Today was another in a string of sunny days ’round these parts, which allowed about eight men to raise holy hell on my house’s leaky roof. They worked about twelve hours today, and should finish the job sometime tomorrow. Amazing.

Also amazing is how much noise eight men working on your roof can make. I was poking away in the basement most of the day, and was well aware that shit was going down. I mean that in both a literal and figurative sense, actually: random bits of the old roof sporadically fell over the edge, creating a veritable rain of death.

That falling debris game me a flashback to Space Quest 1, where Roger Wilco was in a cave and had to walk through an area where acid dripped from the ceiling. You made double-damn sure to save before crossing, because the acid dripped randomly and touching it (apparently with anything else but the bottom of your shoe) would mean instant death. A shingle from the third floor isn’t quite acid, but I imagine that getting hit in the head with one would have a similar effect.

…

I recently discovered that Amazon is selling a DVI cable for just under $8, after a $5 rebate. (Those suckers can be hella expensive—i.e. $30–50, if you try to randomly buy one.) Empowered by this knowledge, I have since purchased, received, and hooked up one of these cables between my computer and its second monitor. That led me to perform further color calibration between my two monitors, and the two are now so close I can taste it. It’s still not perfect (dragging iTunes halfway between the monitors reveals the differences most glaringly), but I no longer feel like I have one display that is significantly preferable to the other.

…

My tower, however, is still preferable to my laptop. I bothered to put a Haruhi desktop on the latter, but displaying the desktop is about all I trust it to do right now. Still don’t know if the disk is failing or what, though—I suspect my distrust of the machine, and therefore my tendency to avoid using it, will probably keep me from knowing for quite some time.