They All Drowned

I love Hunter Thompson and random trivia so I love this.

It is a weird plan, rife with madness and a sort of low-tech desperation that nobody in Utah is proud of ... But it is necessary, they say, and it will not be the first time that white men in the Western Hemisphere have gotten involved in a tragic lake-draining project.

One of the uglist of these is the saga of the draining of the Lago de Amor, a remote inland lagoon in the highlands of Colombia where the legendary Treasure of El Dorado still rests in the foul black mud.

This nightmare is described in a book called The Fruit Palace, by a Britisher named Charles Nicholl, who came on the place while chasing a cocaine dream.

"Eldorado was not originally a place," Nicholl says, " but a person -- el dorado, the gilded man." He was the main figure in a coronation ceremony held for a new territorial chieftan (cacique) in the Chibcha empire.

"At the shores of the lagoon he was stripped naked, anointed with sticky resin, and sprayed with gold dust. A raft of reeds was prepared, with braziers of moque incense and piles of gold and jewels on it."

He and four other caciques floated to the middle of the lake, where he then dove into the lake, washing off the gold. The ceremony concluded with all the gold and jewels being thrown into the lake.

When the Spanish learned of the ceremony, they began many attempts to drain the lake, starting with Hernan Perez de Quesada in 1545.

"Using a bucket chain of Indian labourers with gourd jars, he succeeded in lowering the level of the water by some ten feet, enough to recover about 3,000 pesos of gold." They managed about three feet a month but rain refilled the lagoon almost as quickly. Antonia de Sepulveda and a crew of 8,000 Indians lowered the level by 60 feet about 40 years later. He recovered some gold and gems "including an emerald the size of a hen's egg." He failed to get financing for subsequent efforts and died "poor and tired."

A French scientist estimated in 1825 the value of the unrecovered treasure at 1,120,000 pounds.

The lake was completely drained after a British joint-stock company, Contractors, Ltd., bought the rights "to exploit the lagoon" in 1899.

"They drilled a tunnel right under the lake and up into the centre, and the water was sluiced away down this giant plughole, with mercury screens to trap any precious objects."

The lakebed, however, proved intractable, impossible to walk on because of layers of mud and slime, which became concrete with the sun's heat. Not even drilling equipment could free the mud-clogged sluices and tunnel, and eventually the lake refilled.

--HST May 19, 1986

Oh technology has marched on and I, the poor student, was left behind.

That is until recently. And i have to admit, updating this godforsaken pillar in my daily life has been about as easy as gouging your own eyes out with a curly straw. Short of fire shooting out of the case and burning my house down, every problem has been ostensibly met with a more annoying problem.

I bought the motherboard and processor from NCIX during their boxing day sales. It was a good deal at the time but whatever I saved in money I spent in more money and a boiling sense of rage against technology. The boards came and it was good. When I finally got around to installing them in my current system I came across a problem. The RAM wouldn't fit. At this point I began to see the traces of deeply dug trench war between me and the computer. As all nemesis need names you can hate I started to see this as my own personal Cerebus. Keeping me in misery and bondage.

However, spirits were high and I still had some money saved so I swapped my whole system back out, went once again to NCIX, grabbed some new RAM and waited.

It's at this point that I think I should mention how much time it takes to actually get anything from these guys. Don't bother getting the fast shipping. When they come they'll swoop in in mid-afternoon when no one could possibly be around to sign for anything and leave you a mocking tab of paper saying 'Sorry we missed you'!

You will take no comfort in this empty condolence.

To actually receive said package you have to wait for work to end, then find some way of getting out to an area where no busses run and which is deadlocked traffic from 4:30 to 6 before 5:45. You wait in traffic and get cut off by everyone who lives out in CBS who have been hardened into black little husks by years of making this same shitty trip, kind of like March of the Penguins only if it were made by old jerks and bitches in cars that on first glance look way too big until you notice that the cars have to fit around the heart attack at the wheel. You have to do this whenever you make a voyage to Puralator and when you finally get your package you feel little joy for having had to deaden yourself to the world just to get it.

Anyway...

RAM came in and it fit nicely in my board with a satisfying click that you get from solving a puzzle or take a great picture. Good feelings filled me and I went about the annoying task of once again removing my old motherboard and putting this new one in. Eventually it was done. I started to get excited again, it had been about two weeks now but I was going to have my spoils soon.

Or not.

See, the thing that I realized having not made any major computer purchases in the past year or two is that there were a lot of parts that came out that had managed to make a whole new set of cables and ports the standard. My old board had an IDE ribbon, took DDR RAM and had an AGP socket for the graphics card and had a 20 pin ATX power supply and . New boards, like the one I have have a new drive connection (SATA), new RAM slots (DDR2 - EXTRA PINS SO YOU GOTTA BUY ME!) new graphics card slot (PCI-E) and needs more power (ATX 24 pin). I had none of this so off I went to buy a new Power supply.

It was a surprisingly easy process that. I went to a local store (Boom IT), grabbed a new PSU and plugged it in. If you think that that was the end of it, .... no. To cut this short I spent all evening last night finding BIOS revisions, troubleshooting a potential RAM issue and fucking around with my internal drives until now...NOW... I'm finally able to do a reinstall of windows. It looks promising so far but I know Cerebus and he is a vengeful bastard. It appears to have stalled already, which is a problem that I'm really going to have to figure out sometime, but as long as I can get a desktop tonight i'll be happy...ish.

If I can't then I think it'll be time for me to get a big funny hat and to churn butter for the rest of my life.

Bummer on the apartment. I saw one downtown yesterday that I think i would have taken after a little while to think about it. Turns out that some lady came in right away took a look at the place and grabbed it on the spot. Learning lessons all over the place about getting housing lately. Unfortunately there's nothing interesting left in the paper. I hate calling up the ones with no address listed but I suppose that I'm going to have to search a little harder if I'm to find anything.

Distortion tonight. Kind of want to get a little smashed.