A Mostly Geekless Kind of Day
09.Apr.06
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Nice pleasant day today. Lots of family stuff and much relaxing. So no real useful tech things today. This is a “me me me” kinda post. 
[tip - you can subscribe to just the "Tech" categories if this stuff makes your eyes bleed.]
Slept in today. Didn’t roll out of bed until 7am (*gasp*). Wife is picking up some extra money by doing some painting, so she headed over to the client’s home (which is empty) to get going on that. That left me home with the youngest and the oldest as our middle spent the night at a friends. I worked a bit (mostly email and paper shuffling), spent some time in the garage doing a little cleanup and then played a bit of WoW and Vanguard. Also did some breakfast stuff and generally got the kids all moving.
Once the wife got home, we lost our middle son again (he went Geocaching with a friend’s family) so we grabbed a neighbor kid and headed south to Elizabeth and the Big R store. Time to inspect the baby ducks, geese and chickens! Fun stuff and the kids always seem to enjoy it.
From there, we headed to rural Franktown where the daughter’s (current) best friend lives. That friend is 4-H and, with her sister, acquired a couple piglets yesterday. Since we were doing the rural thing, we had to go inspect the piglets and then visit with their 3 horses. The parents there are super nice people and very easy to visit with. We stayed a bit longer than planned, but it was a good time. While there we swung by a couple properties that are for sale… Do we like our “big” house on a small’ish lot in town, or do we want 10 acres but with an older smaller home? Things to ponder over the coming year… and things we’ve been pondering for the last decade it seems. Ever since we moved away from Colman, SD (pop. 480).
Got home and the wife and I had a “Date” — aka, we went grocery shopping with no kids! Such simple pleasures. While out, I finally remembered to buy an innertube for the daughter’s bike.
Supper was good. The carnivores all had hamburgers. We had picked up some “Amy’s Kitchen Veggie Burgers” for our vegetarian son. They looked good so I went that route as well. I enjoyed mine very much. He didn’t. Ah well…
After supper we all went for a nice long walk. Well, wife and I walked. 2 rolled on scooters and middle son broke out the rollerblades. We walk a lot now that the weather is warming up. Daddy is concerned about his midsection… *cough*.
After the walk I fixed the daughter’s tire and did a little maintenance on her bike. Got my bike down and did some maintenance on it too. Got middle son’s bike out and tweaked a bit there as well. Well hell, that meant we had to go for a bike ride and try ‘em all out! So we did. And now we’re done. And I’m all exercised out for the day.
Now I’ll publish this self-absorbent little essay and go play a little bit of vanguard or world of warcraft. Cheers!
A Fixed Truck and wtf AI?
05.Apr.06
2 Comments
Mentioned a couple months ago that the wife’s suburban had a compressor malfunction. Since then we’ve been limping it along more or less just fine. The fried pulley clutch would make some gawd-awful noises from time to time, but it all worked if you didn’t mind being a little embarassed… Well, it all worked until Monday when that clutch finally seized and destroyed the new serpentine belt. *sigh*
Good news is that the wife had it towed to a shop who gave us an estimate several hundred dollars below any other estimates we’d received. Got it fixed and back yesterday and man, it sure runs quieter with working parts.
Wife and daughter have been hooking me into watching American Idol with ‘em most nights this year. In general I enjoy it, but … what the heck is going on with the panel this year? Randy is Randy, Simon is Simon but Paula is… what, drunk? Every show she seems to be doing or saying something just a bit goofy. And the host (Ryan?) seems to have decided that he is going to get in a shot at Simon every chance he gets. You can feel the tension and frankly it is rather annoying. Ah well, I’m still rooting for the rocker (Chris) and the Pickler. 
So I Get My Kid’s MP3 Hand-me-Downs…
02.Apr.06
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Oh, the irony. I get my kids’ mp3 players when they upgrade. Well, ok — there’s a bit more to the story…
I recently took a survey for a vendor that we use at the day job. Part of the incentive to take the survey was the “some random survey taker will win an iPod” message. Ok, so I took 10 or 15 minutes and plowed through it. And lo and behold…. a few weeks later I am notified that I’ve won an iPod shuffle.
Back last Christmas, the daughter was hinting that she’d really like an iPod as a gift. As a tightwad father, I have to confess I didn’t see the need to spend gobs more money on one brand of mp3 player than other brands that did more, held more and were cheaper. Sorry, I’m just not quite ready to spend extra money for the logo. In discussing this with daughter, it turned out she was also quite interested in “the cube.” Looked at it, seemed like a great value and it became her present.
Turns out she hadn’t quite given up the dream of having an iPod… once she heard that I’d won the shuffle, she called dibs on it! On my shuffle. Oh, for shame… Well, the shuffle was 512 and her cube was 1GB. We toyed around with the notion of trying to return the shuffle at a large nationwide retailer and trade up to the Nano but frankly, the ethics of the thing bothered us all. So this afternoon we swapped.
I plug the thing into my laptop and suddenly realize I now have a 1GB USB drive. This thing holds a bunch of tunes but I can also throw all my utilities on it too. Now I have room to look into more of the portable apps too. Ok, I didn’t need the iPod that badly…
Happy Birthday Wife!
31.Mar.06
2 Comments
Birthdays are scary!
More on the ASP.NET quest
25.Mar.06
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Not much to talk about the geek front. I’ve been pretty consumed by my efforts to get a handle on ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005 (and, to a lesser extent, Web Developer 2005 Express which is, as mentioned, free). I have Visual Studio on one machine and the Web Developer thingy on another. There are some differences, of course, but really… the stuff I’ve been doing so far is fine with either. So for learning purposes, go free.
Still waffling on picking out a book. I spent 30 minutes the other day standing in front of a shelf full of books on these topics but just couldn’t quite pull the trigger. I’ll probably go try again today; Now that I have another couple days invested I’m hoping I have a better idea of what I’m after. I’ve had this Murach’s book suggested to me, so I might look at it a little more today.
Meanwhile, I’ve found a couple of decent tutorial type things on the web. One is the ASP.NET Quickstart tutorial and the other appears to be associated with a college course. Both have been helpful so far. Tons of resources on the web but takes a fair amount of time to sort the wheat from the chaff.
I should add that in spite of my whining and waffling, I have actually made some progress in building a functioning little prototype app.
