My new toy
I finally got my laptop. Actually, they call it a netbook. They’re not made to do stuff that involves a lot of memory or graphics, just the normal checking your emails and stuff like that. Unless you want to try to get it to do all of that stuff.
It went down in price, so I broke down and bought it. Heck, when you’ve been watching something for a month and notice that the price dropped $100, you’re gonna get it right? Here’s a few pics of it.
Isn't she purrrdy!
Now, this pic might show the beauty of it, but not exactly the size.
And this isn't a mini bottle!
Yup, she’s only got a 10″ screen. Not too bad, I actually really like it. I just mostly wanted it to be able to sit in the living room, watch tv and chat/surf at the same time.
Built for gaming.
Well I had a decent amount of lumber leftover from the workbench. (I bought 10ft. 2×4’s instead of 8ft. ones) So I’ve been thinking what I was going to do with the extras. We’ve had our old TV sitting down in the basement since we moved in, and I enjoyed my old N64 setup for the few short weeks I had it set up at the old house. I decided I would like to get it going here, but didn’t want to rob one of the nice glass top end tables from the living room if I didn’t have to.
I didn’t have any build plans for this, but it might look familiar. I used much the same idea as the workbench. Just smaller demensions. I think it turned out well. And like the workbench, this thing is solid and HEAVY. Guess I’m used to particle board furniture. Ha ha!
02.5.09Bottles
Not sure what possessed me to get bottles this time, but I realized how long it’s been since I had a nice chilled bottle of High Life. I dunno why people freak out about clear bottles and beer. Tastes just fine to me. I blame marketing.
EDIT: Rodney, if you’re reading this, don’t make fun of my wood paneling. Micheal Anthony hooked me up.
Time capsule
For those that follow my Twitter, you heard that I bought a “new in the box” N64 controller off of eBay last week. When it comes to eBay, I’m always skeptical by default. But at the price of $27 I figured it was worth a shot. I only have two good working controllers for my N64, and even if this was isn’t BRAND new, I’ll just be happy if it has a nice tight analog stick. So after work today there’s a package waiting for me. I tear it open ready for some disappointment.
So far so good.
The box wasn’t in pristine shape, but I’m not too worried about that. I used to save all my boxes for all that stuff but eventually I decided to throw them away. The controller looks good so far, but someone could have easily repackaged a used controller in a box. But the nice crisp warranty card is a good sign that this might actually be the real deal.
I'm calling it new. Or at least good as new!
After removing the plastic and a thorough inspection, I don’t see any signs of this old thing ever being used. There’s no real proof that it isn’t used, but as far as I’m concerned it’s better than 95% of the controllers that are still out there. I tested it out and it works perfectly. And now much to Andrea’s chagrin, I repackaged it in the box and it’s sitting next to my computer. To stay “new” as long as possible. Ha ha!
01.31.09Sleeping
Nothing much to mention here. Just washed the car up tonight and thought she looked purdy. Can’t wait for the nice weather to start working on it again. It’s been a rough 6 months.
Cox Kansas throttles internet service
This story popped up on my Google Reader the other day claiming that Cox will be trying to control their network traffic by slowing down “non-time sensitive” content during peak congestion times. They state things like file-transfers aren’t as critical as on-demand content like loading web pages, online games, and streaming videos.
At home, I really don’t have a problem with this. A majority of my time is spent surfing the net, or playing Guild Wars. But at work the core of what I do relies heavily on file transfers. I have over 10 hours of audio content that I have to transfer to our on-air computer in Hays, and a majority of that has to first be downloaded from another source. At the present rate it takes about 20 minutes to transfer one hour of mp3 audio to Hays at a measly 40 k/s. That’s ALREADY a P.I.T.A. I certainly don’t need it to take even longer.
Lifehacker also recently published a link to a set of tools to test what (if anything) is being throttled by your provider. I’m anxious to put this to the test and see what protocols exactly are being throttled and by how much. And if it significantly impacts my work, you can bet they’ll hear from me…as futile as my cry may be.
01.24.09I didn’t know it’d been that long!
Well I was playing Animal Crossing in the Wii yesterday. And I found myself thinking, “You know, the music on the original Animal Crossing was so much better.”
Out of curiosity I fired it up. There was a town on the memory card that Andrea and I had created back in the day called Raleigh. Of course it was FULL of weeds! I wasn’t sure how long it’d been since I’d played the game, so I started talking to the citizens. They’d be sure to inform me. First animal I came across wasa kangaroo named Mathilda. “Whoa, a blast from my past,” she said. “I haven’t seen you for 38 months!” Wow. I knew it’d been a long time, but it sure didn’t seem like 3 years!
Then I run into Groucho who’d lived in my original town of Hilldale from the very first day I played the game. Apparently he moved to Raleigh and he complained that he hadn’t seen me for 52 months! I felt a little guilty to tell you the truth.
01.21.09Reformatted
Well, I botched my Ubuntu install when I attempted to upgrade to 8.10. So I got a bit discourage and haven’t repaired it yet. And lately my XP installation has been doing some funky things. It’s been almost three years since I last reformatted, and for me I think that might be a record. I was usually wiping everything clean once or twice a year.
So since I was in the market for a fresh install, and the Windows 7 Beta is available free to the public, I figured why not. So here I am posting from it. Installing it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, but that wasn’t Microsoft’s fault. Since my hardware is so ancient (a couple years old) the company that made my motherboard decided that surely NO ONE would be running Vista on this hardware. So after I got Win7 installed, I realized there’s no drivers available. Luckily I was able to rob a driver from a newer revision of my board to get the ethernet working, and Windows Update took care of the rest!
It’s a bit slower than XP was, but considering my RAM barely meets the minimum requirements I’m not too suprised. I’ll experiment with it for a while and decide whether I’ll stick with it. Too soon to tell now.
Benched
It's taking shape.
It's done!
Well this was a fun little project and should come in real handy. I tucked it away in a room in the basement and it should be a nice little workspace for whatever random projects I come up with. It turned out real sturdy. And it sits flat, I’m impressed with myself!
My latest project
Okay, I’m starting to get back logged on projects here. I still have my carb to rebuild. Andrea’s car to paint. Fix the hail dents on my car. Get the basement chill pad set up. Finish painting the trim on the house… So why not take on another project that will at least help in getting some of the other ones done? So using the power tools I finally got from Sears, I picked up the stuff to build this:
It’s a workbench. Just a simple modest sized bench. It’s going in the basement and I’ll be nice to have a place to work on some stuff. I’ve already started and got all the pieces cut and I’m just putting everything together now. Should be done sometime tomorrow depending on when I get up and how much beer I drink. Photos to follow whether good or bad!