Our Summer Project

One thing the son and I did over the summer was to build a computer to replace our (4) year old Dell.  We had talked about it for a while, had made a spreadsheet listing all the parts we would need, and then gave our self a budget.  The next step was the hardest, waiting for parts to go on sale.  We were going to use this PC to hold all of our movies, tv shows and music so we needed a big hard drive and a decent video card.  We did not need a fast processor or a lot of RAM but we did need it to be small in size and quiet as well.  We thought it would be nice to have a media card reader too.  With that in mind we kept our eyes peeled.

The first piece that was a bargain actually knocked off quite a bit of the parts on our list.  We found a case, (quiet) power supply, processor, video (on board), sound (on board) and network card (on board) that was being bundled with 4 GB of RAM (more than we needed) for only $130 after a $20 mail in rebate.  This deal was also advertising free shipping.  We jumped at this before it went out of stock.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856119024 – Case / Motherboard combo

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220396 – RAM

This represented $90 off of list price not to mention the free shipping.  We were well under way and well under budget.  We got these items in a few days later and quickly put the RAM in and booted up (just to bios) to see if it was working (and it was).  However, there was one small problem.  The case was so small that the RAM (which has heat shields on it) actually was too tall to allow an internal DVD player.  We had (2) choices really.  We could sell this RAM and then buy some normal height ram or we could buy an external DVD drive.  Removing the heat shields was not really an option though we did research it (even found a youtube video of someone removing the shields with a screwdriver and a blow drier).  We found an external DVD drive on sale for $40 after $10 mail in rebate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135194 – External DVD drive

This had the added bonus of running on (2) USB plugs for power (no extra power cord) and looked pretty cool too (the wife did not want anything ugly setting on the bookshelf near our tv or any extra power cords).  Next we needed a big hard drive.  We had figured a 1 TB hard drive would be a good compromise between price and size but when a 2 TB model went on special for $99 we changed our plan.  We were only figuring on spending $75 on the hard drive but this was too good of a deal.  Plus we were way under budget at this point.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514 – Hard Drive

We then picked up a generic card reader for $20 (the only part not on sale in this whole system).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820162024 – Internal Card reader

Even with these last (3) items, shipping only came to $4.  Our overall total (after $30 in rebates) was $294!  We had a wireless keyboard and mouse we were going to re-use along with our speakers (though we still have our hopes set on a nice 5.1 set someday).  As with our Dell, we used our 32” (BestBuy el-cheap $299) tv that we got at Christmas time for our monitor.  It has decent resolution and takes a VGA input just fine.

Me trying to make this tall RAM fit.  Notice the small CPU fan on our Intel Atom processor

The son getting the hard drive and card reader installed.  There was not a lot of room and he had smaller hands.

Although I had a Windows XP license I could have used, we decided to to with Ubuntu (linux) since the hard drive we bought had some issues with any Windows older than Vista.  I had played with Ubuntu over the years but not really seriously.  So far so good as we really like it.  The video is good and the sound is fine (even with our 2.1 speakers).  I let the son install the operating system (while over his shoulder to answer any questions) and for the most part he got it done without my input.

This was a fun project to do with my son and now the problem is that we want to build another computer.  So if anyone out there wants some cheap labor (we work for M&M’s) just give us a yell.

Jon

Bad Jokes

For some reason the other day we were trading bad jokes.  By bad jokes I mean jokes that are just not funny.  I think it started before Sunday school class 2 weeks ago but that is not important (unless later I want to blame it on our pastor, the king of bad jokes, puns, etc).  Anyway, I added my dad’s favorite bad joke…

Q: What do you call a dog with no legs?
A: It doesn’t matter, he won’t come to you anyway.

See what I mean by a bad joke now?  Anyway, my son loves bad jokes so I asked Mr. Google and he was able to provide us a few.  I mentioned a few blogs ago that over the summer the son and I built a computer.  We are using it as our home theater for the most part and (to keep the costs low) we decided to go with Ubuntu (linux) for the operating system.  One cool thing about Ununtu is the ability to find almost any program that you would ever need and install it quickly.  One program I downloaded was a speech synthesizer.  I decided to “tell” the bad jokes to the son using this program and this (for some reason) made some of them almost funny (but not quite).

Q: Why do melons have fancy weddings?
A: Because they cantaloupe.

Speaking of cantaloupes, the wife planted a small garden this year.  One thing she planted was (3) cantaloupe vines.  The started off slow but have really taken over a section of the front yard.  We have pulled about a 1/2 dozen cantaloupes out so far (some about the size of a grapefruit) and they are pretty good.  I am guesstimating that we have about 10 more out there in various stages of ripeness.  It is hard to get an accurate count as they tend to hide under the vines leaves.

Once they start turning from solid green to having the tan “netting” on them, they are getting close.  They are ready to be picked basically when you mess with them and the just fall of the vine.  I have always really liked cantaloupe and was very excited as I watched our vines take off and produce some fruit.  I don’t know what it is but there is something about eating things that come right from your front yard.  We do have some tomatoes that are coming in nicely as well…

Sorry for the slight out of focus, we do not own a very high quality digital camera.  We have picked about a dozen tomatoes so far and even had one today on our lunch sandwiches.  Over the weekend the wife made some zucchini bread from the zucchini growing in the back yard (the green beans back there were choked out by them and the cucumbers – we will plan better next year).  OK one more for the road…

Q: How are a Texas tornado and a Tennessee divorce the same?
A: Either way, somebody's gonna lose a trailer.

Jon

Not What I Remembered

While visiting my favorite pawn shop a few weeks ago I picked up a used DVD of Gremlins.  It took us a while to find (2) hours of daylight as a family to watch this movie.  For slightly scary movies, the daughter does have a strict “sun is up” policy.  It has been 20+ years since I have seen this movie and I remember only the highlights but I figured this was close enough to E.T. (which both the kids loved) that it would be safe.  I do know that a 1984 PG and a 2010 PG rating is not the same and in retrospect I should have previewed the movie first probably.  Anyway (as pointed out by a facebook buddy) there is a lot of smoking in this movie (and not only the gremlins).  Also, there is enough (4) letter words to earn a PG-13 nowadays but even all of that the thing that might have stopped me from showing this to my kids was the gross scenes.  I forgot that one gremlin gets it in a mixing bowl followed by his buddy exploding in the microwave.  I can see the son watching this again but not the daughter (and even then he will likely leave the room for some scenes).  We did manage to get through it though and (after one really gross scene at the end) we celebrated the defeat of the gremlins (but they made a Gremlins 2 six years later).

We also are watching the first (8) episodes of Punky Brewster.  The sister-in-law bought a 1 DVD set that only has the first part of the first season.  Unlink Gremlins, this is exactly what I remembered (namely, horrible).  Even hearing the theme song makes me a little nauseous.  Unfortunately, the daughter loves it (as I feared she would).  Even the son tolerates it (I had hoped he would be an ally in this).  We have muddled through (6) of the episodes and I have researched what the season DVD sets go for just in case this love lingers toward a birthday or Christmas.  Let’s hope it doesn’t.  I cannot believe this show lasted (4) years (a total of 88 episodes) and then turned into a Saturday morning cartoon.  I hope it doesn’t come to us buying the cartoon (heaven help me).

Jon

Another Prime Birthday

My birthday was this past Tuesday.  Nothing extraordinarily special happened really.  My mother took me out to lunch and got me a gift.  I got to pick the restaurant (which is not really a gift).  Whenever we do lunch, neither one of us likes to pick however since it was my birthday, she made me pick.  There are some unwritten rules about going out to eat when my wife is not with me.  I cannot pick a place that she would like to go to (since she would be missing out).  If that cannot be avoided (say my mother picks the restaurant) then under no circumstances can I go to a restaurant that she (the wife) has not been to yet.  I did this once, it was not pretty.  There is a minor corollary to this rule that states that I cannot order anything that she would have liked to have tried (at least a bite off my plate).  These rules are so engrained into my mind that I do not even consciously think about them, I just react.  Keeping these rules in mind, for my birthday dinner with my mom I chose Red Lobster (the wife is not big on seafood) and I ordered the shrimp jambalaya.  It was pretty good.  These rules have caused me to expand my normal ordering habits.

Once we were done eating, my mom drove me back to work and gave me my birthday present which was a pair of shorts and a pullover shirt (seen modeled below).

The picture is a little crooked as I had the son take it this morning.  I have not owned a pullover shirt in years actually having converted over to button up shirts some time while I was in Texas but everything fits so I don’t have to exchange it.

This is my 41st birthday which means (among other things) that my age is a prime number.  It has been (4) years since I was last prime.  I take comfort that next year when I turn 42 that I only need to wait (1) year until I am prime again.  The prime couples are rare (well prime numbers are rare actually given all the numbers but prime couples are obviously even rarer).  I forget when I first started appreciating being prime.  I doubt if it was when I was 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 or even 13.  It might have been 17 or 19 but I just don’t remember.  It doesn’t matter, I am prime now and that is all that matters.

The wife keeps promising me that I do have a gift coming but I am beginning to have my doubts.  Unlike the past several birthdays, she is working now.  This means that she does not feel like she is using my money to buy me a gift (her words, not mine).  If you add this to the fact that I am a hard to buy for person and that she is not particularly good at buying gifts you can see that my birthday is not usually a happy time for her.  All I ever want on my birthday is the same thing that I want on Father’s Day, namely a nap.  I did not get a nap this year since I worked until late.  So rarer yet is the prime birthday nap I guess.

Jon

A Warning Sign

I spent a lot of the summer working from home.  Things run better when there is an equal number of parents and children in the house.  The ratio needs to be 1:1 for peace to flourish.  The kids started back up with school 2 weeks ago and I returned to the Kokomo office and my corner cubicle.  I think I have mentioned previously that due to our workforce transformation policy, those of us on the 2nd floor were all required to move to the 1st floor resulting in many people working from home full time.  I was able to keep a cubicle but still had to make some adjustments.  One of these adjustments was the bathroom situation.  Upstairs there are (2) men’s restrooms.  One has (2) urinals and (3) stalls and the other just has (2) stalls.  For the most part there was no waiting.  I am not sure of the women’s restrooms and their stall count.  Downstairs however is a different story.  There are (2) men’s restrooms downstairs but between them (combined) there is only (1) urinal and (2) stalls.  This is still usually not a problem given the lower amount of people in the building.  The restrooms upstairs are available (for overflow seating if you will).  This is a good thing to have handy as I was greeted with this view when I entered the restroom downstairs with the lone urinal…

I can honestly say that I have never seen a sign above a urinal that started with “Beware!”  The rest of the sign reads…

Flush w/ caution?  Wow, what an interesting choice of words!  Here is the sad thing though, I was greeted with this sign 11 days ago when I returned to the building but I took this picture today.  So the last part of the sign (“Problem reported”) seems to have had no effect.  I will have to keep you posted.

Jon

Narcissism

I cam across this made up diagram the other day…

…and I thought it was almost too perfect (you can get the t-shirt here).  Of those sites listed in the overlaps of the circles, I have really only used facebook with any regularity.  I do have a twitter account as well as a myspace account but I only recently created them and spent only a day or two trying out the sites.  I have never used foursquare and don’t know much about it.  Of the 4 marked overlap areas, I wonder where blogging fits in best?  It is definitely in the narcissism area.  According to the wikipedia article, “Narcissism is the personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness.”  Since I don’t think blogging involves stalking that would lead me to think about ADHD and taking over the orange space occupied by myspace in the diagram.  The question is, am I OK with this?

I enjoy blogging, it is very therapeutic.  But, is that the only reason that I do it?  Do I have a need for others to value my words, my thoughts?  If I am honest with myself, I would have to answer, “Yes!”  In fact, I only joined facebook after I saw that xanga (my long time blog site host) added a link to post your blog to your facebook account.  I only wanted to drum up visits to my blog.  And, it worked!  I probably tripled the visitors.  In my 2 month absence from blogging, I also disabled my facebook account and have yet to re-enable it.  My wife and son are on facebook daily (multiple times daily actually) and I don’t miss the feeling of needing to keep up or feign caring about my 200 friends daily goings on (I am trying to be honest here).  Only a few people have mentioned my not being on their walls so my 200 friends have found a way to fill the void that I left.

Faithful reader, thank you for reading.  Thank you for taking the time out of your busy day.  Thank you for spending a few moments with me instead of some other person’s wall or blog.  I hope my blogging does not come off as narcissistic.  I secretly hope though that it is not due to narcissism or ADHD (or both) that I blog.

Jon

The Return

Without really planning it, I seemed to have taken the summer off from blogging.  It was part laziness and part taking time for other things (like say, mowing the yard).  I’m serious.  I have over 1/2 an acre and only have my pathetic push mower that I bought while in Texas.  There are parts of the yard that grow rather quickly (like the part toward the road, the most visible part) and some parts of the back yard near my detached garage.  Other parts of the yard are in the shade and devoted to clover and devoid of grass.  These parts hardly grow at all so I have developed a partial mowing method to protect my sanity (as when mowing these parts weekly I go crazy trying to determine where I have mowed and where I have yet to mow).  The wife is not too hip to this method but short of cranking up the push mower herself, she has to live with it.

Another thing I have kept myself busy with this summer is pruning back the dozens of trees on my property.  These trees have no sense of boundaries and just grow hodge-podge wherever and in whatever direction they like.  The vines on the trees are quite intrusive as well.  My trusty weed whacker and limb cutters though have kept them at bay.  It is incredible to me how fast a tree can sprout up and thicken up.  I am forever having a large pile of limbs and vines that go on my burn pile.  As I type this I have (3) large piles of limbs and brush that really need to be set a blaze soon.

We did finally get gutters put on the house.  That was close to the top of our list of things to do to the house should we have the money.  The wife took matters into her own hands and started working part time (again) at a local pet store.  She has worked off and on at this store during our marriage and actually worked there when we first met as well (14 years ago).  She takes her paycheck and cashes it and puts it back into the “fix the house” fund.  She paid for guttering and for replacement vents for the bathrooms (along with making sure they actually vented to the outside instead of just into the attic).  She is now working toward new gravel for the driveway and the destruction and hauling away of the (2) small sheds that are in the back yard.  Beyond that we need some (ill placed) insulation removed from under the house and a fresh sheet of plastic set down there and then maybe redoing the front bath / shower (since we have never used it since moving in here 18 months ago).  It is a long list but I am sure she will get it all done.  The gutters are nice and the first rain after their installation was a doozy but we enjoyed watching the rain pour out of the downspouts (we even videoed the event).

We did quite a few things over the summer including taking our first real family vacation, building a new home theater computer and installing a few ceiling fans.  Hopefully I take the time to devote some blogs to those events as they are truly blog worthy.  I will need to ease back into this blog thing though and I think this is enough for now.  Thanks, faithful reader, for your patience.

Jon