The Government Manual for New Pirates. How can you lose with a title like that?
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. Ditto. (I have this book now)
I just started using Google Reader, a nifty little RSS aggregator. It looks (loosely) similar to Gmail. And the price is right—free.
If I could harness what it is that makes computers go tango uniform at the worst possible time, I could sell it to the government as a weapon.
My in-laws' business computer went down yesterday, the day before Iron Man participants start flooding in to the city (and their business). Fortunately, they've already charged all the credit cards in advance (most places around here do that for Iron Man, from what I hear), so they aren't losing money, but all their records are on the machine…
The company I work for has instituted a new policy which allows us to do volunteer work in the community one day per year, and get paid as if you actually worked that day. While this sounds great, keep in mind that that day used to be a regular vacation day.
Anyway, it's still a good thing to do. I used my day last Friday to volunteed at Camp Easton during the Cub Scout Day Camp. I spent the whole day outside in the sun, which means I was miserable. I got sunburned and had just about the worst allergy episode in 20 years.
That ought to teach me to volunteer…
On my way to work this morning I was stopped behind two cars at the stop sign just around the corner from where I live. The front car had apparently died, and the passenger of the car in front of me hopped out to help push the car off the road. I pulled over and helped push. The younger woman driving the car said she thought she was out of gas. A city police officer was also on the scene. I offered to run home and get some gas for her, because I had a small container that held almost 1 gallon I just bought a week or two ago. So I hopped in my car, picked up the gas, and poured it in to her car, which started up just fine.
The problem was when she put it in gear (it was an automatic), it promptly died again. This repeated multiple times, even after following some suggestions the officer had. I let the woman (Ashley) borrow my phone to make a call, she forgot her phone earlier that morning. She couldn't get hold of anyone, and said she was heading to Coeur d'Alene. The officer didn't really have a way to get her there, but I said I was headed to work, and that I work in the Hecla Mining building, to which she responded she lived behind the Best Buy, just up the street a little. So I offered her a lift, dropped her off, then came in to work.
So perhaps a little good karma is coming my way. Unless, as my cow orker Luke suggested, that my good deed is just balancing out something bad I did before, in which case I may just be breaking even…
This morning I had some terrible news—Cliff, an old friend of the family and a guy I used to work for what I was 16-17, had a daughter pass away recently. The funeral is today in Hood River, Oregon. I am very sorry for his loss.
My dad is probably driving down there today. I don't think I'll be able to go.
Update: I have more information, she was 14 and had meningitis, it was very sudden.
Well, I was going to start painting last night. Instead, I ended up tearing out several square feet of drywall from my bathroom wall. I yanked out the tile backsplash around the jacuzzi tub, and as I was pulling the tiles off the wall (I just stuck them on with tile mastic), it started to make holes in places. It ended up being faster to bash the wall in and tear the tile out the messy way. I have plenty of drywall downstairs, I'm going to cut two pieces tonight and put them back over the holes, then mud and tape them.
Friday (or perhaps Saturday) we will paint and put up the new tile. So, once again, a small home improvement job turns out to be a bigger one. I never did like the tile backsplash anyway, the top row never sat right for me. I only put it in because the builder said it wouldn't pass code if there wasn't a backsplash there and I wouldn't be able to buy the home. Stupid code.
Originally, the plan was to tear out the top row of tile and replace it with chair moulding. Due to the damage the removal was causing I decided that it was best to tear all the tile out after all. What a hassle.
Tonight I go home to paint the master bathroom. I masked everything off last night, but just ran out of steam and didn't get into all the painting. I should have taken a before picture, but I didn't. I suppose I still can, but it would have blue tape everywhere…
Today I bought some new toys: laptops. I bought twenty four of them. Woohoo for corporate purchasing!
Remember the scenario I wrote for Settlers of Catan back last October? Well I forgot, too. I won 3rd place! Now where is my pin…
Today I brought my lunch with me to work, and as usual, it was a peanut butter sandwich. I also brought some snack-size Ritz bites (peanut butter filled), as well as a snack bag of Nutter Butter bites. Everything has peanut butter in it today, and I didn't even plan it this way.
Today is Daisy Wu's birthday, best wishes go out to her and her family!
The marketing department had a meeting a little while ago, just down from my office. They had pizza delivered. I worked through lunch, and don't have anything to eat except a snack bag of Fritos. I hate days like this…
I just stole some of their root beer, though. Not that it matters, their meeting is over and they left it out.
I pray that today's trend continues—things seem to be slowing down just a bit, but enough to relax me so I don't have 4 top-priority projects all due yesterday…
As for tonight, it's another night at Scott's, finishing up the new monster computer.
Tonight I helped out my wife's uncle Scott build his new computer. It's pretty dang top of the line. He bought a huge aluminum case from CoolerMaster, a Tyan motherboard that supports two dual core Athlon 64 processors, each with their own 4 banks of RAM. He got 4 Gb of registered ECC DDR2/667 RAM (the fastest the board supports). The board has nVidia RAID and 6 SATA ports, 5 of which we installed 500Gb hard drives, one as the primary OS drive, and the other 4 in a RAID5 configuration (the nVidia RAID utility was really nice). The only thing I was surprised about was that the motherboard didn't have a parallel port, nor did it have onboard IEEE1394 (firewire) or sound. It did have dual gigabit ethernet jacks.
Things went together pretty well, and I cut myself on a sharp corner of the case, as usual. I don't believe I've worked on a computer until it has extracted some amount of my blood.
PS I forgot to mention he put in a GeForce 8800 video card with 768Mb RAM. Holy cow it must have cost him a fortune!