Tag Archives: Gadgets and Nerdery

I have a pimple on my forehead.

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Aidan used a Twizzler to spread something on my laptop’s monitor. Streaks of something that’s stubbornly resisting my thumbnail. I’m up now, hoping to go to sleep soon. Energy drinks are helping me stay up when the baby is, because caffeine alone doesn’t seem to be doing the job. Cian’s just fallen asleep, but he seems to know whenever I get the covers over me and get settled in. He wakes up after having summarily ejected his pacifier from his mouth, or has gotten his blanket over his face (which he hates), or has persistent evil gas bubbles working through his tiny, tiny digestive system.

I’ve acquired a bluetooth mouse for my laptop, and it works well on odd surfaces. Even the arm of my recliner. It’s a little small, but I’m getting used to it. I’ve had good luck with Microsoft peripherals in the past (almost as good as Logitech), so we’ll see how this one holds up.

Whoop, he’s awake again. I knew it. :) Pacifier has been applied.

We had our first Pampered Chef party at our house today. We were both hosts and consultants, with the way that it worked out. Almost all of our guests had to cancel, but we’re leaving the show open for web ordering for the whole week.

All right, he’s been asleep for a little bit now. I’m going to try and get some shut-eye.

I have much to say.

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I’m updating from a new/refurbished laptop that has come my way thanks to the amazing . My wife. *sighs happily* I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with the moon-eyes. They’re going to be around for a while.

I hesitate to call the machine reliable, lest it suddenly become not. Yes, it’s running Vista (Home Premium), but I’m not complaining too much. It is after the SP1 threshhold, after all. Also, it’s a Dell, who happens to also sell machines with Linux pre-installed. So, both wallet and conscience were served.

For Yule, got me a Philips GoGear mp3 player. It’s a spiffy little 2GB player that doesn’t try to be what it’s not. It’s simply a spiffy little 2GB mp3 player (along with other formats). And then, um, I lost it. Dropped it in the snow while moving Aidan’s car seat from one car to another at the crack of dawn. Well, yesterday, the snow began to melt. Hardcore. I looked a few times, but didn’t see it. I’d made myself pretty bummed about the whole deal, since it was a gift. Then, yesterday, lo and behold, Hunter to the rescue…

“Skippy! Your mp3 player! I found it!” We were on our way to Howell to pick up ‘s hopefully-fixed car. I ran over to him, raised my arms to the sky, and yelled “YES!” at the top of my lungs. I picked him up and spun him around, which made him giggle madly. Later, he kept asking why I’d spun him around, not quite grokking the response of “I was -that- happy, man.” I’m just thrilled that he saw that squareish black rubber holster on the side of our driveway.

After waiting a few hours for it to dry, I gave it a shot. My Philips GoGear survived being lost in the snow, shoveled into a snowbank, being melted on, and then being dried out. It works flawlessly. It’s one hardy piece of tech.

Good gift. :)

Dropped off the face of the earth

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Yeah, I’ve been gone for a couple of weeks. There’s some news, and there’s some reasons, and there’s some mixing of the two. Yeah, vague, I know. Some of it’s purposeful. If you want clarification, feel free to hit me up on IM. I probably won’t be clarifying in the comments here, and there are good reasons for that.

I’m no longer working for Great Lakes Comnet/CoreNetworks. I was not expecting it, nor did I leave the company of my own volition. Legally, that’s all I can say.

I am looking for new employment, and have been for two weeks.

I can’t say how much I’ll check back on my backlogged friends’ page. I’ve been without reliable computer since I returned the work laptop. I’ve got Puppy Linux running on Nikki’s old laptop, and it works fine until I get Pidgin running. Then it kernel panics. Soooo.. putting Debian on a G3 tower, and I’ll be finding out what its max ram is. I’ll make that my workstation until I find something better.

Yeah, even (or especially) when stress levels get high, and life throws changes my way, I geek out with old equipment. Sue me. :)

Hunter’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese was a complete success and an absolute blast. He’s 8 years old now, and has earned/been gifted with enough money that he’s purchased his own Playstation 2. We’ve got a deal going about behaving and doing well at school, and earning money by doing it. Seems to be working well.

Cian, the baby in the oven, is kicking like a crazy person. I’ve felt him, and talked to him, and generally been embarrassingly cute about everything.

Stress is a bit high, so my temper is a bit short. I’m really working on it, and I’m really working on fighting depression. Maybe I need to throw in a few more reallys. Really.

Totally.

No perfect way to force-quit a browser.

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Saving tabs on quit across multiple browser windows is not something that Google Chrome is good at. However, it seems fantastic at pretty much everything else.

So, there’s a bunch of stuff that I meant to share and/or read that is now lost in the ether. I hope to tread those paths once again sometime in the future.

I’ve officially ditched iTunes on any of my PCs. WinAmp, despite being part of the AOL/TimeWarner megacorp, seems to do what I want it to do with the least amount of getting in my way. Also, it seems to cross the lines with MP3 players. The Sandisk Sansas shows up on it. So does the Creative Zen. I’ve yet to try an iPod. Probably because I’m not planning on purchasing one.

Is the Apple shiny finally wearing off? Probably not as long as VMWare Fusion exists. *drool*

I’m late in posting it, but I wholeheartedly support this:

Also, a Catholic Father in CA defies his Cardinals and speaks out in favor of gay marriage. In this case, I have to say, preach it, brother.

Argh.

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From Google Reader’s help site:

Google Reader doesn’t currently support authentication for private feeds that require a username and password to view. Such feeds will appear to be empty or missing if you try to subscribe to them. This includes Gmail feeds.

Random Updatery

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Most of the wall of boxes is gone. Unpacked, broken down, and either in my car or stacked. We have a window in the dining room!

There’s awesome stuff hung up on the walls.

There’s books on the shelves.

I’m wearing a green shirt. (Why would I say that? How often have you seen me wear green?)

I pulled Slag (Compaq 266 mhz) out of the stack of computers in the basement, to see if it’d survived sliding around in my trunk for a few months. I mean, the hard drive was failing when I was using it for proof of concept at LW. It booted once, but I was getting a ton of write errors when running the apt-get update on it. So, the Quantum Bigfoot drive died, and I’ve replaced it with another drive – smaller in size, higher in capacity. Upgrade from 4 gb to 6 gb, I think. Anyway, the first of the two 8-port ATI hubs I got at MSU Surplus ($2 each) works, and Slag is halfway through its bare-bones Debian install.

I didn’t know how to dispose of the hard drive properly, because you’re not supposed to just toss a lot of computer parts. A quick Google search brought Back Thru the Future up, and so I’m sending the drive to New Jersey for recycling. If they can make some bucks on the aluminum that’s in the drive casing, and the steel that’s inside it, I’m all for it. Yay for profitable recycling.

I miss Aidan already.

My groggy day.

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A link: To the media: Do your job. Long article, but worth the read.

We’re moved in to the house! Holy cats. We keep finding more little things that need work, and our landlord/repair guy team are being responsive and actually seem happy that we’re relaying this stuff to them. They’re not annoyed that they have to fix things. They seem to -want- to make sure the house is up to par. It seems that they get that fixing things now means less work than having to fix a cascading failure later.

That sounded geekier than intended. In that vein, Ubuntu installs have a habit of being at 33% of whatever they’re doing when I look at them.

Yes, I’m a little sleep deprived, why do you ask?

While , Cassie, and Aidan were napping, and while Hunter and Killian were playing, I sat upstairs in the finished attic and finished up a piece. When I get a chance, I will be typing it and Steven up.

Prepping CentoS for a Xen install now. Man, this post keeps swinging back toward the geek-centric content, doesn’t it? Why am I even a little bit surprised?

Much of my computer stuff has already been moved into the basement, where a wall-mounted workbench and metal shelving unit await their transformation into the SETI@Home for Twilight Computers. I’m not sure if any of the 486 machines survived, or if my oldest down there is a Pentium. In any case once Comcast (some would say, the devil) comes by on Wednesday, I’ll finally have the wired connection I need to sink my teeth into that project. Not that I’ll have the free time to nurture it, but whatever. Debian pretty much runs on its own, once it’s set up.

Maybe some of the cardboard forest will be defeated tomorrow. Wish us luck! :)

“You played it for her, you can play it for me.”

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There’s about a billion things in my head that I keep wanting to get out, so I’m going to do a couple at a time.

This weekend’s move will start at 11 AM, and we’ll meet at my current apartment. Tomorrow is a packing/get water and gas turned on/grocery shopping day, and I should have the whole place packed by the end of the day. If you need directions, or the address or some such, just drop me a phone call or a comment here.

I desperately need to shave my face.

traded me a sweet shiny black computer case for my portable CD/MP3 CD player the last time he was down, but I totally forgot to get it to him. It’s sent out with delivery confirmation and tracking, so it best get to him in one piece.

Remember that cassette tape MP3 player that I’ve been gushing about? This one? Well, I finally spent part of my Micro Center gift card on SD cards for it, and it… has issues. It spazzes out with anything longer than a four-minute song on MP3 when it comes to pausing and resuming. It ejects from my car’s tape player with an E11 error – broken tape. So, it’s basically useless to me. I ordered the thing back around my birthday, in early May, and so I figured I was stuck with it. No harm in trying to return it, though, right?

I e-mailed ThinkGeek with the situation, quoted this spot from the ad:

You will have no problems listening to hours of your favorite songs via the built-in SD card slot, and you can easily change to different songs if you have multiple SD Cards.

and got an email back the next day with a shipping label, RMA number, and apologies. So, I’ve packaged it up, labeled it, and sent it back. They’re going to give me a full refund. I think I’ll end up with a microSD-expandable Sansa player, because I want to be just like . I mean, c’mon. Don’t you?