Month: September 2010

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

A fishy blog post (or, Little E’s trip to the sea)

Last year for little E’s birthday, I took him to the Tulsa Zoo. They had monkeys and elephants there, so he was happy, but I found the place kind of underwhelming. Funny story: this time a year ago, the Crapquest, erm, sorry, Mapquest directions to the Tulsa Zoo were so horribly and amazingly and utterly wrong that we got seriously lost and accidentally found our way to the Oklahoma Aquarium. If I had only known how hard the OK Aquarium rocks compared to the Tulsa Zoo, we would’ve stayed lost and gone there instead. So this year, the whole family went to hang out with the fishies.

Little E pets a starfish … Read more

Categories
Gadgetology

Not the kind of surprise I was really looking for, but thanks

So… two things. As of today I’ve got a few days off, for the first time in a year that didn’t involve anyone dying. After the past two weeks at work, I can safely predict that someone would’ve been dying if I hadn’t gotten a few days off. Even the expanded-hours training schedule we’ve been on lately was truncated today, so I got to go home today after – get this! – only eight hours.

And then the fun really began. I get home and bring my two desktop machines out of standby, and my older machine – a Dell Dimension I’ve had since ’05 that has served faithfully even though I sometimes think the best thing for it would be a reformat of the ol’ C drive and a solid kick right between the registry – sounded like it was gonna freakin’ take off. The fan keeps getting louder… and the pitch of this loud whine it’s making keeps rising… and I had a bit of a flashback.

So I did now what I did then: pulled the plug out of the back.

Bad move. When I waited a couple of minutes and reconnected the power cord to the power supply, the thing stayed asleep when I tried to wake it up.

Let’s pause for a moment and see what all this machine does that I don’t/can’t do on any other machines in the house:

  • My entire DVD-burning capacity is tied up in this machine.
  • This machine plays cartoons out to a TV (hooked up as a secondary monitor) for Evan.
  • This machine has my entire music/audio collection on it, and the vast majority of my digital video files (all Doctor Who and Star Trek, and spinoffs thereof, reside on the F drive on this machine).
  • This machine has the master DVD ISO files, and all of the master video files, for all of my DVD productions to date.
  • This machine has my (half-dozen or so) books-in-progress on it.
  • This machine is my LAN hub.
  • This machine has all of my photos of my son on it.

Okay, I think you get it: double-plus-non-good. Fortunately, after about half an hour of trying to call friends in the know, I tried to power the Dell up again… and this time, it woke up.

I think the plan is to keep it awake until further notice, giving me a little bit of time to buy a new power supply, without it being an ohshitgottagetanewonenow thing. But I’m under no illusion that it’ll stay awake forever waiting for me to finish that search at a leisurely pace.

This has not been my year for power supplies.… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code Home Base

Thank you for not blogging

This blog has become a bit of a no-blogging zone here lately. The whole site has. I’m working on that a bit, but it’s been slow going. My hours aren’t conducive to me getting… well… much of anything done. (I just mowed my yard this week after getting a long-distance call from the guys aboard the International Space Station, asking me to do something about the fact that my grass was tall enough to brush up against their windows when their orbit carried them over Arkansas.) Daddy duty is taking more of my time as little E reaches the age where he wants to explore things, learn more stuff, and have conversations. I love the little conversations we have. It’s the whole reason one’s in the dad business. He cracks me up sometimes, especially when he comes up with some humorous response that’s like something I would say in the same situation. He really is turning into a little me. (I want him to turn out better than that!)

I’m trying to figure out what to do with theLogBook.com. Daily updates, frankly, ain’t gonna happen anymore. It was a valiant try, but at this point I think it’s all about finding clever ways to leverage what’s already on the site. You’ll be seeing quite a few instances of “It aired today X years ago!” stuff soon, as we’re going into the time of year that American TV shows generally premiere – it’s kind of a no-brainer. I wish the forums were generating more activity that I could point to without having to go in and constantly goose it, but I guess this is to be expected when I pretty much fell off the grid for about a week or so (without really planning or preparing to do so, it has to be said). Responsibility for the site going comatose lies solely at my feet.

At the core of the issue is: I have less time to do all the watching / listening / reading that I used to do, to say nothing ofr writing about all the watching / listening / reading that makes up the site. My schedule has really become more about drive-by forum postings (and an awful lot of them are links to other places) when I have the time – perhaps a little too much influence from Facebook, but really much more of a function of my schedule.

I’m open to ideas on how to make it work. I’m not ready to give up yet, even though by any measure that includes common sense, I probably should be.… Read more