my father came with me to dorchester, he was the getaway driver, i was the pickup guy with a role of cash in my jean pocket. we drove down to the very southern end of mass ave and got onto columbia. when i rang the doorbell of the address of the place my contact person told me, a confused looking hispanic woman came out, a look of annoyance on her face over the disturbance. a few seconds later a young guy came out, rubbing his eyes, "sorry about that, i fell asleep." i went into his bedroom, where he had the pc all set up to demonstrate that it was working. one look and i was already sold, but he wanted to show me that the sound card was in working order, as well as the modem. he was thorough with his presentation, but i already had my money in my hand, ready to take away my new used pc. however, i was disappointed that it didn't come with a burner. in his ad, he wrote "cd-rom drive reads cdr, cdrw, vcd, etc." if it had a burner he'd just have written, "cd burner." along with the computer, he also gave me the mouse and keyboard, everything in its original box. he helped me with the doors as i stumbled with my purchase, out to the car where my father was waiting.

when he arrived this morning, my father brought back the box fan. this box fan was left here by the previous tenants. it worked fine, but it was coated in grease and years of cat hair, an utterly disgusting appliance. well, my father took the fan yesterday, cleaned it up, and brought it back as good as well. if you saw the fan now, you would never believe it was the cat hair fan from before. i need the box fan to air out the kitchen when i'm making something particularly smelly.

before arriving back at the house, we dropped by the cambridge office of public works to get some yard waste stickers for the trash cans, otherwise they won't pick them up, like what happened last week, when i had a big barrel of dead leaves that they didn't bother emptying because i forgot to label it as "yard waste." i don't know if my upstairs neighbor knows about this, maybe in the past it was the previous tenants we did most of the yard work. i don't mind it of course, my backyard is so small, there really isn't very much work, and it gives me an excuse to be outside, even if it is within the enclosing confines of a thickly settled residential property.

back at home, james fagerquist, former srm illustrator, came to visit. he wanted to see the house that had been featured so prominently in the weblog, and also to chat about the new coolpix 950 he got from ebay. i couched him through what he should be setting his camera to, and then later we went next door to zoe's for lunch. we were the only patrons at this sunny chinese restaurant on a semi-deserted street. i ordered the spicy peanut chicken with hot and sour soup and white rice and a chicken wing.

i hooked up the pc to my sony monitor and it booted up effortlessly. i was relieved to discover that it did have a network card, and windows xp professional automatically connected to the internet without any configuring on my part. it was actually pretty exciting to be in possession of a pc at long last. i felt like a whole new world was opening up to me. and to be quite honest, i like the windows xp interface more than i like the mac os x interface. os x is all aqua and translucent blues. windows xp has a certain level of copycat translucency, but done in a much happier shades of primary colors. pc's are republicans, mac's are democrats. at least i know a pc's os is screwing me over. with the new mac os, it screws you over but pretends it isn't. all the pc's i've ever used, i've always borrowed. to have one of my very own, i can play with it all i want, mistake all sorts of rookie mistakes, an no one's the wiser. like with any computer purchase, old or new, you inevitably end up buying stuff for it. the first thing i'd like to get of course is a dedicated monitor for the pc, followed by maybe a cheap cdrw drive, and another hard disk. the keyword is "cheap," and i'll probably be hanging out at craig's list, waiting for the things i want to show up.

first thing i did was to add some favorite links into the browser. then i downloaded aim so i could talk to the rest of the world. the third item was a copy of limewire, figured i'd check out how much more stable the pc version of this gnutella client might be.

later, while heating up a lasagna for dinner, joel aim'ed me a dvd application to play the set of first season alias vcd's he burned for me a while back. it was pretty sweat, especially the option of playing the video as the desktop background. i don't think you can do that on a macintosh. like i said, this whole new world is opening up for me, all for the low price of $220. the mac world i already know, mapped it out, got my flags planted. the pc though, that's a brave new frontier, and i'm looking forward to spending some time in that strange and foreign land.

i rearranged some of the items in my living room. working on the floor was just killing my back, now that i've moved my mac to a higher coffee table, i can work a little bit more comfortably but the ideal setup would still be a desk. i'm still kind hunched over, but instead of on the floor, i'm sitting in an armchair.