This weekend I performed a peeceectomy on Little Elvis. The patient is now resting comfortably.
Back in the dark ages of computers (a couple of years ago), when you purchased a new machine you got 30 gigs of hard drive space. At the time, this seemed like a lot, but as we now know, no amount of disk space and/or ram is ever enough, not to mention the fact that I’ve got discarded iPods with twenty times as much free territory. Because of this miserly built-in drive size, since Little Elvis came into my life I have purchased not one, not two, but three standalone drives. I have also purchased flashdrives which I reckon by the dozens (one of which runs You Don’t Know Jack). I am a storage maven of the first water.
And of course, to enable the running of the TRPC software, back in the day I loaded up Virtual PC, the Windows emulator of the pre-Intel Mac generation. This may be as slow as [insert humorous metaphor for some really slow thing here] but it did do the job. In fact, it did the job better than TRPC on my Dell. Whereas the Dell tends to get tired during break rounds, forcing you to curse and holler and do things by hand, Little Elvis would soldier along valiantly until the last rebuttal was fired. But VPC takes up about 6 gigs of hard drive. Which meant that, whenever I turned on Little Elvis, I’d be looking at 3 gigs free at best, and often just 2. Running any computer with such a minimal amount of available space makes it even slower than [repeat metaphor from above, but vary it a little for even more humorous effect].
So, says I, it was time to sever VPC from Little E’s innards. In the worst case scenario, I could always run TRPC on the Dell and let it go at that. But what if I simply ported VPC over to one of the portable firewire drives? It was worth a try. And, voila, it works almost perfectly. For some reason I can’t launch the program as an application; I have to launch the data file which then launches the program, but that does work, and in the consequentialist world of computing, all that matters is results. And now, tada! Little E has 9 free gigs on his inner drive. The beach ball of death is rarer, and lasts less long. Callooh! Callay! For some reason I can’t pass data from Mac window to PC window anymore and have to use one of my numerous flashdrives (or their sisters or their cousins or their aunts), but that’s a small price to pay for a third of my disk drive space becoming available again. And to run tournaments all I have to do is bring along a small extra firewire drive. Piece of cake.
So what did I do over the weekend with all this newfound Windows real estate? Loaded up the Goy of Districts. It took a couple of bouts (the program advises you that some systems like this version, while other systems like that version, and of course, my system liked that version after much cursing over this version) but it’s finally going. So far one school has signed up. Tsk, tsk. You guys are in trouble… There’s about 182 pages of goyische help for each step of the process, most of which is the sort of help that, if you really need it, you need too much help altogether, but I don’t have enough data yet to really knock the application around. Whatever. There’s still a couple of weeks, and the worst that could happen is we haul out some cards like we always do. I’ll worry about that tomorrow.
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