The Daily Diversion Archive For June, 2004

Tuesday June 1, 2004

So I'm in a kickin' ass and takin' names kind of mood. I've put a couple of long-term projects to bed and I got the feeling I'm going to ride this wave of motivation for a while longer.

One of the things that really needed to be done was to update my resume. I'm not really looking for a job right now, but if someone would like to offer me a spot that's competitive with what I'm making and doing right now, I might just take them up on the offer. The biggest reason I updated it was that I didn't have any mention of my certifications on it. That's not optimal, really. I worked hard for that knowledge and I got a couple of printed-out plaques for my effort. So there.

The basement project is pretty nearly done. I've said that before, but it really is just about done. It's in the cleanup phase now. We have to do a thing or three with some stuff that's still lying around and we have to get rid of a bunch more junk, but the carpets are in and down and the basement looks pretty good. We're thinking about a big-ass TV down there, but we're both leery of hanging out in the basement. It's not been proven that either of us can hang out down there without our allergies going nuts. Once that's cleared up a bit, we'll move a couch and TV down there and that'll be the informal, hangin' out kind of place in the house. It's been a long time coming, but it's pretty much done and that feels pretty good.

In other news, I'll be posting the results of the first International Beer Night that happened a couple of weeks back. I have information for all of you out there which is the best beer among 11 or 12 beers we had that night. I'm not sure yet whether or not it will be on this page or on a different one, but certainly the notice of when the results are available will be right here. It was fun. Um... Duh! Sit around with a bunch of the fellas and drink some beer out of tiny cups? Sign me up. Twice.

Tuesday June 8, 2004

So we're back from Boston. Sarah had a conference there and since she put the trip together at the last minute, there was action. It was a good kind of action, though.

We stayed at the Parker House, which is a really old hotel about a block away from the Common. From the Parker House, it was a 1/2 block walk to the Granary Burial Grounds where I saw the graves of Paul Revere, John Hancock and the graves of Ben Franklin's family. Gus and I also explored a bunch of the Common and the area around our hotel. It was big fun.

We stayed with Sarah's brother the last night we were there. To do this, we took a cab out to the airport and rented a car. Since Gus is a baby, we needed a baby seat and so we got one. He's small enough that we have to have him ride facing the rear. Apparently, the Hertz guy in the lot didn't really have a grasp on the finer points of infant car seats. He had never heard of such a thing as a baby seat mounted backwards. He gave my wife a bit of a hard time about it (I was loading the car at the time), and when he excused himself to go check with his manager I re-oriented the seat myself. Our boy Einstein came back and said his manager would rather give us the infant seat instead of the baby seat.

I told him fine and he comes back with the carbon copy of the seat Gus outgrew so that we had to get him the seat that had already been in the car. I told the guy this, and I think I broke his brain. He brought back the old seat and while we were snapping it in, I showed him the instructions on the seat that described when and how the seat could be used facing the rear. He finally got it and we got the seat put in correctly. Jeesh.

We rolled out to Stephen and Meg's place and had a lovely afternoon with her parents joining us.

Sunday, we get up at the crack of ass in the morning, pack the car and roll back to the airport. Although Gus had flown pretty well on the way out, we were still gritting our teeth at the prospect of flying again with him. We made it back to Logan, dropped the car off and took the shuttle to the NWA portion of the airport. Our skycap was helpful, telling us where to check in for the fastest service (he was correct) and where to go to get through security far more quickly than the main security checkpoint (correct again). Even with these fast (in terms of an airport where nothing is fast) services, it still took us 20 minutes to get through security. Gus got to the end of his rope in the security line and proceeded to melt completely down. Worse, the milk that I had carefully kept cold since the Hotel had curdled. That was bad, but we found it out after we had already given him the bottle. Oops. We finally made the gate. Gus calmed down and the rest of boarding and the flight was without a major hitch.

We made it back before noon, but the day was a total loss because we all had caught a cold. It's a good thing we didn't have much to do that day.

So. Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup. Whatever.

I see the Timberwolves are out of the playoffs as well. Again, whatever.

Friday June 18, 2004

What's cool?

Baseball, good service and speed boosts for old computers.

What sucks?

Sick babies, mosquitoes and yard work.

The Twins are back in first again. It's only by a half-game and it didn't come during their big home stand, but it is first place. Watch the White Sox implode after the All-Star break.

Also on the subject of baseball, I have tickets to a Twins away game later on this season. I can't wait to see them play in a different stadium. That will be cool.

Good service is hard to come by these days, but I do have to give props to a couple of places for great service lately. First, I'd like to give props to Sears Auto Center at the Sears on Rice Street by the Capitol in St. Paul. I went there an hour before closing to get a battery for the MDU and not only did they have the right battery in stock, but they had me in and out of there in less than an hour. The price was reasonable, too.

Less significantly, I'd also like to thank the people I bought some sticks of RAM from on eBay. It's been 5 days since the 4 auctions closed and I have 3 of the RAM sticks already. Nice.

Also, I'd like to thank the Amazon Marketplace CD store that I bought my Love Junk album from The Pursuit of Happiness. They beat the Amazon order to the house by 3 days. Excellent work.

Most of the PC stuff I've bought lately is for work. It's hard to find 64Mb sticks of PC100 RAM these days without paying a small fortune for it. The worst price I got on a single stick of RAM on eBay was exactly half what it would have cost if I went down to our nearest supplier to buy another one like the same. The only reason it was as high as twice is that I accidently bought insurance on the item. Oops.

Anyway, we've a bunch of older PCs at the shop. Every once in a while, a user's needs suddenly increase and a speed boost is called for. Usually, this need is caused by a person getting more responsibility, a different job within the department or having to use a different software package. For boosting old Slot1 Asus motherboard-based PCs, the slotket solution from Upgradeware has been working out quite well. Just by chance, most of our PCs have the right motherboard revision numbers to take this upgrade. It moves a Pentium II 400 (the average chip we have on these PCs) to a FCPGA2 Celeron 1.4GHz processor. That's quite a leap. Generally, one of these processor upgrades and another stick of RAM will do wonders for the machine. To make the total package zoom, the last step is to upgrade the hard drive and controller card. These boards are capable of ATA/33 speeds. That's not terribly fast. The HDDs that these PCs came with are also very slow. They may just do ATA/33 and have about 4Gb of space.

Upgrading the HDD to something new, preferable with a higher rotational speed and 8Mb of cache along with a new, ATA/133 PCI controller really makes these old machines zip. Pricewise, it does shake out to be about even with procuring another, older replacement PC. The drive, depending on how big it is is around $100. The controller retail is about $40. The slotket card and processor is around $85 and the extra stick of RAM new is about $40. Total cost is $265 and the same PC is good to go for another few years. Better yet, you can copy the old HDD's image on to the new HDD and the user never knows anything different than what the PC was except for the new-found speed.

Gus caught a bit of stomach flu a couple of days ago. It's hard to see the little guy so out of it, but he's doing fine now.

I ended up doing some yard work last night. It's been pretty wet lately. I think we've had about 6" of rain in the last 3 weeks or so. This is also the time of year that we get our first major hatch of mosquitoes. With all the rain, there's a bumper crop of the little bloodsuckers. While mowing the lawn, weed whacking the fences and trimming the hedge last night, I literally uncovered clouds of the little buggers. I didn't seem to get bit up too badly, but it really made certain jobs suck.

Putting air in my truck's tire from my reserve tank was quite a chore. I had to stop about 10 times to kill mosquitoes who had lit on my arms or legs. The yard work had to be done because the yard was starting to over grow. If the grass had been much longer, it would have been a real bear to mow.

Monday June 28, 2004

I was in Boston last week.

Sarah and Gus flew out last Saturday, while I drove the MDU. I left immediately after dropping them off at the airport for their painfully early flight.

I'm no stranger to long road trips. The key to long distances in a day is to keep driving. Once you stop to attend to bodily functions or to refuel, momentum is lost and it's very hard to get it back. The best thing to do is to set an inconspicuous speed and to hold it there for as long as you can stand it or until you need gas.

The ride out was a two-day affair as was the ride home. At Sarah's request, I didn't try to go the entire way in one day. It was probably for the better, and it certainly let me select better lodging than I would have been able to had I driven 'till I needed to stop. The first day I spent trying to put as many miles between me and MSP. I ended up stopping just east of Buffalo, NY. I got a cheap motel room and went out to dinner and a beer.

Sunday dawned just as nicely as Saturday did and I was off. The only fly in this smooth ointment of a drive happened just before noon on Sunday. I was driving through NY state on the Turnpike and I got caught speeding. I figured this would happen, but I really didn't like getting a ticket. Word to you all out there, 81mph in a 65mph zone is still too fast. More on that later...

Although it was a drag getting touched up for speeding, the rest of the trip was uneventful. The car did it's best impression of the perfect tool for the job. I made Boston in the mid-afternoon on Sunday.

The worst thing and most demoralizing thing about driving east--other than getting ticketed--is losing an hour to the time zone. Here you are, zooming along and all of a sudden, you're an hour behind your schedule. It's a drag. It doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but it is an issue, at least for me.

Boston was fun. We went up to Newburyport for seafood, we went to Rockport for--you guessed it--seafood and I saw the Twins beat the Red Sox in Fenway for the third time in a row. No, I only saw one game this time around, but the Twins have won all three games I've seen them play in Fenway. It was the Sox' 100th straight sellout game. 35,000 people were there and I was one of a very few smiling at the end. Radke got totally screwed out of a win, but the Twins did pull it off in the 10th inning.

I got dropped off by Sarah's dad in Harvard Square and took the subway to the game. Both inbound to the game trains I rode on were hot, stuffy and crowded. Once the game was over, both trains I rode home on were relatively cool and, although crowded, not unpleasantly so.

I mention the train stuff because I planned on taking the newly-opened light-rail line into work today. I am pleased to say that it was a great ride and I think my new commute thing will be very smooth from now on. Cheaper by more than half, too.

Anyway, the ride home from Boston started very early but went extremely well. I saw speed traps in NY state, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The most obnoxious ones were a tie between the Pennsylvania trooper in an unmarked and totally non-patrol-car-like Volvo station wagon parked in the median strip like a construction vehicle might park doing the radar shooting and the pursuit vehicle on the other side of a break in the median to run down the speeders and the Ohio trooper just pulled over to the side of the road with one leg out the door shooting traffic as it approached him from just around a corner.

I have one question for all you troopers: Is speed control a public safety issue or is speed control a revenue generating venture? I suspect the latter, but that's only because I have some experience with speeding tickets. Shouldn't you troopers be a bit suspicious when a lot of your speed-control gear is donated to your agencies by the insurance companies?

Anyway, I made it to Chicago in good time, but Chicago has a Saturday afternoon rush hour. Go figure. It took more than two hours to traverse Chicago and by then I'd already made arrangements to hang out at a friend's place for the night.

My friends, Katie and Ted, are excellent hosts. Once again, many thanks for your trouble.

I got going a bit later on Sunday morning and ended up rolling into the spot in front of the house right around 4pm.

Sarah and Gus are flying in this morning and I am anxious to see them both. It amazes me how much I miss them when they're not around.