Sweetie Goes 20/20

Written 3 April, 2007

Sweetie Goes 20/20

How about that!

I do have a blog about Sweetie after all!

Long-timer readers of this blog may remember that last fall I managed to smoke my Athlon 64 system by improperly inserting a memory stick.

I loved that computer, all UV lights and flashing LEDs, but it’s been sitting on my kitchen table for five months now with its guts hanging out.

I had planned to pick up some RAM for it and network it in my living room, but the more I used the Sony Vaio dual-core system with which I had placed it, the less I was inclined to spend money on RAM for the Athlon.

I want to punch that box up—namely, to stick in a dual-core board and processor and about 4 gb of RAM. Then I’ll stick it in my living room and hard wire it to my network

Woo hoo!

Until I find the money, though, it will go into storage.

The Athlon system has a really nice 256 mb nVidia GeForce video card in it. It performs significantly better than the 128 mb card I stuck in the Vaio. But it’s an AGP card, and mother board manufacturers no longer use AGP. Everything is PCI-Express. And so the card was doing me no good.

I offered it to Sweetie, but she was interested in helping herself rather than having others help her, and so I backed off.

Then, about a week ago, Sweetie went video card crazy.

She couldn’t stand FOR ONE MORE MINUTE looking at a gray Second Life world through the view screen of her laptop.

She phoned me. She was on the way home from an overnight business trip. It was six p.m. on Sunday, she was in a rural area, and of course she had to have a video card IMMEDIATELY!

I understood completely.

I stayed on the phone as she opportunistically found a parking spot just at the door of the Wal-Mart store, and had to sadly tell her the only video card W-M had fell below Second Life specs.

So no video card for Sweetie that night.

But she did allow me to bundle up the card from my Athlon system and drop it in the mail to her.

I’m not a believer in overnight mail. First, it doesn’t get there overnight, and second, if you wanted it there on Friday, you should have by damn mailed it on Monday. Still, as Saturday came and we were both wondering if the parcel would be on her doorstep when she arrived home from work, I found myself wishing I had overnighted it to her.

Although if I HAD mailed it overnight, most likely she would have found only a little note telling her to come to the post office to pick it up.

But the box WAS there, and within an hour she had located, downloaded, and installed the drivers and was seeing SL for the first time in living color!

“Wow! I rezzed instantly!”

“I can see your outfit! And your makeup!”

“What’s that red line coming out of your hand?”

I told it that line appears whenever someone points.

“I’ve never seen it!”

A year into Second Life, and she hadn’t even known it was there!

Now Sweetie has 20/20 vision.

Now we’ve got to get her some RAM. The 512 mb in her machine isn’t nearly enough.

She can’t even take photos of her Cheyenne.

And we can’t have that, now, can we?