PixlBit

Pixlpeeps what is up? How has the week been treating you good people? I’m excited the week is over but the sad part is that in the Pacific Time Zone it is time to move clocks up an hour. At least my random wake ups at 5am will now be 6am so I guess that is the silver lining to the whole thing. Anyways let’s get started with this week’s edition of Quick Hits with Chris.

Chris Watches…

The Voice – NBC: I’m still watching The Voice Blind Auditions (when I remember) and once again they got me to buy a song. Well played Voice. Let’s see if I continue watching the show during the knockout rounds.

Agents Of Shield – ABC: It’s back, more superpowers are flying around and once again wouldn’t it be easy to just call in one of the Avengers or new Avengers to come in, and help out? This season has been good and I want to see how everything builds up to the season finale.

Quantico – ABC: This show is also back and I have to admit I was a bit lost because I don’t remember what happened before the mid-season cliff hanger. As for who is the other terrorist, I have a new theory

It’s Booth. His name is Booth, like a certain assassin who killed Lincoln.

The People Vs. OJ Simpson – FX: In the latest episode of The OJ Show, instead of making it about the Dream Team with Ross from Friends saying “Juice” every couple of minutes, this week we get a look into the life of Marcia Clark. Man she had a ton of stuff on her plate, and a couple of bad haircuts. Seriously how bad is it when your boss tries to in a non-disrespectful, but damaging way of saying he knows stylists? There seems to be less unintended humor in the past couple of episodes (Twitter was having a field day with Theo Huxtable driving Rod Tidwell tweets) and we are at the point where Mark Furman is on the stand.

Billions is still solid, no Green Batman for a couple of weeks, Wrestling has been bleh, Hell’s Kitchen #1 rule of Never Ordering The Chicken is still valid, and at some point I will binge watch House of Cards, The Americans, and some new cop show on Amazon Prime that is supposed to be released today.

 

Chris Listens To…

Last week my iTunes non played track count was at 13,185 and this week it is currently at

 

To my credit I had it in the 12,000 area before I took a trip to the local mom and pop (more on that later) Actually, I might be under 12,000 now because I haven’t synced my phone to the laptop.

 

Chris Takes Pictures…

Since the weather has been random here in Southern California (high 80s one day, and currently it’s going to be 70 degrees today with a good chance of showers, which means STORM WATCH 2016!!!! Southern California doesn’t handle weather too well.) Yesterday the sky was a nice pink color around 7pm and I snapped this picture of one of the random plants

I was playing with my zoom lens instead of the usual 50mm and I like how this turned out.

 

Thanks for looking at my picture!

 

Pickups!

Chris Buys A New Laptop!

Remember a couple of weeks ago I said I was going to buy a new laptop? Well I finally did. A little background: I own a Macbook Pro and apparently it was one of the laptops with a faulty logic board and guess who missed the deadline to get it replaced? This guy. Anyways after having a battery rupture I thought that was the least of my worries but no, it still has problems. When it was working it was great, but having random shut downs, and not being able to turn it off is a pain. Off I went to find a laptop that had similar specs, was affordable, enough space for my iTunes library, and maybe some PC gaming. I didn’t want to go desktop because I like being able to move around when I use my computer. I went with a Dell 7559.

The specs:

i5- 6300 HQ 2.3 GHz Quad Core (6m cache, Turbo up to 3.2 GHz)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4GB GDDR5

256 GB M.2 Solid State Drive

8GB DDR3L SD RAM

 

I also added:

2 TB Hard drive

8GB DDR3L RAM

Cheap Wired Mouse

 

It’s been awhile since I followed what goes into computers so I was a bit lost, but thanks YouTube for letting me know what is going on!

I picked this laptop because it was in my budget (maybe a $100 over because taxes) but I am able to have the quick boot of Windows, like I did with my MBP with OSX, I have more storage, and I am able to play games.

 

I ordered this setup on Friday afternoon, and I got everything Sunday Morning. Thanks to the mailman for actually putting it at my door!

I spent 10 minutes adding the extra stick of RAM along with the hard drive *random tangent: why don’t hard drive manufacturers include hardware? Do you know how hard it is looking for extra screws? How cool is it that the 256GB of storage is that stick in the top left corner under a fan? The back panel is connected by one screw which makes it easy to pop the panel off. 

When it booted up everything worked fine except the second hard drive wasn’t appearing on my screen. After a couple of minutes of trying to figure it out I realized that it needed to be formatted and once I did that, everything was golden. I spent the next couple of hours migrating iTunes over from the 1TB external I’ve been using for a couple of years to the new internal home with still over a Terabyte of space.

 

Random shot of my cheapy mouse. I went with wired because I don’t want to deal with having to replace batteries. Also I found out this mouse has weights that can be removed (I can’t get the cover off)

I was amazed that Windows brought over my settings from my Mini PC to my new PC

 

And the setup after I finished installing the hard drive and RAM

 

It took most of yesterday to figure out how to get a PS3 controller running on the laptop and after I got that going I played Need For Speed Most Wanted which was one of the freebie games from Origin. I’m not going to be doing a lot of PC gaming but I will give a couple of games a try, and maybe check out some stuff I may have missed that wasn’t available on console. I'm also going to buy a giant SDSU sticker to cover up the Dell logo on the front. The whole thing is red and black so why not make it an SDSU theme laptop?

 

Music

I took a random trip to the mall in the middle of the week for lunch and while I was there I decided to stop in the local mom and pop music store and spent $10 on 8 CDs from the buy 5 get 3 free section

 

Filled a couple of holes in my Rap section of my iTunes library. Heavy D and the Boyz is an album my friend used to play all the time (on cassette) when we were growing up.

 

Some R&B. Adina Howard is from High School, so another High School album is off the must find list.

 

I found my second Dual Disc. Too bad one of the arms is broken. I have an unofficial goal of trying to find the entire run of Dual Disc (around 100 or so) in the wild. I have two.

 

I believe this is Debbie Gibson’s third release, but I’m not 100% sure. I’m slowly building a Debbie Gibson discography, and yet still no Tiffany CDs. The CD next to is The Tom Tom Club. They’re famous for their song Genius of Love (good song) and later sampled by Mariah Carey.

 

The next group of CDs were in the free bin next to the check out counter. The owner of the store said a guy came in, dropped them off, and left. He then handed me my bag and said fill up with as much as you want. I spent the next five minutes searching through and picking up whatever I did not own

 

Elton John and Andrea Bocelli. I’m slowly building up a discography for both.

 

I didn’t realize I already own Simon & Garfunkel so that goes on the donate pile. Another Celine album

 

Who would give up Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits I&II? I’m happy they did because before this point all I had was GH III, and some random albums. The other CD is Neil Young & The Blue Notes

 

Yes I make fun of myself for owning the Kenny G album on cassette. I like to blame Freshman Chris on buying it but I did figure out how to play a couple of songs on my saxophone. I could never figure out a section in the track The Wedding Song.

 

Charlotte Church rounds out the free CDs I took. There were still a good 20 or so CDs in the bin, and I lined them up so other folks wouldn’t have a tough time looking though them.

Once again The Voice got me to buy a single. Well played Voice

 

Alright Pixlbit I am off to get my morning walk in. Have a good weekend, oh and if you’re on steam I’m AztecsAlum, come say hi!

 

That’s all for now, more later!

-Chris

 

For today’s music I thought I’d share The Tom Tom Club’s Genius Of Love

 

And Mariah Carey’s sample in her single Fantasy

 

Both good songs, and fun to listen to. Have a good weekend!

 

BONUS! Since it’s 311, here is one of my favorite 311 songs. It reminds me of going to the beach during summer school