I lost my wedding band for about an hour last night. We thought it had come off in the meatloaf when I was mixing/mashing it up, but we didn't find it there (we ate very carefully). I ended up finding it under the oven. That sucked.

As per the recent standard, I am having very bad luck with my desktop PC. It's randomly freezing. The forums and such claim that my specific problem is fixable, but none of their suggestions have worked. I'm debating between setting up WinXP immediately or just sticking it out and waiting for the new version of ubuntu to be released next month. I'm also thinking I should ditch ubuntu and go back to linux mint. Ubuntu is working like a champ on this laptop though. Super stable. In the words of Method Man, a demolition crew couldn't wreck it.

Stephen may be getting past his shy stage. He had a lot of fun with Steve last night and he showed no trepidation around my in-laws this weekend. He's doing lots of cool stuff. He's having a lot fewer tantrums now, and he can suddenly keep himself entertained for long periods. His favorite "toys" are still ridiculous, though. A pen inside an empty coke bottle. A carabiner with an empty key ring on it. Remote controls are still near the top of the list.

My wife's fantasy football team is a perfect example of the manipulative ability of wives. She's been softening me for six months. It started off as "Will you help me with my team next year?" This would receive a definitive response of "Hell no. I hate fantasy football." Then she would whine even though the draft was 6 months away. That behavior kept up the same for a while.. then as the draft approached she was always asking me what she should do (like I know). Then, during the draft, she didn't want me to go on a beer run because she couldn't possibly make any picks without me. Now it's the beginning of "who should I play?" every week. I found myself staying up until after 1am last night to see the conclusion of the last game of the week so I could make sure my wife's team won (they did, even though Ray Rice and her receivers completely sucked). Why am I constantly doing things I don't want to do? Oh, that's right--I'm married. I'm starting to see where all the cliche wife/husband jokes come from.

At different parts of my life, I have found out that people just love to give away old things, but only if they know that their old "things" are going to take on a new life.

My parents got me a new turntable when I was maybe 17. Well, saying "turntable" nowadays alludes to a DJ's turntable... this is a record player. Most of the music I was listening to at the time was available on records, and over the next few years I found out that people just love to give away their old records. Stacks and stacks of them. Crates full of LPs, from behind the dress clothes in the closet, or under some boxes in the attic. As long as I showed a genuine interest in these records--which I did--and as long as I would allow them to talk to me about their albums as they looked through them one last time, people had no problem giving me all their LPs.

I mean, you can get LPs at a thrift store for a buck a piece, and there are occasionally some good finds in there, but getting 70 or 100 records all at once... there's nothing like it. And you have all the time in the world to sift through them and listen to whatever you want, in your own home.

Well, once I figured out this small fact of life, I casually brought up listening to records in conversations with my friends' parents. Instantly, I'm in some sort of club. "Oh, you listen to records? You like records? Come upstairs to the closet in the guest room, I'll give you a whole bunch of records." This is how I ended up with about 700 LPs in my collection, most of them free. This is also how I ended up with 4 or 5 repeat copies of some popular albums. Then the record donor would paw through all the records, telling me which ones they liked, or which ones were no good (those were always their sister's albums, or their ex-husband's).

There is something satisfying about music on vinyl. It's just there. I don't have to worry about losing my data or any of that nonsense. Nothing can destroy it except a house fire. The records will even survive a flood and still be playable once given a cursory cleaning. They will still be playable hundreds of years from now, provided anyone has a player for them. Brand new store-bought CDs will last 20 years if they are lucky (even with no scratches).

Jaime got a new laptop in January and I inherited her old one. I did a lot of tinkering around with it, and eventually it could do everything that I needed it to do, just like a brand new laptop. Like old vinyl records, a lot of old computers still work.

Now, my main computer is irreplaceable and no amount of tinkering or OS installations will replace the sheer power of it. Being able to manage/modify my library of [over] 20,000 photos with Lightroom was unheard of 10 years ago.

BUT, running Windows 7 should not require a supercomputer. I can understand that a lot of modern software (especially games) will inherently require a more powerful computer, but booting up into Windows really should not require an increasing amount of computer power. The technology has increased so quickly that no one is focusing on making their software work correctly. There is so much extra processing power and RAM in modern computers that programmers figure no one will notice if their software is full of memory leaks and requires half of your CPU's power for simple calculations. It has gotten to the point where cell phones have a 1GHz processor in them and there are still mysterious delays when trying to do something simple like navigate the menu system.

Anyhow, this has made me a magnet for old computers recently. People love it if you tell them that you can make an old computer run a few modern programs and perform well on the internet. My father brought me four kind-of-mostly-working computers last week, Steve has some stuff for me, and Eric got an old Pentium III from his boss that he gave me today. So far I have breathed life into the best computer that I received, a Pentium IV with 256megs of RAM (I spent 20 bucks and upgraded it to 512mb RAM). I gave it back to my Dad when he drove through town a few days ago. Now I have this Pentium III with only 64mb of RAM and I'm trying to find something to run on it. I may just use DOS on it.

Anyone got any old computers that work? First I'd have to get rid of these current ones (and prove to my wife that I'm not a hoarder), but I'm open to some old computers that are just sitting around.

Tennis is back but I don't really care this time around. I think I'm sick of all the weather delays and timezone difference issues. I got two tickets to the final match of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic coming this August. I had a good time at last year's matches even though the heat was quite bad in early August. I'm excited to be going again. Going to the Men's finals ensures that you'll see at least one "famous" player in person.

In many ways, babies and dogs go hand-in-hand. For instance, I gave Stephen about ¼ of a leftover biscuit in his highchair this morning. He just mashed it up and made a huge mess. I'm not sure how much he even ate. With one swipe of a clean cloth, a hundred little crumbs fell to the floor. The floor was clean within ten seconds.

I think I have the new/old laptop set up pretty well by now. Didn't take long, once I received my replacement CD drive.

WordPress is now seven years old, and it is growing faster than ever. This tiny blog post is a good recap of the accomplishments of WordPress, most of them happening in recent times. This free software now manages over 20 million of the world's websites.

WordPress (the software used to manage this blog) has changed the way I think about computers and software. The more I learned about WordPress, the more I couldn't believe it was free. That prompted me to try a version of linux (a free alternative to Microsoft Windows), and has eventually landed me here, where I only use free or legally purchased software on all my computers. To be honest, once you learn your way around linux, it takes less effort to operate free software than it does to steal commercially-available software for Windows through means of warez.

I just took the dogs out literally minutes before it started raining out of nowhere. Gotta love it.

Since I began this post this morning (when I said I didn't care about Tennis), Robin Soderling has ended Roger Federer's streak of 23 consecutive appearances in the semifinals of major tournaments. One of the greatest streaks alive in sports, and I saw it end on live tv. To put the streak in perspective, it's like Tiger Woods finishing in the top 4 of every Major Golf Tournament for six straight years. It's equivalent to the same team making it to the "final four" of the NCAA basketball tournament for 23 years in a row. Robin Soderling is now the only player in history to have beaten both Nadal and Federer at the French Open.

Well, I installed two distributions of linux today, national nerd day. I upgraded my desktop computer to the newest version of mint this morning. I had only one major problem, and fixing it involved temporarily moving my desktop computer upstairs so I could plug into the internet while I looked up a solution before Stephen woke up.

So, after I got that straightened out, Jaime brought in the mail, which had a replacement DVD-ROM drive for this laptop. I reformatted it and put Ubuntu 10.04 on it. Things are going well so far.

What a disaster my computer situation has been.

Three day weekend for working folks. Going to Jaime's parents' house tomorrow, and planning to do music stuff with Steve on Monday. Extra days are nice.

A[nother] body was found in the pond by our house. The cops came and roped off the entire pond while about 150 people watched them extract the body. It was an adult black male that had been drinking down by the pond the night before. Right after we moved here, a child drowned in that same pond. Also, someone in the house across from us killed themselves about 2 years ago when Steve was out smoking on the front steps. Lots of death around here, but surprisingly none of it is due to citizen-on-citizen gun violence.

It is impossible to not be a fan of Kevin Durant's at this point. He's nice, extremely skilled, super young, and he shut down Kobe. As a side note, the NBA all-star game has only featured a classic H.O.R.S.E. game for the past two years, and Kevin Durant has won them both.

I have only been using Linux for two months and I'm already strategizing how I can get by without Windows at all. I absolutely must have Windows to run Adobe Lightroom, Jeskola Buzz, and Adobe Audition. That's it. I'm looking into Virtualbox to install Windows XP as a virtual machine within Linux.

Stephen finally got his last incisor. He now has six teeth, the four front ones in the top and the two front ones in the bottom. He is a little more interested in walking every day. Should be soon, he takes 7-10 steps now before falling.

Hope everyone has a good Friday..

I was on such a roll yesterday. I accomplished so many nerdy things that I never thought I'd have the ability to accomplish.

First, I exported all my old livejournal entries and converted them to WordPress posts. This was all handled within WordPress and was all automated. There are some minor issues pertaining to formatting and some other things, but I'm all done! My old pictures (2005-2008) can be seen in the lj category: here. There are pictures from my wedding/honeymoon, new hampshire, all kinds of good stuff. It even imported all the old comments. Pretty happy about that.

It's interesting for me to see that, in many ways, I had no idea how to edit/optimize photos back in 2005-06, but I still managed to post a lot of good shots. I think that's because my original Nikon "coolpix" e5700 was able to do so many things on its own. Excellent macro support, RAW support, and a movable screen with live view made it a perfect "starter" camera. I often wonder what would have happened to my interest in photography if I had gotten a different camera at the time. I definitely miss being able to shoot in macro mode.

After that I spent quite a bit of time trying to understand style.css sheets and how all the different .php files come together to make all my pages/categories on this blog. I have a very simple layout on here, so I think I may have actually learned how it all works. I changed the sidebar on the right, gave it a grey background and got rid of the dividing line between the main section (here) and the sidebar (over to the right). I also took forever to make that custom search bar with no "search" button to click, and made a few pics for my "about me" section. A few steps in the right direction. Now I just need a banner at the top, and a few other things. This is easier than I thought. I've been so scared to edit anything (last time I learned anything about HTML, style sheets were not in use, and now they determine the entire look of your site) that I've avoided it all, maybe a bit too much.

Then, since I was on a roll, I looked up ways to make Ubuntu faster and ended up editing 4 config files (blindly trusting some people's blog posts and forum responses I found via Google). Still up and running in Linux, so I didn't break anything... I don't think. I'm starting to drink the Linux cool aid a little bit. It breaks down to two basic things for me. First, you are immune to everything Windows isn't. Shady website? Might have viruses? No big deal, I'm immune to all viruses in Linux. Second, if you care enough, you can make Linux do anything you want. For instance, when I receive an instant message (AIM service), my computer reads my messages aloud to me. It took a lot of work, but I hooked my AIM client through the "accessibility" text-to-speech synthesizer. In Linux, you have unfettered access to even the most sensitive files, so you can always fix whatever is wrong. If you care enough.

I started off trying to learn how to modify this crap so I can get my wife's blog (in the works) going, and in the process of learning how to do a few things, I took a 6-8hr detour and worked on my own site all day.

I'm getting back into a non-tv phase. This is a good thing--a very good thing. I used to watch cartoons all morning with Stephen, and then leave it on ESPN's endless loop of Sports Center all day. There is no reason to watch ESPN at all anymore since football is over. Without Merril Hoge, there is no analysis worth watching. Merril Hoge is the best post-game analysis personality, in any sport, on any channel. You have to ignore the fact that nearly all of his predictions are wrong; that is not his thing. I love all of his little "inside the play" replays.

I should just cancel all of my DVR recordings (PBS' Nature, FRONTLINE, Nova) and stop downloading documentary specials. I don't watch any of them. I just watch 60 Minutes every week. That's it. I'm listening to more music as a result, and writing more blog entries. (It's not all good, however. I spend a lot of time on link sites).

The verdict is that I really like Linux Ubuntu. If something goes wrong or does not work "out of the box," things get very difficult, very fast. For instance, my Logitech webcam was working in every program except Skype, but after searching a lot of forums, I found that the webcam works in Skype when I load it by typing "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype" instead of just typing "skype." It was a pain to figure out, but now that I know, it's not a big deal. It would be much harder if I wasn't running GNOME. This old laptop doesn't even have enough power to run Skype video chat in Windows XP, so I don't actually have any other options.

Speaking of that, I spent about a hundred bucks last night to repair/upgrade this laptop (Dell laptop from 2004). This old battery lasts 7 minutes when unplugged, and the keyboard is kind of destroyed, so I spent about 50 bucks buying replacements for both of those. Hopefully replacing the keyboard is as easy as it looks. I also spent 49 bucks on 2gigabytes of memory. I'd like to extend the life of this laptop for at least a few more years. Running linux is already helping me turn this little pony into a fast horse, and upgrading the memory should make everything run smoothly even though I like to keep lots of software open (and 10+ tabs in my web browser).

Now that my photos site is all debugged and displaying properly, I have no excuse not to finish it. Still need to finish my little bio/profile/about page, and I'm going through several years of photographs, finding a few of the best ones to add. That is where they have been/will be some photos on here recently from a few years ago.

Well, I'm composing this post in linux (Ubuntu 9.10, to be exact). Now I can be an elitist. Yay.

They make it so easy to set up a dual boot. You can download a "Windows Installer" that automatically sets up a partition and the dual boot screen when you restart. It also leaves Windows XP as the default boot option (something that doesn't take over your PC, how refreshing).

First and foremost, when you set up a new computer or operating system, you try to get on the internet. Well, that didn't work for me. After reinstalling Ubuntu three separate times, printing about 50 pages of forum nonsense, and typing "sudo [command]" about 200 times, I finally got Ubuntu to recognize the WiFi card in this laptop. I was immediately introduced to the negative aspects of linux. Supporters of linux say "It's not linux' fault that manufacturers don't make drivers for linux!" I had to use ndiswrapper to convert Windows XP drivers into linux drivers. Finding the correct drivers was a snap, the rest is entirely linux' fault. They have to know that a lot of people are going to encounter the same problem that I did, and they do absolutely nothing to make it intuitive to new users. I had to download 4 packages (installers for utilities/software) on another computer, burn them to a cd, install them in Ubuntu, and then figure out how to use the wrapper. Then I had to diagnose what the conflicts were and remove the other...... okay, I'm bored typing this, so I can only imagine how it is reading it. I'll stop now.

The point: it is definitely linux' fault that this nonsense isn't at all accessible. I am in at least the 98th percentile of computer users, and it took me 8-10 hours of work to get the internet on this sleek, modernized installation of linux. There is nowhere I can go and click "disable all default WiFi drivers," for instance, which would have saved me a lot of time. At least do something to try to make it intuitive for new users. From what I read, my problem occurs in a large percentage of Ubuntu installs, yet there is still no easy (or even reasonable) fix.

I guess it's just a different mindset.

There are some advantages I have already found. You update all your software from one window. Just a few clicks, and all the software on your whole setup is updated at once. Also, Ubuntu natively supports a desktop that is twice as big as your monitor. Just scroll over, and you have the space of a whole other desktop. It also natively supports scrolling by dragging with two fingers at once on the trackpad (like a MAC). That's something that could get addicting. I already use it kind of naturally when browsing. No need to find the scroll bar to browse further down on a web page. We'll see how this pans out.

Also, all software downloads files to the same place. Adjusting the colors/theme of your setup takes effect on all installed software.