I’d have retained 80% of its value.

No, really, I looked it up.

My computer is so toast. Got it running yesterday after a long while. Hooked the second monitor back up. Died. Would boot, then did a crazed dead screen display trying to load windows. Safe boot didn’t work. Single monitor, eventually got safe boot to work. Got everything running again… now I’m afraid to try again. At least one of these is semi-toast, in a troubleshooting sense beyond my capacity to understand:
– video card
– power supply
– OS

The rest of this week is going to be totally awesome, I can tell already.

I had a kind of heinous doctor’s appointment this afternoon (eliding details). After I got out, I was all knotted out with stress and whatever, but I realized I could check out the Cafe Vivace by REI on my way back… and now I’ve just finished a stunningly good latte, I’ve got work open via VPN, and I’m starting to chill out nicely.

Vivace rocks and the rest of my afternoon’s looking up.

When I was growing up, there was a huge status thing around Levi’s. Anything else was a huge step down in terms of respect. Wranglers? Get out of here. Lord forbid you should wear Toughskins or something. As a result, I made a royal pain in the ass of myself pestering my mom when we went back-to-school shopping, and as a result she’d watch the papers until someone ran a sale, and I’d get two pairs.

The thing I loved about them at the time beyond lowering my social visibility was that theose things were well-nigh indestructible. I spent a lot of my time running around in the woods, clambering down stream beds, and generally beating those things up, and I’d often outgrow them before they came apart (the knees, generally, or the cuffs.

As I grew older and I had to start paying for my clothes, I stopped buying them, because I wasn’t the ad-watcher my mom was, and the social acceptance went way down. But if I ever came across some ridiculous discount, I’d pounce. Better to pay more for a quality pair that lasts than burn through six pairs of cheapo brand.

Then I broke with the brand entirely when they went the Walmart route. Levi’s started to produce a down-brand crappy jean they could sell for less at Walmart, and to me, it destroyed the company: they went from being a high-quality, high-cost item I aspired to to competing with the cheap-o crap-quality clothes I didn’t like at all. Soon, they stopped producing any clothes in the US, and Levi’s became something else entirely — just the tag, and a tag that carried a significant price premium. The one time I bought them, the quality was terrible, and they were toast within months.

I stopped caring for years. I bought my jeans wherever and didn’t care. I’m unwilling to pay big money for designer jeans, I can’t find a decent source for oragnic cotton/hemp jeans or anything interesting, and my uniform for a good chunk of the year is Boring Suburban Dad:
– khaki shorts
– dark-colored T-shirt

Which, and this is another topic entirely, really annoys me. I don’t like looking lame, but I don’t know any better. I want to wear shorts in the summer, I’m sorry. How do I do that and not look like I’m about to mow the lawn or start complaining about kids today with their text messaging and their blogging?

That ties in to what happened a couple months ago: the last time I was shopping, I happened across some 501s on a huge discount — as cheap as anything else at the store. And they were the Mexican Levi’s, too. I bought a couple pairs and went through the ardous process of getting them to fit properly.

They look great. They fit, they’re comfortable, they look good — people actually compliment me on my jeans. And how I look generally on days I wear them. Even I look at myself before I go and think “Huh, I do look significantly better than normal.” This is unheard of, as I have no fashion sense at all (see above).

I maybe have five, six pieces of clothes that I’d say make me look nice, and now three of them are pairs of jeans. I’m a little disturbed.

I don’t know what to do. I have mixed feelings about the whole things, and I’m spending a lot of time pondering questions that never occurred to me not that long ago:
– Has the non-US build quality of Levi’s improved that much over the years?
– Is it worth spending a little more to get jeans I like?
– Are there even better options that don’t cost $300 a pair?
– If some well-fitting jeans make that big of a difference, are there other similar upgrades available?
– Really? I should spend some more time on how I dress?
– I can appreciably improve my appearance through clothing choices?
– How do I learn to do that?

I found that if you’re willing to search them out, you can find sweatable outlet valves. Now, they’re a pain in the ass, and you then have to buy the right tubes and stuff, but it meant that instead of fighting those stupid things for another couple of days, for $10/fixture or so I could break out the torch, some solder, and bam! That thing’s in place forever. Wahahahahaha!

Came across this while searching Google for a paper:

hours on hours on hours
my timesheets like car models
spec signoff! relief!

Looking out of my office building, with the wind gusting, right now I can see the rain coming in from the right at a 45 degree angle, and from the left at a 45-degree angle, and straight over the top, as if all of it’s being drawn to a bare spot between clumps of trees on the soft slope of the hill.

… and now it starts to swirl.

I came across something online that claimed that diesel buses emit 200x the pollution of a normal passenger car. I looked into this, read some studies, and it’s not true.

The average vehicle on the road emits ~1# of CO2/mile (it’s higher for light trucks, lower for cars, but it works out quite well). I looked up some testing data, and a late-90s diesel bus on low-sulfur fuel (no trap, none of the new cool technology) puts out ~6.4# CO2/mile.

So an older diesel bus = about six cars, CO2-wise.

Caveats:
– There’s a lot of variance in how much pollution an individual bus generates
– This doesn’t account for the relative harm of the pollution generated by the different vehicles, and there’s a case to be made that the buses should account for non-CO2 products

But as a range… there’s just no way it’s 1-to-200.