A quick note – for those who need to work the PC later at night, flux is something to check out. The basic function is to change the color temperature your monitor is set at over the course of the day/night. At night it is set to a lower temperature – which helps keep your brain from thinking “oh, this light is daylight and it is not the time to sleep”.
For more, hit up their website: flux
(note: software is available for Windows, Mac, Linux)
Well, the news over here is that I’ve moved back to North Carolina.
The job demanded it. I’m torn – I know that I like NC, but I’d just started enjoying CO. I will certainly be coming back to CO for vacations in the years to come, but it would be nice to live there again some day.
My new address is 209 Leeward Court, Cary NC 27511 4407 Hopson Road, Aprt 6308, Morrisville NC 27560 (*see comments for the story). In case anyone wants to mail any books, you know. Dresden books, for example.
It was a three day drive from Colorado to North Carolina. The cats handled it very well; better than I would have hoped. My stuff arrives on Tuesday. It’s kind of a weird limbo, living out of a suitcase again.
It’s been too long since we have had a post!!! Surely something newsworthy is going on with one of us!
I guess that includes me. Sigh. Let me see. I am 60 now (oooold).
Luke is finished with chemo but still having to go in for a test occasionally. He is stronger and feeling better. Right now he is out in the heat blowing leaves off the drive way. It is nice to see him feeling good enough to do things like that.
Penelope and Zoeie are getting along.
They all have favorite petting stations. Bruce prefers laps. Penelope likes the work table in the sewing room. Zoe prefers the desk. I now wage a constant battle with black cat hair on the desk. It is particularly attracted to the mouse pad.
We are seeing alot of Bill and Eliane these days.
I miss my grandkids. 🙂
But you already know all of that…. none of it is really news.
The biggest thing that happened today, aside from my going back to the pool after giving up and letting school kids having it for the summer, is that a pen pal sent me a letter in an envelope made of a calendar page – it made a very pretty envelope. I tell you… it’s a thrill a minute around here. 🙂
Just a quick check.. anyone here have any invites they could forward on?
I just thought I would say that we now have an iPad. And that we are enjoying it. We will do a review later.
A few things about the iPad now that we have been using it for a while.
1) typing large amounts of text is not that easy when you do not have the feedback of a keyboard. I did not think that i would miss the feedback of real keys as ouch as do.
2) the platform does get out of the way when you are doing something. essentially, it becomes all about the application.
3) pinch to zoom is nice and it makes me sad that apple patened the tech; then again, it does keep people tied to apple products.
4) for someone using the iPad as a computer replacement is going to have a hard time unless there are apps that fulfill their specific needs. I will not be doing work from home with it any time soon.
Hi – thought I’d post my ski pictures here for all to enjoy.
We had a fabulous time. Kevin spent most of his time standing around saying encouraging things, which is why all the pictures are of me. When I stood around, I huddled inside while Kevin did one of his black diamond runs. Which would have been too fast for me to take a picture of anyway.
The Mac:
In a recent discussion on what Linux needed to be a contender on the desktop the ‘Magic’ and polish of the Mac. Most everything has a single place to get things done – that’s the biggest difference so far. There is, however, consistency about where that single place is across applications. For a given operation that you will do with any application – say, resizing the window – you learn it once and your done.
Networking with Windows machines is a bit of a pain thus far; I miss being able to specify a single IP-address based path as where something exists. It’s probably one of those ‘bad’ things that Microsoft does that the Mac doesn’t for some good reason. Stil miss it though.
Windows Home Server
Liking it thus far. There are a few things I wish it could do, but they mostly relate to things that I believe are HP-based additions. I wish I could figure out how to assign it an IP address instead of leaving it to the random nature of DHCP – but doing a manual address breaks something when it comes to talking with the MAC. I’m missing a setting somewhere and I don’t know what it is.
Still, being able to toss a few hard drive at the thing and it Just Works… I like this. Especially that I didn’t need to turn the machine off to add those hard drives.
Right now we have moved all our files over to this system. Add together the drive the system came with, the extra drive I bought for the now dead system, and the ‘large’ drive I pulled out of the dead system… we now have 2.9 TB of space, with 2.1 TB available. Overkill at the moment for sure, but I’m ok with that.
A few weeks ago our main PC died. Well, mostly died. There is a virus on there that no virus scanner I’ve tried can catch. (I suspect Aleah’s new found ability to click on all things shiny led to clicking on Something Bad). Then came the computer crashes that would happen even when trying to re-install the OS on a brand new hard drive. (RAM problem is my only real thought).
So we started talking about things we wanted to do with the computer. We’ve wanted to get it out of that room to make it more “Donavan’s Room”. We’ve also wanted to move the PC into either the living room or into our bedroom – both of which make us want a much smaller computer. Add to this a general (and growing) curiousity about The Other Side…
We got a Mac.
A Mac Mini, to be exact. We get to keep our existing monitor/keyboard/mouse/etc and we get a computer that is roughly the size of a tissue box. (6 1/2 inches wide, 6 1/2 inches long, and 2 inches tall. TINY)
There’s a problem with this though: No Adding Hard Drives. The base model Mac Mini comes with a 160 gig hard drive. To upgrade to a 320 gig hard drive would cost… the same as buying a 1 Terabyte hard drive at regular retail prices.  !?!?!?
So there’s another thing we’ve been talking about doing: getting a computer that we could use to store all our files to access them from the laptop, the desktop, the whatever. Enter in the HP Media Server – which should arrive in the mail today. (go go Amazon Prime Next Day Shipping!)
When it gets here I’m going to load it up with all our media files and create personal space for everyone to store their ‘stuff’. And remember what I said earlier, that I couldn’t even re-install Windows to a new drive? Yeah, that new 1 Terabyte drive is going in the media server right way too. I’ll probably even wipe clean the extra drive that is in the PC and add it in. I expect we’ll have just short of 2 Terabytes of space on the thing to start with.
So that’s the hardware side of what we had happen when the computer died. One new Mac in the house and a home server too.
Now we get to enjoy the software side of things. (such as saying good-bye to all our stored e-mails, and learning an all-new OS)
I like the new description of The Family ” Hard to get in, but you are in for life if you do.” Makes me almost laugh.
This is the new snap press I bought for putting on plastic snaps. It is about twice the size I expected – that’s a 15 inch ruler beside it. With this thing those snaps don’t have a chance!
