it's amazing how fast oyster mushrooms can grow given the right conditions, especially considering how when i first got this kit during the summer nothing was happening. now i hardly need to water and the thing is just sprouting this bracket of mushrooms. however, compared to my february 2006 mushroom growing adventure, this one is only growing from one area, not all over the bag. i wonder how many more times this one will produce before it's done?

an unnoteworthy day, one where i didn't even set foot outside, although judging from the temperature it must've been cold. i spent part of it working on client N's project and the other part surfing the web and watching some movies. another check of apple's online repair status page revealed that my macbook pro had been fixed and was pending delivery. hopefully i can get it back by monday or tuesday, although now i've grown used to working off my desktop machine, even though it's putting some strain on my right eye, which still isn't getting any better.

the red sox win the world series this past sunday, a parade on tuesday, colts-patriots game this sunday, and tonight the start of the celtics regular season. total sports overdose! i watched the game out of curiosity more than any sense of loyalty to the team (it's been many years since i've given up on basketball). other than the big three - pierce, garnett, allen - i didn't recognize any of the other players, celtics or otherwise. the celtics dominated, and some one point it reminded me of the whole patriots "running up the score" controversy of this past week. celtics ended up beating the wizard by 20 points. during the game i had a sports epiphany - most sports are about getting an object (usually a ball) into a receptacle, whether it's a hoop, an end zone, out of the park, a goal net, or a hole on the golf green. each sport has it's own variation in style and rules, but they're all basically the same. with basketball though, there's a certain elegance to scoring. i'm not talking about brute force dunks, but to see somebody take a 3-point jump shot and make it, it's a thing of beauty, almost like you can't believe you can throw a ball into a hoop from that distance. romanticism aside, will i be following the celtics this season? i don't know if i'll be watching all the games, but my curiosity is definitely piqued.

i had ramen for dinner. it's been a while, and my taste buds have since developed a low tolerance for salty foods, which ramen is one of them. it tasted pretty gross, so it's going to be a long time before i eat ramen again - which is probably a good thing.

i have to get a new monitor. but while trolling the internet for bargains, i also thought about upgrading my PC. the machine i have now is a dell dimension 1100 which i paid $300 (november 2005) including the small monitor i'm temporarily using now. i got it originally as a testing machine and maybe to play some PC games. but what i didn't realize was it was so stripped of features that a lot of the new games won't even run on the machine (mostly due to an inferior integrated graphic card soldered on the motherboard). so i started researching, and thought about building my own computer. the thought might've scared me 10 years ago, but since then i figured i've become PC savvy enough to tackle such a challenge. i figured that for about $500 i can create a pretty good setup - and most importantly, fast enough to tackle the latest games. then i got the notion that instead of building just a regular PC, i could try making my own hackintosh, possibly replacing my aging G4 desktop, and still be able to run both mac and windows. the problem with that idea is running OS X on a PC (OSx86) is still experimental at best, and a lot can go wrong. but since apple doesn't seem to be interested in making an affordable standard desktop model (i don't mean the imac, or the mini, or the expensive mac pro starting at $2500), making a hackintosh out of spare PC parts seem to the only option.