Catching Up

Between the “excitement” at work and some infrastructure changes at home, I’ve gotten behind on my posting – again.

First, my contract at work expired after a year, at the same time all of the contractors and about 10% of the regular employees were let go. Stoopid economy. So while on the positive side I have a bit more freedom and flexibility, on the downside our budget is about to go from “squeaking by” to “somewhat less than squeaking by”… To be followed by “burble burble glug glug (sink)” ala Titanic at some point.

This has not done my general stress levels any good and I notice my patience and nerves are suffering for it. Either that, or it’s the reduction from about 5 cups of coffee a day down to  just two. 🙂

On the home front, I’ve pretty much completed a big overhaul of out home computer setup. Allison now has use of her mother’s iBook, with her own simplified account, and with a proper LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse. I’ve phased out my old Dell 9100 desktop and am using my Delll 1501 laptop in its place, with my Mac and the 1501 sharing the 19″ LCD. The Mac also uses a second 17″ LCD as before.

The router has been repositioned and is now vertically-mounted, and my computer desk has a lot more room on it. Pretty much the entire reshuffling of equipment was done without additional cost, other than the cost of the VGA KVM for about $25, and another $25 to replace the old Mac mouse Allison was using as the USB cable was starting to go bad. The sale of the old Dell desktop should more than offset those. (Which is good. See comments about budget above.)

Moving all of my files, software, etc. from the Windows desktop to the laptop was time-consuming though, and it left me without Picasa for generating my photo galleries. Now that everything is finally up & running, the galleries have been generated and I can start catching up over the next few days. Then there will be some pretty pictures instead of this irritating and dull text stuff. Well, less text anyway…