Two days update

Yesterday, Friday, I was home all day feeling not so good. This was expected when moving to a new country. Annika and I met John at the Buona Vista station and immediately travelled to Rochor.

John was very on point. We walked to Sim Lim Square and up to the fourth floor to the PC store we had researched it had the cheapest computer parts. While the guy working there put everything together in plastic bags, the three of us went downstairs and ate dinner at the food court. John's choice of food was the best one, Annika and I ate a mango salad drowned in chilli sauce. Both of us ate half of it. Annika took of towards the shopping street and we went back to SLS.

John withdrew so much cash that his wallet would not close properly because there was a rebate for paying cash. We paid and a guy helped us with a cart to get the things down. We made a stop at another store to get the screen and mouse that we wanted before we went out in the heat and stood by the taxi stand. Our taxi driver was very kind and explained things about taxes and payment. For instance we think that the driver that took us to Ministry of Manpower added three dollars extra for no reason. If we ask for receipt we might not have paid as much as we did. Lesson learned.

During the evening and into the night John put together the computer all by himself. Very interested I tried to look but he had made the area a no-touch-zone-for-Ellie so I sat in the sofa playing Destiny on PS4. Around midnight I put myself to bed while the two of them were still up and I was sleeping like a baby when John came in.

"Long story short: the computer was not working as planned. Or at all for that matter. It was impossible to get any kind of image signal from either the motherboard or graphics card, although everything started up like it should, so nothing seemed broken. I had stayed up until around two in the morning trying to troubleshoot every single little detail, including plugging out everything that wasn't essential, creating a poor husk of a computer to remove all possible miss-wirings and redundancies. A lot of frustration, a few calls with some great friends in Sweden - thank you David and Joel - and tons of manual reading later I gave up. Slept pretty poorly thinking about which part was broken and how much of a fuss it would be to replace. 

Turns out I had to trick the motherboard into sending out a HDMI signal by plugging in a VGA cable, installing windows, inserting a secondary monitor via HDMI, making it my main one, rebooting with that configuration and then plugging in the graphics card. Whew. Who would've thought of that?" - John

Today has been a very slow day. I did not feel well at all. Annika spent most of the lunch and afternoon up on the roof. John and I went out to buy food, ate lunch and buy essentials. It took longer than expected because of me, but eventually we made it home. The rain came just after and was very loud, sounded like somebody was pouring buckets from the roof. Saturday became a gaming day, a very much needed one.

Tomorrow we will go see some apartments.