Aquarionics

Eventually, I’ve got around to revising my desktop rig, as happens every couple of years. The new machine is called Thundersnow. The key requirements were the three monitor setup and a CPU revision, but the upgrade to 16gb memory and a decent sized SSD was also nice. Full specs at that link.

Annoyingly, I can’t play games across all three monitors, since AMD’s Eyefinity tech refuses to support monitors with different resolutions. Eyefinity 2.0, which was released a couple of months ago, does support that but appears only to work with 7000-series cards, which being the current high-end are over what I was budgeting. Plus, I didn’t even find out about Eyefinity 2.0 until I tried to make the above work properly. Apparently some stuff rom Eyefinity 2 “might” make its way back to older cards, but I’m not holding my breath. Maybe in a few months another upgrade, then. Actually “Refuses to support” is a little strong. If I change the monitors to a common resolution and orientation, it’ll work, but any res that works on the wings looks like stretched-lego on the centre, and I’d rather my games look awesome on the middle monitor than awful across the entire world.

The background across all three is “Ambiguitas” by taenaron on deviantart.

The biggest problem with that image, though, is that it reflects that my teacup is empty. I should fix that now.

This is the second type of tea.

(Shot, Edited and posted using the iPad as an experiement)

The office has no kettle.

Two floors above the office is a kitchen, which will give me free “tea” or hot water, and in the office is a sachet-based “coffee” delivery system which does not deliver hot water on its own. In order to solve this “No Tea” problem, and it is a problem, I have invested in something that could be classed as a mistake.

Freeze dried instant tea.

It looks like a lighter version of instant coffee.

The world, however, is conspiring against me getting any. I have cunningly cut the bottom from a hot-chocolate sachet to trick the machine into giving me hot water, in time to discover that the device has no water. In refilling the coffee machine, the cooler ran out of water. Then the coffee machine refused to boil the water I gave it. Eventually, I had hot water.

It’s cooled down a bit now, and I’m not sure how to describe exactly how it tastes. Hmm.

You know when if you leave a cup of generic teabag tea for a little while too long, it starts to generate a kind of earthy taste in the back of your mouth, sort of reminding you of the legends of teabags being made out of the floor sweepings of places where they cut real tea? It tastes like that. All like that. Distiled and coating the back of your throat like a week in the desert.

Time for plan C, then. I suspect plan C involves giving in and switching to coffee while I’m at work. Who needs sleep patterns anyway?