Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).
Joy and I are thinking of switching cell phone carriers. We’ve been using Cingular for several years and at this point we are out of contract with them. There are a couple of spots on my drive home where my cell phone drops pretty much every day, and it’s only a ten minute drive, so that’s getting pretty frustrating. We basically have it narrowed down to Sprint and Verizon. The problem is that I am really picky about cell phones, so I’m not sure exactly what I want to get. There is a phone that is supposed to come out on Verizon in the next month or two (it has already been delayed several times), so I think I’m going to hold out to see that phone before we make a final decision.
Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).
We recently got a new lawnmower. Last time we bought a lawnmower, we got one of the cheapest ones we could find. It always worked pretty well, but it was not self-propelled, and sometimes if the grass was really long it could get a little bogged down. So this time we spent a little more and got a self-propelled model with a little more power. After using it three times now (including the lovely night adventure I wrote about recently), I have to say that self-propelled is really nice. It just takes a lot less effort to get the mowing done. I can get the lawn finished a little faster than before, and I’m less tired afterwards. So maybe I’m just lazy, but it really is pretty nice. Hopefully it will continue to work well and will last us a long time.
Joy found a show called “History Detectives” on PBS and she just can’t get enough of it. Apparently it has been on the air for quite some time, and they air an episode every day. They are almost all reruns, but they are new to us. The basic idea is that people write in with some old item or artifact that they would like to know more about, and then the people on the show investigate to see what they can find. As you might expect, some items are more interesting than others, but when they have a good item, the show is actually quite interesting. My favorite episode so far was one where a guy had a set of small paintings that he thought might be from a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Amazingly enough, they were able to find the man who did the paintings and speak with him. His reaction to seeing his own paintings again after all that time was quite powerful. I have no idea what Joy is going to do once we get caught up and we’ve seen all of the reruns, but she is certainly enjoying it for now!
Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).
Whenever I’m working on my computer, Joy calls the motherboard and/or CPU “the brain” of the machine. Well, Wednesday night my order arrived from NewEgg with a new brain for my desktop at home. When I built my machine last year, I used an Intel D975XBX motherboard, which was supposed to support the new Core 2 Duo processors when they were released. However, it turned out that there was some kind of voltage problem running the new C2D processors on the board, so Intel eventually released a new version, creatively named the D975XBX2.
I ordered the new motherboard and a C2D processor (E6600 for those keeping score at home), and I was hoping to be able to switch the motherboard and processor out without needing to reinstall the operating system. The motherboards are quite similar (but not exactly the same), so I thought I at least had a chance of getting things to work. I couldn’t find anything online where anyone had swapped out the two motherboards, but I decided to take my chances all the same.
The first thing I did was split my RAID 1 mirrors back into separate disks. I didn’t know how my RAID setup would work from one motherboard to the other, so I decided splitting the mirrors was the safest thing to do. Then I cracked open the case and swapped out the motherboard and processor, which wasn’t too terribly difficult since the boards are physically arranged the same way. I booted into the BIOS setup and configured the settings for the new board to be identical to how I had the old board set. And then I booted up the machine to see what would happen. XP started right up just as if nothing had changed, which was really nice to see.
XP picked up everything on the motherboard without any complaints. I had to reinstall newer versions of a few of the Intel software packages once XP was up and running, mainly the Desktop Utilities package and the Matrix RAID Console. Once I had the new RAID Console installed, I was able to rebuild both of my mirrors without any problems at all.
The main reason I wanted to swap the processor (other than the always appreciated speed increase) was because my previous processor (a D930) always ran pretty hot. It idled around 60C and just went up from there under load. The new C2D idles between 34C and 36C. I used an Intel tool to run the CPU at 100% load for 30 minutes and the temperature never went above 59C. So the old processor idled at the same temperature as the new processor under full load. Nice! I’m sure part of that is the difference between a D930 and a C2D, but another part of it is likely because I used an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler instead of the stock Intel cooler I used on the old D930. I’m not sure which made the bigger difference, but I’m very happy with the results.
Our lawn grows pretty quickly in the spring and summer months. I mowed it a week and a half ago, and with the help of some rain we had recently, it was already really long again. I left work right on time yesterday, hoping to make it home in time to mow the lawn before we got more rain. But just as I left the office, it started sprinkling, and then raining. It didn’t rain for long, but the grass was too wet to mow. I was a bit frustrated, but there was nothing I could do.
After we got Charis to bed last night and Joy and I got a few other things done around the house, I decided to check the lawn to see if it had dried enough to mow. And sure enough it had! So with only 20 or so minutes of light left, I fired up the mower and got to work. Our front yard takes about 45 minutes to mow, so by the end I was squinting in the dark trying to finish up with the help of a few outdoor lights on our house. But I was able to finish and now our yard looks less like an out-of-control jungle.
The whole time I was mowing I kept thinking of the REM song “Gardening At Night”.
In preparation for Micaiah’s arrival, we decided to stop our DirecTV service to save some money on monthly bills. We can get all of our local channels in high definition using the antenna in our attic, so we’re just going to go with that and see how we do. After using TiVo for many years, though, we decided that we definitely wanted to keep using one. So I sold our DirecTV TiVo and we got one of the new Series 3 TiVos that can record HD from antennas or cable cards. The Series 3 has all kinds of nifty features that DirecTV does not implement on its boxes, so that’s kind of cool. We can share music and pictures from our computers, download movies from Amazon Unbox, and get our local weather forecast. So while we still have a TiVo, Joy is going through withdrawl from HGTV, Discovery and National Geographic. But I think she’s finding a few shows on PBS that she likes, so hopefully that will help.
I’ve mostly been buying Virtual Console games for my Nintendo Wii, but a few weeks ago they released Super Paper Mario. It looked good enough in preview videos and got high enough reviews that I decided to go ahead and get it. With Charis running around all over and preparing for Micaiah’s arrival I haven’t had a ton of time to play it, but in the time I have had, it’s been pretty fun. It primarily plays like a 2D platforming game, but at any point you can switch into 3D to reveal all kinds of things that you can’t see in the normal 2D view. That’s just enough of a twist on the gameplay to make it feel new and fresh, while still retaining all of the good parts of a classic Mario game. I’m sure it will be forever before I make any real progress into the game, but I’m looking forward to it whenever I can squeeze in a little bit of time to play.