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.

Priceless Art

The Phoenix Art Museum had its grand re-opening this weekend where they had free admission all weekend long. They opened up a new modern art wing that had an interesting firefly exhibit. Basically, it's a completely dark room lined with mirrors and strings of little lights hanging from the ceiling. It's pretty cool except for the fact that you are paranoid of hitting the wall as you walk around. They also had an Asian art section, evening dresses from the century, Ansel Adams Gallery, Cowboy Art section (we skipped that one), and some other cool modern art.

UFO sighting?

Out with the old....


in with the UFO?

Apple pie assembly

Nothing like apple pie from scratch. Even the pie crusts were home made. Although they were a little too crumbly. Probably didn't add enough water.

Apples from Chelan, WA by way of Costco.


A mound of chopped apples, sugar, butter, cinnamon, and salt provided by Christy.



The final product!

Cheap construction

Whenever it's really windy out, you can always here the ventilation flap inside making noise. The reason is that the vent opening to the outside doesn't have a door. Probably not the best thing when it's over 100 degrees out too.


Well after some tinkering around with some sheet metal, I was able to create a flap that will hopefully prevent the wind and hot air from entering the house. The white in the picture below is clear caulk that hasn't cured yet.

Bathroom remodel

This one fortunately cost under 20 bucks and will hopefully prevent the kitties from kicking cat litter out of the box and more importantly not let them pee outside of the box. Our previous one didn't have the cool bubble lid and door. The problem with introducing any new bathroom is that your cats might prefer their old bathroom more and boycott the new one. After finishing the bathroom upgrade, I was a little nervous since the cats had not used it or even gone to check it out. Let's just say I've never been more excited to wake up and see some logs in the litter box.

4" nail but no 5" nails

We had a roof tile fall off during a storm. Luckily no one was under it. I thought putting it back up would be easy enough but turns out that my 4" nail was just a little too short to hit the roof. Turns out that Ace hardware doesn't sell anything larger than a 4" nail. So a little improvising led to a piece of wood screwed to the roof and then I nailed the tile into that. Hopefully the wood lasts. All of this looks easy enough minus the fact that you are 20 ft up in the air.

Cologne for Cats?

This is our last hope. The cats demand to be fed at 4:30am and won't take no for an answer. They scratch and body slam themselves into the door. Hopefully this cat pheromone plug-in diffuser will do the trick. Will let you know in 4 weeks if it worked or not.

Nothing like a glove to catch those fly balls

Caught a Giant's game while vacationing in SF. Even rode the slide in the huge coke bottle in the stadium.

Spoke a little too soon

The finally two speakers came today although one had a damaged corner. Personally I think this happened prior to shipping since the speakers were double boxed with thick foam between the boxes. Regardless, they are sending out a replacement speaker.

You can see the damaged corner here.



After



Before

Last of the upgrades

Finally bought 5 new speakers to go with the TV and DVD player from aperionaudio.com, who sells direct over the internet. One thing that I've read is that the build quality is top notch. This was evident in that fact that the speakers came wrapped in velvet bags as seen in the photo. They also provide you with a sound meter so you can properly setup your system. None of the speakers came damaged even though they shipped UPS ground and are probably more fragile than the two lamp shades that were damaged during UPS shipping. I still think you should never write fragile when shipping things.

Also, if you call up Aperion Audio, you can ask to see if they have A-stock speakers which are opened items but not damaged for a 15% discount.

Gotta love Costco

Found these lights below at Costco over the weekend. They looked very similar to these other lights we tried out but couldn't use because of the mounting plate. We were able to get 3 of these lights for the price of 1 of the other ones. These lights even have a built in motion sensor and photo diode.



Original inspiration that didn't fit.


Here are the old lights. Slowly but surely we are getting rid of the 80's.

Caroline enjoying chocolate

Universal sign to kick me....

Three different boxes with "kick me" on them. You can see how well the light shade stood up to the punishment. Next time we'll be buying a light locally.

Out with the 80's

Before...


...after

Upconverting DVD player to go with the HDTV

After our cheap $30 DVD player died, it was time to invest in a new upconverting DVD player. Ended up getting the Oppo 970 player. Oppo has 2 players, a highly rated 971 and a just introduced 970. The 970 supports discrete on and off so that gave it the nod over the 971. Below is a picture of the 970 as packaged in the box. Not quite your normal plastic bag.

Why that's a large base you have

We noticed we had a crack in our dining room table base so Ethan Allen came and replaced the base. However the base they replaced it with had a slight design difference in the form of a wider end. I guess customers were complaining that the table seemed to wobble and so they flared out the pedestal base to better support the top. You can see the design change below. I didn't realize furniture had continuous improvement.