TiVo Series 2 on sale cheap!

TiVo is currently having a sale on Factory-renewed units. If you don’t have one, go get one right now! I’ll wait.

I’ve had a TiVo for three years now. It is the greatest television related invention since the television itself. What’s so great about it? I know that I will not be able to explain this well enough, but I’ll try.
Continue reading “TiVo Series 2 on sale cheap!”

Dinner conversations with a two year old

We had a pretty crazy weekend around here, and I started back to work Monday to find a number of fires to fight right off the bat. I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about my daughter.

Sometime she really cracks me up.

One night last week I came in from the grill with some pretty nice looking pork chops. As the smell filled the room my daughter ran over and yelled "I want steak!" The night before we had, in fact, had steak from the grill.

"We’re having pork tonight. That’s pork," I replied.

She belted out, "Yeah. Pork is good steak".

Can’t argue with that.

Tonight we had pasta, and Denise and I also had salads. After the pasta was gone, Denise asked "Do you want something else?"

"I want my salad."

"Do you want something out of my salad?" Usually Denise and I will give her a few carrots or a cucumber, but she’s never had a salad.

"I want salad in a bowl!"

Denise shrugged, gave me a look that said, "she’ll never eat this", and handed her salad bowl over.

"This is my favorite dinner I never had."

Apparently it was, because she ate almost all of it while my wife hungrily looked on in amazement.

Phase Outline: 50%

After this mornings fun, and a family lunch I’ve managed to get the phase outline to 50% (the glass is half full). This puts me halfway to where I had planned to be Sunday (the glass is half empty).

I’m going to do my best to get the thing done by the end of the week at the very latest (time for a new glass).

At least this get’s me past the stickiest part of my outline. There are three very vauge phases that will prorably slow the writing one I hit them, but I needed to move past them for now.

I will not be defeated

I feel I haven’t gotten anything productive done in days.

My laptop fan went insane, so it’s out for repair. This cuts my writing time down to only that time I can closet myself in my office. That pretty much means after 11pm most days.

I had set time aside for writting on Sunday. Every time I went to start something came up and I agreed to do it later. Later didn’t come until midnight, and I was too tired to start by then.

Yesterday I got up early to get started because I knew it was a busy day. I reviewed everything, got all set to start moving and time was up. I did have a great day though.

That brings us to this morning. I got up at 6:30am. I wandered in to the office, turned on the computer, waited for the memory check to… start? Great! Dead computer! No surprise there. Why did I get up again? I rebooted, went into the BIOS changed the memory settings slightly, hit "Save & Exit".

Apparently that was a mistake. "Save & Exit" on my board’s BIOS apparently means "Slowly corrupt the CMOS". It seems that this option has problems, and over time will make the system unbootable. I had just hit that limit. Now it didn’t post, didn’t beep, didn’t do anything. There are no good suggestions online for how to fix this (besides RMA the board).

After doing everything I could think of I managed to get the board to at least beep a failure code. Progress! I put one stick of memory, the CPU and the video card back in, powered on, and it posted! I went into the bios and hit F10 to save (rather than the "Save & Corrupt" option) and it rebooted. I reinstalled all the hardware and booted up. Windows started, and the steam stopped pouring out of my ears.

So here I am after getting all the hardware reinstalled. Two and a half hours later and I’ve accomplished nothing I set out to do. Maybe I can manage to get back to the office after breakfast.

To the surprise of noone, my server crashed while posting this story. It’s better now. I don’t want to talk about it.

Now for that breakfast…

Unplesantly Surprised

I came up here tonight to get some more work done on the outline. So far no go.

I just spent about two hours reading up on someone who I ‘knew’ online (I had been involved in online discussions with them). This person has done some amazing things, many of which I greatly enjoyed. One particular area of interest of mine has been changed forever (for the good) by this person’s work.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking they went from well respected to convicted sex offender. Continue reading “Unplesantly Surprised”