At Max Capacity

It was my intention to get a lot of stuff (for me) done this morning, so once I got up I resolved to spend less than the usual amount of time sitting around doing nothing.
Accomplishing that, I made my way first to Circuit City.
I have a process running on my computer(s) at all times that can sometimes eat up a lot of memory, and this, naturally, can cause issues when I’m working on processor and memory-intensive tasks like painting and image editing.
The obvious solution is to just kill the process when I’m going to be engaging in these tasks, but then the problem becomes remembering to start it back up afterwards.
In any case, last week I decided that to resolve this issue I would simply bump up the amount of RAM in my system.
My system is capable of supporting a total of 4 GB of RAM, and came with 1 GB installed, in the form of two 512 MB DIMMs. This left two slots open and meant that if I wanted to upgrade to the max I’d need to buy 4 GB and replace the two half GB DIMMs.
I opted to simply double the current amount by purchasing two more 512 MB DIMMs, creating a total of 2 GB of RAM. Why not go all out? Well, as mentioned, I’d have to replace the existing RAM rather than simply adding to it, which would, according to my research, cost me around $600.
Simply adding 1 GB at ~$150 seemed like the maximum bang for the buck point, so with that in mind I headed off to Best Buy.
(It should be noted that after going online to find the exact kind of RAM I needed, I wrote the specs down on a post-it note…which I then affixed to the back of my PDA. It was a hybrid low tech/high tech solution.)
Once I got there, though, I found that they had no 512 MB DIMMs in stock, and I hadn’t realized at the time that you didn’t need to pair the DIMMs, so it didn’t occur to me to just buy a 1 GB DIMM.
Over the weekend I made the discovery about not needing to pair the memory, and also found that employees of my company get a discount from PNY, a memory manufacturer. However, they did not have the kind of RAM I needed in stock.
So today I decided to check out Circuit City. I had grabbed a 1 GB DIMM and was considering buying two, as it would bring me up to 3 GB and still keep the cost well below the $600 that 4 GB would set me back, but they only had one DIMM in stock.
Ultimately I decided to check the other Best Buy that I was near, but they didn’t have any of the RAM I needed.
On the way back to Leesburg I stopped at the other Best Buy to see if they’d replenished their stock. They had 1 GB DIMMs in stock, and, in fact, had them on sale at such a price that buying 4 GB only cost about $50 more than buying 2 GB would have.
So, while it’s too late to make a long story short, the gist of it is that Hugin is now whizzing along with 4 GB of RAM installed.
I’d planned on going grocery shopping before going home, giving me enough time to get everything put away before my chiropractor appointment, but by the time I’d bought the RAM I only had enough time to go home, put the RAM in, make sure that I didn’t inadvertently fry anything in the process, and head over to the chiropractor, so I held off until after my appointment to get the groceries.
So all of that is done, and now here I am having completed all the tasks I set for myself today.
Because I’d forgotten to stick my post-it back onto my PDA, when I was at Best Buy I was operating from memory, ironically enough, as to what kind of memory I needed to buy. I was 99.9% sure I had the right kind, but went up to an employee to ask him to double-check for me. This was only after I was able to find one, as they’re never around when I want one, but are constantly besieging me when I don’t.
I found some kid who had that all-too common sort of teenage boy voice that suggests that either he has a permanent head cold or is mildly retarded (my vote is for the latter), and explained that I wanted him to confirm for me that this was the correct kind of memory.
He said, in his congested/brain damaged voice that he “don’t understand that computer stuff,” and so I went off in search of another, who understood that all I needed him to do was go to a memory maker’s Web site and do a search on my computer’s make and model using the database search that the site (like all memory manufacture sites) has. The site seemed to be broken, though, so he had to go to Dell’s site to find it.
Anyway, that was the bulk of the excitement for my day. I had the disturbing experience of being behind an elderly woman buying lingerie at Wal-Mart, but the less said about that the better.
Ahead of her was a woman who was making her shopping experience more difficult than it really needed to be. As I’ve said many, many times, buying stuff isn’t really that complicated. I should know; I just spent over $500 today with no real difficulty at all.
Yet somehow people manage to make it so, and I just don’t get it. Are they just overthinking it and operating from the theory that it must be more difficult than it appears to be on the surface?
Somehow I have my doubts about that, as there seems to be so little thinking actually involved. One can’t help but wonder how these people handle the actual challenges that life throws at them when they have such difficulty clearing one of the easier hurdles.
Of course, I can’t think of a better note on which to direct your attention to this clip from the Mike Judge film Idiocracy, which tells the story of a future in which natural selection has been thwarted. Enjoy!