Thursday, November 22, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful for many things, first and foremost that the day is nearly over and I get some rest. Wow is it a busy day.

We followed the lead of last year and invited the Vassigh family over for the daily feast. It was lots of fun and it is great to see Ali, Steph and Darius again. No pictures this year. Had too much fun to remember the camera.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

House guests

Well, I haven't posted much lately because we have been prepping the house for some guests that will be staying with us the first weekend of December. Mr. Knight aka MatchesMMalone will be visiting the PacNW as well as my parents. So along with that, I needed to make sure we had enough sleeping berths for everyone. So Michelle picked out a new bed and we have been turning my office into the fourth bedroom. I can pleasantly say that the office is clean (which is the first time since I finished drywalling, mudding, painting, and carpeting this room) and now has a bed in it. The worst part about it was just the shear amount of stuff that was scattered about in here. We really have some filing to do now and to decide what papers gets shredded (old stuff) and what we keep (new stuff).

Next to do is move the bed from our room to the guest bedroom in preparations for the arrival of a new bed next week. So I have to say that I have had a pretty productive weekend. Oh, and I really haven't slept.

And with that I believe that some coffee is in order.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Computer...

Well, I have to say that it feels weird still to have a fast computer again. The effect it's had on what I do with my computer is still nill. I still check email. I still surf the net. Although, I can do so with ease and speed. The biggest surprise to me so far in these intervening years is how fast USB 2.0 is compared to it's previous versions. Pretty pathetic huh?

That being said, working with photographs is now much more of a joy. And I am looking forward to trying out some of the PC only games that I have missed out on, specifically Spore.

I am not sold on Vista. I ended up turning off most of the Aero improvements. I don't need fancy stuff when I use the computer. I made it look like good old Win95. I am ok with that. More it is just easier for me find things. I may switch it back when I feel like monkeying with it, but I see these things as very utilitarian.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Cork Dorks

Given that I am not a connoisseur, but try to be one, I found this article on the Subjectivity of Wine to be pretty cool. Most of the time, I tend to keep my classification simply to drinkable and not drinkable. The second part of my analysis hits on day two with the size of my headache.

Will talk about my new PC later.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Misc post

Couple things have happened lately. First, I am likely to do nanowrimo this year, but I have firm beliefs that I won't finish it. I just want to do it to practice writing, but in no way will feel obligated to complete the 50k words in a single month. Mostly to do so would risk time with family and I don't want to do that. In such, I am going to try using one of the online office programs as I am replacing my desktop computer.

I recently got a Zune, mostly cause it was cheap, and partly because I wanted a media player. The device arrived yesterday, but due to gaming, I just set it to charging and played for a while. Once I was done gaming, I started the whole installation process. Now I would like to say that I feel like I am handy at computers, I have cobbled together many machines and have limped many along for a while. This installation process left me with tons of wasted time. First off this is a gen-1 zune and I figured my 4+ year old desktop would suffice for it's media connection. Wrong. The Zune may say that it works with USB 1.0 but that is a lie. I spent 3 hours trying to install the software in such a way as to work with my device and at the end of that, I pulled out my 3 year old laptop with a broken power plug and installed it on that. But the problem is that it is a 1.4GHz Centrino which translates to slow. So today, I did some bargain computer shopping while waiting during installations and have purchased a HP Pavilion M9040N Elite Desktop PC. Usually I order Dell, but due to the fact that lately I have noticed more and more troubles with Dells (over the last 3 years) and coupled with a decent amount of machine for the price, I went with the HP. The real drawback I see here is that it has Vista. Sigh.

Along with this Zune purchase, I was also under the incorrect assumption that it could possibly work with Amazon Unbox since I have a couple of shows downloaded that I have not watched. Again, I am disappointed. Sorry Microsoft, but when I buy a player from you, I expect it to work with Plays for Sure. Yes, if I would have done some research I would have realized this. Shame on me. But this DRM thing is really screwing with the consumer. I mean, damn it, I want to spend my money with you fuckers, but I do and ... and ... and you punch me in the face.

(I lost in the beatdown again! I need to switch to boxer.)

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Nanowrimo

Well, we have finally reached November. Now I need to decide if I am going to do National Novel Writing Month. I have done this in the past as in before Miranda. I am not sure if I am up for it though.