Goodbye, Kai
by Scott Hardie on October 24, 2014
I've been trying to save up for a new computer for the last few years, but bigger purchases like a wedding and medical emergencies kept consuming the funds. This past weekend, I finally broke down and bought a cheap but still quite powerful Windows 7 machine on Newegg, because I could no longer stand my old Windows XP machine.
How old was it? I bought it back when Windows XP was brand new! It was 2002, and I was a recent college graduate just starting his new life in Florida. What was top-of-the-line then became excruciatingly slow today: Trying to open more than two tabs in Chrome caused it to hang for several minutes. Opening Photoshop 7 took five minutes. Opening The Sims 2 took twenty minutes. Any video playing on a web page tended to freeze the entire browser (I was not a happy camper when The Onion and A.V. Club started auto-playing videos on the right sidebar of every article). Using this computer was painful, and I was a patient man for a long time, but enough was enough.
I'm still working on setting up the new machine and transferring files (slowly) from the old one. This has taken up most of my time this week, and it has affected the site: The goo game has seen a run of mostly hard goos this week because the queue is running low and I'm still setting up the software to make new easy goos. I haven't been able to fix a known glitch in Rock Block's start-a-concert form because I'm still copying over Funeratic's files from the old machine. It's weird having my hands tied behind my back like this as a site admin. I hope to finish the process this weekend, in time to add ten more items to The History of Funeratic for the site's anniversary.
There is one permanent change to the site as a result of me changing computers: Celebrity goos will no longer be made with Kai's Power Goo. That ancient software was written for Windows 95! I managed to find a fan-made port for Windows XP when I bought the last computer in 2002, and it has served us well ever since, but I have no hope of running that program on this new 64-bit machine today. There are numerous similar programs online, as Chris and Justin and Lori and Samir know from creating their own goos recently, and I'm sure that we'll barely notice a difference. They'll still be called goos, even if the name isn't technically correct any more.
Thanks for your patience with some tough goos this week while I set up my new machine. Here's hoping that I finally get the computer that I really want before this cheap replacement becomes twelve years old.
One Reply to Goodbye, Kai
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
You Won't See This in the Goo Game
Jeopardy! history was made yesterday: (link) Go »No R'lyeh, I'm Not a Fan
I never thought of myself as a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. I don't think I've read more than a couple of his short stories. Go »Pigeon Panic
Since Adrianne doesn't permit replies to her posts, I'll link it here: Poisoned pigeons fall from sky in Texarkana. The chain of events is too bizarre not to reiterate: A pigeon flew into a bank and defecated on a customer, so the bank put poisoned grain on the roof hoping to drive away the pigeons. Instead, dozens of birds flopped dead on the ground downtown – right during the city's annual festival. Go »Fur and Feathers
Yesterday was a good day: To celebrate my mother's 75th birthday, we took her out for a day around Sarasota doing things that appealed to her love of animals. After starting with a big breakfast, we went to a local attraction that we've all been meaning to see for years, the Big Cat Habitat that takes care of exotic animals that were born in captivity but abandoned by their owners. The lions and tigers and liger were the prime attraction, but they also had bears, monkeys, a chimpanzee, parrots, emu, turkeys, goats, koi, and even stranger animals like a kangaroo, kinkajou, and coati. Go »I Can Deflect Staples
Should you call your day a complete wash if your greatest creative achievement was paper fastener nunchucks? Go »
Scott Hardie | October 25, 2014
I see that Joanna has a goo request in the system too. I need to catch up on pending requests. I need to catch up on a lot of things asap. :-)