Category: Life

Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).

On Easter Sunday, my wife and I went to her sister’s for lunch1. While we were there, the relatives sprang a couple of broken computers on me asking me to fix them2. Since we were getting really good grub3, I figured I could at least take a look. Of course, neither person with a broken machine had any useful CDs with them, though one did run home to see if she had any there (nope). I ended up taking both machines home and working on them in my spare time. Today, I finally fixed one of them and I fixed it by following the instructions I found in this article: Windows XP Crashed? Here’s Help. That worked really well in helping me fix the XP laptop dumped on me, but the other machine is an older WinME desktop. I’m still working on that one, but fortunately there’s no rush on the WinME box. Still I’m thrilled that I’ve got one of them fixed and can relax a bit4.

1 We had an extremely yummy lamb roast.
2 For the record, I’m a database guy these days not a support tech. *sigh*
3 And free, never forget free! *grin*
4 Yes, I’m still reading those wretched fun Wheel of Time books.

Like many Americans who get their taxes done early, my wife and I recently received our federal income tax refund. As soon as I noticed it had arrived, I moved it over from checking to savings. And as I like to try our finances on my computer1, I registered the transfer of funds from checking to savings immediatley. Then for the rest of the month I wondered why the bank kept showing us as having so very much more money in our checking account than my computer did. Mostly I thought it was due to some checks not having been cashed yet (e.g. the mortgage payment). In any case, I trusted my figures better than the banks as my figures would include those uncashed checks.

Then in today’s snail mail was the paper copy of our bank statement. This evening I sat down and reconciled our checking account and low, I spotted a rather large oversight on my part. I forgot to register the deposit of our income tax refund. Whoops! Once I did that my figures and the bank’s suddenly looked a lot closer than they had and I felt much, much better about our finances.

Moral of the Story#1: If you don’t want to spend money, assume you don’t have it.
Moral of the Story#2: Always be sure to enter all your deposits as well as your withdrawls! 😀

1 I track our finances using KMyMoney.

Some time ago, I was having a discussion with a friend where it came up that I like those nasty, orange candies known as circus peanuts.  I don’t really understand why I like them myself; I just do.  Since then, I’ve used the term “circus peanuts” in my head as mental shorthand for anything that I like which either isn’t any good and/or which I have no distinct reason for liking.  I bring this up because my faithful readers will probably notice I started reading a book which wasn’t on my list of planned books, The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan.  I will not pretend that this book has the greatest story, characters or writing in the world; however it is a book which I have read multiple times and always enjoyed.  I picked it up to read this morning as I looked over my unread book list and nothing on there appealed to me in the slightest.  So I went with a “circus peanuts” book to have something to read over my lunch hour at work. Then as  I was about to start reading the book, I started to wonder what other people’s circus peanuts might be.  What do you think?  What is your “circus peanuts”?

Coleco Adam computer

PC World is running an article about the 10 Worst PCs of All Time and as a whole the artcle is a refreshing trip down nostalgia lane. However I must strongly disagree with their top third choice, we had one of these Coleco Adam computers when I was a kid and it totally ruled. We never had any of the problems mentioned in the article and that Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom game was sooo rad. I mean after you beat the game once; you got to flip the cassette tape over and play the game all over again. Only on the second time through, you got a different color spaceship. Beating it a second time got you back to your original ship. Beating it repeatedly let you keep switching between the two colors of ship. I wasted spent hours of my youth playing that game and I don’t consider one minute of it wasted. So if Dan Tynan keeps spouting all this nonense of the Adam being a crappy computer; he’s going to get his arsed kick something fierce! :p

Note: The image used in this article was found under the Coleco Adam article on Wikipedia and was released under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 2.0 license by Andrew Lih.

Bolted E | Flickr

Mostly, I’m uploading this image because I want to test a new WordPress/Flickr integration plugin I installed on my blog. However I also want to point out Ken Rockwell’s Camera Adjustments: from Blah to Aha! is a great article. I tired making his recommended adjustments to my little Canon P&S and found to my very pleasant surprise that the colors were much, much better. I’ll definitely be using those adjustments in all my shooting from now on. Unfortunately the majority of the shots I took with those adjustments, did not turn out the way I wanted (composition-wise, wind blew leaves the wrong way sort of thing).

Update: The plugin worked perfectly. Wahoo! This means I’ll be more likely to blog about any new images I add to my Flickr account so you my faithful minions won’t have to either visit me at Flickr and don’t have to did through my gallery to see new images. Instead they’ll just appear as regular posts. *glee*