Thank gods for Firefly, or I’d have no friends!

OK, so that’s not entirely true, I’d have one or two friends, but the truth is that the Firefly Fandom really does create it’s own pseudo family. I’ve heard rabid Firefly fans like us described in the media as creepy, as obsessed, and as not just a little bit scary. I remember back in the day, before we got our Big Damn Movie (ie Serenity, which was just voted All Time Greatest Sci Fi film by the readers of SFX magazine) our mantra was “Normal-not-scary, normal-not-scary”. I think we passed that by several years ago, and now we’re just plain scary. But in a good way.

In the best kind of way.

In the way that brings like-minded folk together who may not have found each other before.

Well, the local Firefly ring is small but equally rabid, and is beginning to grow (as we get more and more people hooked on the show – mwaaaaahahahahahahahaaaaaa!). But I just thought I’d share with you the core group of “scoobs” as we somehow ended up calling ourselves. They’re brilliant, funny, talented, witty and charming, as I’m sure I’ve gone on about before:

Front L-R: ErnieMay (Erin), EricaLea (Erica), ThursdayWeld (Christine), GoldenFool (Me!), and in the back is Astrid (Lee Ann).

This was us doing our bestest-ever Saffron Pouts. We are terribly seductive. I know. Stop with the drooling, please. *grins*

Computer building 101…

It’s happened folks. I’ve done it. I’ve gone and done it. I finally bought all the parts that I needed for my new PC, and last week I delivered my very first baby computer!!

Started with an empty box and all the separate components in their separate boxes:

So I strapped on my anti-static wrist-band:

And started screwing in, plugging in, tangling and de-tangling:

And the very fine moral support of a fellow computer-geek, Greig, we turned this:

into this:

Many thanks to Greig for his help (and the use of his camera phone when my camera ran out of battery!), though he was very patient with me when I made him sit there holding his tongue because I was too proud to accept much advice or physical help plugging things in (though I was not above letting him have a try with the CPU fan, after I’d struggled with it for 10 minutes or so) – I wanted this to be 100% mine.

And it is!

This rig (as I discovered all the cool kids are calling computers these days) is a wee hot-rod of a machine, too! It’s got more than 500Gb of storage space, 2 gig of ram and a dual core 2.19Ghz cpu. Doesn’t get much faster than that unless you’re willing to spend considerably more than I did.

It was at that point that I discovered that actually BUILDING the rig (yes, I AM a cool kid) is only half the task – once the hardware was all working, it took me another couple of days to troubleshoot all the software issues! Oooh, but then you should have heard me squee when I clocked my start up initially at just 30 seconds from power on to fully operational. But then I added another (full) hard disk drive, which added another 30 seconds to the start up, but that’s ok. Still better than the 3 minute start up on my old machine.

Ooooh, but I can’t wait to take the new graphics card out for a walk, to test out its video editing capabilities!

A very merry bunny-day to you all! May they taste as scrumptious as this one:

(all thanks to my mum for the fantastic photo!)