Sharkbait’s Cocktail of the Week: Have You Tried Turning it Off and On Again?

Why? Why does technology hate me? I was off yesterday and today, and my plans for day 1 of this 4 day weekend went completely off the rails when I tried to boot my PC this morning. It started up, but nothing displayed. No BIOS, no login, nothing. There was a VGA error on my motherboard I was able to see (Thanks tempered glass case wall!) and immediately I feared that my 3 year old graphics card shit the bed. I brought it over to my friends house to test my PC and card on the plethora of other computers he has built in his house for LAN party nights. Of course when I got there my PC started playing nice and booting properly. Subsequent testing of the card and my computer led us to think that while the graphics card is cooperating for now, it most likely needs to be sent out for warranty. Ho-ray. At least that portion of the day ended with the two of us getting beers and bar pizza at Treehouse. That didn’t suck.

On top of that, this evening (Thursday) my home internet has decided to just drop out randomly, multiple times per day. I’ve narrowed the cause down to my 9 year old modem, or my ISP. I’m willing to bet the modem is dying given its age, but I’ll call the ISP when I get back from FOB: Cape Cod that I’m heading to today to check that the line is still functioning properly and rule them out completely.

End. Rant.

So where does this leave me? Something fast, and something with little to no thought or effort. I give you  what I’m calling The IT Crowd:

2.5 oz. Smith and Cross rum

1 lime wedge

.25 oz. Simple Syrup

Frozen cubes of pineapple

Add frozen pineapple to a rocks glass. Add rum. Squeeze lime wedge and drop in the glass. Add the simple syrup and stir.

Yeah, This is a total half ass effort. I just wanted to get something in before either my graphics card goes tits up, or my internet drops and the back end page refreshes and I lose all of my work. For being half assed though, it isn’t half bad actually. The rum is a decent sipper, so that definitely helps out a lot here. The lime and simple syrup take the edge off a little bit, but they don’t impact the flavor. I still get a ton of the warm rum spice, and other flavors on the palate. It helps that it’s Navy strength by nature, so the flavors are more intense and can get through what resistance the lime and simple provide.

I don’t get a lot of pineapple…yet. I added those because I thought it would be a fun attempt at cooling this without ice, and it doesn’t do that job very well. I’m not too broken up about that though. It’s still good, and now I get rum soaked pineapple cubes to look forward to when this is all said and done.

So, yeah. If technology can stop hating me that would be great. Especially since this is possibly the worst time to need a new GPU.

(Banner image courtesy Matthew Tetrault Photography)