My desktop finally bit it. I’ve been back from Germany for about two months now, and my desktop has been flaky since then. It is about 5 years old and spent the past year collecting dust so I haven’t expected much, and last weekend it fulfilled those expectations.

Sunday night I rounded up 200 bucks and got a some new parts to fill my case. Everything arrived on Thursday, so I sat down after the V.P. debate that night with a case of Franziskaner hoping to put all these parts together. It’s so easy to work with computer parts now, my new motherboard is literally half the area of the old one and I have tons of free space in my case. Everything went great until the last piece – my power supply.

The case was pretty cheap 5 years ago, but this was really unexpected. The mounting screws for the power supply are inverted: the part goes in upside down. This was fine with my previous power unit, but this new one had a fan on the bottom. Upside down, the fan would blow brushed aluminum casing at the transformer instead of air. Right side up, one screw fit. Here is the situation…

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After a moment of pondering, the solution seemed obvious:

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The next morning of course, the ridiculous of the solution seemed obvious. I have named this computer “Franzinstein”

A study of standardized testing results from nearly 7 million students over from 2005 until 2007 confirms two things: girls are just as good at math as boys, and standardized tests have some value.  Hopefully the most immediate consequence of this will be a better gender balance in my lectures.

Why do all cities in Italy have 3 or 4 names?  Either it’s because their beauty leave the visitor stammering in search of the word, or because these places all have a cultural heritage dating back thousands of years.  This past weekend I finally had the opportunity to visit Florence, a city filled with so much beauty it actually sickens people.  A friend of mine moved there a month ago so I had a place to crash and another friend had a car for the weekend.

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My weekend was spent immersed in the outward beauty of the city. I did a lot of slow walking, visited a lot of the famous monasteries and churches, and went for an afternoon hike in the hills surrounding the city.  The first photo below is of downtown Florence, taken from San Miniato al Monte.

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Visiting a friend who already has roots in a city can be one of the most rewarding things about travelling.  In addition to walking, I met a lot of interesting people from a wide variety of backgrounds this weekend.  Invariably talking with these people led to talking and walking.  This is how I had the opportunity to take that afternoon hike.

Surrounding Florence are hills I do not know the name of but this did not matter because once there I would not have been able to speak it.  Along the hike were some extremely rewarding vista’s of the city and the countryside of farmland, vineyards and olive groves that surround it.

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Each time I go to Italy I find the experience so personally rewarding that I wonder how I can keep leaving.  Someday I really am liable to visit for some number of years.  This time however I did leave, and I did it by learning to drive stick through the countryside.  Success!

On a more technical note, I’ve continued to work on my gallery.  I’ve also made an upgrade to WordPress and completed the integration of the Gallery2 software with WordPress.  I haven’t yet decided on the best way to link my galleries with my blog posts, sohe gallery for my trip to Florence is here.  Everything else works great though.  All of these photos are pulled directly from the gallery, with titles and all.  No more uploading wheeee!  Anyway, the plugins are the Lightbox for WordPress for image display and the WPG2 for pulling images into WP from my galleries.  This is my first experience using Lightbox, and I really like it.  I’ll probably be applying it frequently.