Nerdery Abounds

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I like feeling productive and getting things done, an aspect of my personality which strongly conflicts with my fondness for sleeping in late and sometimes just taking it easy. The older I get, the more I realize just how much the oft-discussed duality of Man is well represented within me. The internal conflict of competing desires seems to apply almost everywhere I turn…

But on the productive side, I’ve been rearranging a lot of computer equipment at home. For my daughter’s upcoming 6th birthday, I’m going to set up our third desk with a computer that will be her’s, at least when we’re not traveling.

To that end, I’ve been making sure that we have the necessary cables and other gear, and that included freeing up one of my three LCD monitors for her to use. Now my Mac shares one of its two monitors (via KVM) with the XP desktop, which I’m planning to phase out in favor of my XP laptop. So my desk has been cleaned, dusted, organized, rearranged, and is much-improved. I’ve been working on making the switch to using the laptop for all my Windows needs, but that’s going to take time and a lot more installs.

Along the way, while dealing with monitor resolutions, video cards, etc. I decided that I really, really want to replace my ancient PowerMac with a Mac Mini. But as (relatively) inexpensive as they are, I still really can’t afford it with my wretched budget, when I have so many other things that  need my monetary attention. It would probably be helpful if the economy made a dramatic and convincing recovery, but alas…

While reconfiguring everything, I also tweaked some of my router settings like DHCP lease times, and moved some power cables and my ethernet switch. In all, it felt more than a little like a continuation of work, where I’ve also been a very busy, multitasking fool of late. But a wise man once said that happiness comes as a result of accomplishments, and sure enough I’ve had a nice warm feeling from knocking out so many tasks both at work and at home.

I’ve also been making an overdue assault our spare room, which had turned into the dumping ground for all of the extra junk we have accumulated. Each weekend now I spend about an hour sorting old papers, throwing things out, identifying stuff that’s worth selling on eBay, and filling up our trash and recycling bins. Again, I like that feeling of progress.

So much to do… I keep emailing myself reminder notes from work when I remember something. Or somethings, since I sent one the other day that had a half-dozen “to do” items in it. At least I can stop feeling guilty about not getting around to a couple of blog updates, particularly with Snuva cranking them out lately!

I did get some nice R&R the other day though. On the 8th, Carl and I again went down to RadioFest in Monterey, for the annual ham radio nerdery. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to buy an OEM version of the external speaker I use for my Icom dual-band mobile in the Jeep, at 1/6th the retail price of the Icom version. I’m going to use it to replace the tiny Radio Shack external speaker unit I’ve been using with my CB. The timing is excellent to  as the plastic bracket on the Radio Shack speaker recently broke.

After attending a couple of the seminars, we decided to head out and do a little caching in the area. We managed 9 finds in pretty short order, and were pleasantly surprised to see Small and Regular-size caches were well-represented, even in the urban setting. Up in Silicon Valley, nearly all would have been Micros. In the process, I also grabbed my 500th travel bug to move along.

Last weekend, besides moving around the computers and working on the spare room, I also managed to catch up on my sleep, attend the going-away lunch unevent for Rocket Girl (and assist Marky who picked the lock on a padlocked ammo can with improvised tools), have a nice afternoon outing with the family, and finishing writing up the particulars for my new D&D character. I also finished historian Max Hasting’s latest work, the 600-page Retribution, which I should review in another post. How I mamaged to fit that all of those things into one weekend, I’m not certain, but I’m happy that I did.