Plato

We adopted a cat this past week. So far he has been adapting well to his new surroundings. His name is Plato and he is one year old. We brought him home from the Humane Center on Sunday. It's quite amazing how much he resembles our departed cat, Smeagol.
There are some other differences besides his features and color. He is a very 'talkative' cat.
We're all pretty happy with the new member to the household here.

New friends

Artemis seems to be getting along fine with the new addition to the family.
Plato seems to have found himself a big brother.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899

HOLY COW!!!!
You know... I got an invention...
*Bleh*

YES!

I was invited to join Gmail today. Thanks again to thre3
Here is my new email, chip5150@gmail.com . I will no longer be using my old mail accounts.

Gmail? Release? When?

Ok... I want my Gmail account and I want it NOW!
I have a hotmail account... yeah yeah yeah... and a Yahoo! account... *yawn*

Neither of which allow me to go POP3 with my mail. Only people who pay for their email accounts can use that feature. However, Gmail has that feature and it's free.

As soon as it is out... I will be able to forward all my mail to one place and then access it with one mail client. Speaking of... if you are still using Outlook or Outlook Express, you are sadly missing out. Download Thunderbird. It will import your accounts for you if you like... or you can set them up pretty easily yourself... either way... it beats remaining a slave to Micro$oft.

I also notice that more than half of the people who view my page here are still using Microsoft Explorer. Why? Get Firefox. Use it for 99.99998% of all your browsing needs. The -only- use I have found which remains for my Internet Explorer browser is when I need to download something from the microsoft site(s) itself... and wouldn't you know it... they only work with their own browser?

How did they not get slammed with all those monopoly charges? Beh...

Hard work has paid off...

Well, we have finally settled into our new place.

This weekend has been spent unpacking and moving furniture around to get that ‘just right’ feeling in every room.

I can say with all honesty that I have never had my living room arranged in such a way as to just ooze utter comfort to me. Maybe it’s the soft black leather couches that just pull the stress right out of you when you sit down, or maybe the layout which has conversation and relaxation in mind. Whatever it might be, I believe perhaps that it was my obsessive-compulsive side which really crept out of its hiding place this weekend and just put everything in proper order.

I like… no… I love my living room and kitchen. It’s as though there is this ever long, sustained ‘aaaahhhhh’ that has been let out and allowed to just linger over the entire place. I sat in my living room tonight and had a drink, all the while just admiring our hard work and enjoying the silence and solitude of our new home.

Life is good.

Comfort.

View from the entry hall... as you walk into the house from the front door.

Kitchen

If you don't buy purified water, I -highly- recommend it to you. Tap water isn't as good for you as you think. Life's too short to drink contaminated water. Think about it.

More kitchen..

Picture speaks for itself.

Kitchen window

It's night out, or you would see a lot of green... palm trees and such. We totally love it here.

Movin' and shakin'

We had a quake early this morning. Once again I miss out... I was busy sleeping.
You can read about it here and here.

Phase one complete

So now you see that I have taken three systems apart and put in a few new components [with some more still on the way] and presto- a 'new' system is born. Well... ok... a massive upgrade is born.

My future summer project of building a TV recorder is still in the works- [the bulk of it's components are sitting on the right top corner of the desk in this picture -motherboard, cpu, video card, hard drive and a few other random components left to decide on] -

The desktop is running great. Best thing to note is that it only took two troubleshoots to get it to boot right up. The first problem was I had miss-tagged the sequence for the two hard drives and had them out of order, so the system would not boot off of the slave drive. I had to change around the wiring and it was fixed. [Thanks to thre3, who I was on the phone with at the time for the pointer on checking my wire sequence... which I had thought was squared away.. proven it wasn't]. Lastly, my optical drive would not fire up. Again... it was a sequenced problem with the wires. I had the power sequence for it out of proper order. It is working perfectly well now.

So there you have it... great function -AND- good looks too!

Down below

The box tucks nicely away under the corner desk.

Side fan

Side view of the illuminated fan. Pretty cool but I know all that glowing would keep me up at night so I switch it off at night.

Cleaning house...

I took two systems and condensed them down into one.

[Actually, I stripped all three systems down, however one of the three is an oddball which has [had] an Intel chip running the show and was not going to be compatible to the other two systems which ran off of AMD chips.]

The gateway system [Intel] will be reborn again someday. Right now I’m focused on the AMD set-up for my main desktop.

Stripped down to bare bones here…

Starting to look like a computer again...

The mainboard is now bolted down inside the case and I have added the two hard drives to the mix as well.

Project v1.0

Project. v1.0

So I have streamlined myself down from 4 PC's to 3 and now to 2.5 systems.... sort of.
I have become a hopeless addict. I’m a dedicated reader of CPU magazine. I’m in the middle of six bizzillion things at a time [as usual] and still adding onto the stack. However, to keep myself motivated and moving forward I feel the need to create a new project for myself.

I am referring to the project as ModMaddness v.1.0

I want to mod a pair of systems out of this mess of systems I’ve got sitting around the house… with a few tweaks and add-on’s thrown in for good measure. [This obsession will most certainly drive my wife insane with my ‘nerdness’, however after everything comes together and is working as it should be, I feel she will come around and in fact be happier with the situation.]

One of my previous CPU mags has a write-up on building a digital tv recorder. The best part of this is most people have 90% of the parts that they will need in order to do this just sitting around [like I do]. The last 10% in parts is pretty cheap to get and easy to install. Mainly, you will need to get a large hard drive of about 300g [give or take]. With a 300 gig hard drive you can effectively save/record up to 1000 hours of tv programming.

Next, you may want to upgrade to a dvd burner [if you don’t have one already] so that you can burn off some of those shows or movies you save so you can watch them later on.

Here is the best part. The software that you need to make all of this run flawlessly is out there right now, just waiting for you to use... for free. Once I have narrowed down the software that I will be running, I will post more info. Suffice it to say that free is good enough for me.

Anyhow… so that is my project for the near future... Right now I have my main game box torn wide open as well as the other two systems and I am taking notes on what I want to upgrade, what I want to keep and how everything is going to go back together again.

So far I need:

300gig hard drive

A new graphics card with TV in/out

Several sticks of RAM [for good measure]

A top of the line DVD burner.

You may email me in the event you wish to donate parts and or money to this endeavor. All donations are greatly appreciated.

So there you have it, my summer project.

A new start...

Well, we're still out in San Diego... but we've moved away from the beach. We have a really wonderful new condo resort and life is good.

We are still in the process of unpacking and moving furniture... and such...

Once we get settled I will bring you all up to date on events... my prego wife is demanding thatI get her some food... NOW!!!!

;)

Poolside...

We have several on-site recreational centers and pools. This is the one that is closest to our condo. Always nice to be within walking distance of the pool... especially in the summertime.

View

Our view has changed. Now we have trees and hills instead of sun, sand and sky.
I welcome the change of pace and lifestyle.

Walking path

There is a nice and quiet walking trail right out the back door of our place.

Stadium

You can see the San Diego Chargers Stadium from out back.