Good thing I don't work for Dell

Christmas came a little early this year. I finally finished building a new Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz PC with 600 Gigs of Raid 5 storage, 7600 GS Nvidia graphics, and 2 Gigs of DDR2-800 RAM.


Here you can see the gigantic Scythe Ninja heat sink.



So while Dell can build a PC in about 2 minutes, it took me about 5 hours.

I hate waiting in lines and I love a great deal

I'm sure most of you have shopped at Target but the next time you go, check out their credit card reader. This has got to be one of the best ones in any retail store. You don't have to read any directions, or push credit versus debit. Just insert your card, sign your name, and then take your card back. There's no press yes to confirm the amount. The machine is smart enough to know it's a credit card versus a debit card. I especially hate the ones in the supermarkets where they ask you a million questions, or at gas stations where they try and sell you a car wash. I once saw this older man, swipe his card 4 or 5 times because he didn't answer the questions fast enough or it didn't register his swipe. You might as well write a check if you are going to slow down the line that much. Okay I'm exaggerating there.

Also, Office Max will give you $3 for each printer cartridge you bring in and you can use up to 5 in a visit for a total of $15 off a $15 purchase. Staples has had something similar but they usually don't take Canon ink which is what we have.

Early Xmas presents?

Riley left us a nice present on the rug. Unfortunately it's not the type of present you can't wait to wake up and open. Originally we had bought those cat pheromones so they wouldn't scratch on the door or leave presents. The cats still scratch on the door although now at 6am instead of 4 or 5am and they haven't left us any gifts in a long time. So it seems that the pheromones don't quite work. The pheromones did run out during this last episode but I think the gift was Riley getting even for not being fed until 7am.

Thanksgiving mistakes

We cooked turkey for thanksgiving and had a few friends over this year. We've cooked turkey twice before without any problems but this year we screwed up twice. Well rather I screwed up twice. The first was that the bottom of the turkey wasn't fully cooked. I attribute this to our new convection oven. Convection cooking cooks things more uniformly regardless of the rack position and faster because of the better heat transfer. However, this didn't quite work because we were roasting in a v-rack where the bottom of the turkey was being blocked by the roasting pan. Next time, we'll either flip the turkey half way through or roast on a flat pan.

The other problem we had was that I didn't remove the giblets. Well the exact problem was that I didn't find them in the hole that I thought they'd be in. Instead I found a gravy packet which threw me off. I thought they had replaced the giblets with this gravy packet. Well turns out the giblets were actually in the other orifice. You can be sure that we'll never make this mistake again. The picture above is actually from thanksgiving in 2003 when we were in Boston.