No computer upgrade is complete without a little blood loss. My desktop started locking up randomly today, and I realized I was using a power supply with a questionable history from Erika’s old computer. I had to make yet another run out for computer gear, this time blowing $50 on a new Antec power supply.
When testing it, I inadvertently stuck my finger in the running CPU fan, and chopped off a hunk of skin. Good fan. Moves quick. Thumbs up from me. Anyway, it’s been running for nearly an hour now, so that’s a Good Thing.
I put off going out until the end of the Indy 500, and man am I glad. That was easily the best finish I’ve ever seen, with Helio rolling to the finish with barely enough fuel to make the victory lap. My dad took me to Indy several times, and it’s the only racing event I love to watch.
My vacation memories: Frys. I’ve made half a dozen trips to Frys this week grabbing various little bits and pieces. My home server (which serves the web site you’re looking at) was powered by a clapped-out Celeron 400, which has been replaced with a hand-me-down 800 from my desktop. I bought a new 1.3ghz cpu for my desktop, but it turns out my motherboard won’t take higher than a 1ghz. More trips to Frys, and now I’ve got a P3-933 in my desktop, and more fans for my home server. (It uses SCSI drives, and it’s been getting way too hot.)
I can’t say enough good things about the folks in the CPU department at Frys. I asked for the quietest CPU cooler they had, and the woman knew exactly where to find it. These people are always on top of things.
All is not lost. We spent the day at Galveston, walking around the beach and shopping. Of all the shops we went into, the last place I would have expected to pick something up was Mikasa – but we got a teapot and a glass cordial decanter. I owe Erika five (now four) glass bottles from a bet I made regarding my income tax refund, and I promised Mom I’d pick up a whistling teakettle after I repeatedly left a pot of water boiling on the stove while I worked. I make coffee using a french press, and I seem to have developed a nasty habit of boiling pots dry.
So much for rest and relaxation. Everything that could go wrong, did – our flights were overbooked, the timing was wrong, and even when we’d gone home and figured the night was over, it managed to get worse – I got food poisoning. Unreal. So now I’m typing this from home, and I’ve just about recovered from all the nasty stuff. Thank goodness for modern medicine. We’ll try to make a flight up to Michigan this week. We decided to go see my folks instead of Mexico. Long story, and lost a hotel deposit in the process. Ahhh, travel.
On the road again… Vacation time. After a frenzied couple of weeks, I’m ready to hit the road and relax. I won’t have my laptop with me, but I’ll check the site remotely and maybe post a blog or two.
Been doing the Ebay thing a lot this week. Got a nifty addition to the PalmPilot that I got from work, and a central part of my upcoming car computer project. (I’m building an MP3 jukebox for my car.)
Can’t wait for Survivor – only two more days! Hope I can catch it on TV. Sure wish I had a Tivo for times like this. I’ve almost got Erika convinced to let me buy one, heh heh heh…
Web site updates coming right along… Well, I took the day off to get away from the computer a while, and I realized I hadn’t published a lot of the changes I’d made over the last few days. The site is in dot-Net now, and yesterday I scanned some new photos and set up a page about my turtles, Frank and Fred.
More upcoming changes are in the works: the blog really isn’t up to speed yet, and I’ve gotta finish the discussion areas and my column archives. I’ll also have a login setup so that you can get emails whenever I publish a new blog.
On a personal level, I’ve got a horrible headache today. Dunno what’s going on there, but it’s been persisting for the last couple of days. Probably a brain tumor. These might be my last words. Egads.
Well, it’s coming along. Let’s see how this works.
And of course, it won’t save multilines.
Here we go! I’m in the process of converting the site from plain old ASP to dot-Net. I figured while I was at it, I’d give the site a bunch of new functionality. Here, for example, is my new database-driven blog.
The changes are being driven by two things: I was dying to play with the new Dreamweaver MX, and my site’s probably going to start getting more hits now that I’ve got a column in HAL-PC magazine. I wanted to have a discussion area for the columns, so that people could ask questions and contribute ideas for upcoming columns. Anyway, here we go!
