Olde Tyme Computer Bargains

I took my trip to the computer thrift store and picked up a 3.2 GB hard drive for just $5.00 Nice! I put it into our third computer (upgrading from its previous 1.6 GB drive) and spent an hour putting Linux back on it and setting up the MOO. The OS and the MOO work fine, and only 12% of the disk's capactiy is being used.

Technology and Us

Hello dere . . . how is every darn thing?

We are well on our way to mastering five-year-old technology here. I bought Cindy an inexpensive MP3 player, and she is over at her desk now loading and unloading songs, and getting everything just so. Setting up the software was a hassle - her computer is badly overburdened pending upgrades next week, so it took a long time - but everything works now.

Also, I have found "MP3 CD Converter", a Windows program that takes MP3s and makes audio CDs out of them, so my old-tech (but much loved) CD Walkman can play them. The trial version only lets you put 10 songs at a time on a CD, but most store-bought CDs are around ten songs anyway, so I don't mind. And CD-Rs are so cheap now I don't feel like I'm missing valuable CD capacity. So now I have a job that lets me listen to my CD player, and a custom heavy metal CD, a custom Ramones CD, and a custom Techno CD. That should keep me amused as I assemble my robots at work. "MP3 CD Converter" is easy to use - the interface is clean and everything works exactly like you expect it to. I recommend it. IM or email me if you need help locating it.

Off to parents' for dinner now . . . my birthday party is next Sunday, so we're all looking forward to that!

Drug Store electronics bargains!

My keyboard gave out kinda suddenly (There's a famous John-and-Cindy story that starts, "I was just SITTING there, minding my OWN BUSINESS . . .") so I was off to buy a keyboard. I'd been threatening to buy one for a couple of weeks, and when my spacebar stopped working, the time had come. I remembered that Sav-On (of all places) carried computer keyboards, so I headed down there. And, besides, buying electronics from a drug store late at night is kinda funny.

I found the keyboard pretty quick - despite the store rearranging aisles every couple of weeks - and I found another find too. Headphones! I'd been needing headphones for even longer, but I'd dreaded getting another pair of cheap-cr*p 'phones from the . . . place I got those. But on the computer aisle (of the drugstore) were headphones. (You know, the computers- headphones- graph paper- aisle). I found a pair for $9.00, the Sony MDR-101LP. They sound reeaallly good. Maybe it's just that they're 10x better than my 99 cent (really!) pair that just died, or maybe they're really pretty good. Anyway, I recommend them without reservation. Wait - wait. The cord is kinda short, like 3 feet long. One tiny reservation. My point is that the sound quality is really good - you can't beat it for the price.

Events and Things and Happenings and Stuff

Well hello!

Here I am again.

Life goes on and no stopping it! I'd say one day follows another without much change, but then something interesting happens.

I have a new job. Friends of the family will note that I just *had* a new job; now I have another. Now I work for Climet Instruments, Inc, based in Redlands. What they do takes a lot of explaining and isn't that interesting unless you're really technical, so I will put it in shorthand: I assemble eletrical stuff. I have my own workbench, and today I (mostly successfully) used a soldering iron AND a crimping tool. It's reasonably entertaining and it's twice the hours of my old job, so even without pay increases I'm making about half again as much as I was at FedEx. It's even more fun if you imagine that what you're working on is some kind of Giant Robot part.

Other good things about the new job: It's four minutes from our house. You are 'expected' to wear jeans and polo shirts, unless you're in Sales or Management. You can have an MP3 or CD player. There are two ten-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch. You're done for the day at 3:30pm. There's almost no chance of being hit square in the face by a sliding box. Nice!


Other news: I've had plenty of computer drama is the past three weeks.

First, our DSL went mostly out, to the point of being almost unusable. I have no idea what caused it, and by the time I decided that Somebody Ought To Do Something, the problem cleared up and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

Then my computer started crashing all the way to power-off. Ouch! It would do that every 20 minutes or so, to the point where I gave up and moved my vital stuff (my MP3's and my Trillian instant messenger) over to Cindy's computer. Eventually I traced the problem to a failing power supply. Specifically, the fan in the PS sometimes does not turn, and it gets so hot it shuts down in self-defense. Sometimes, though, the fan is just fine and the machine can run for hours.

Now, the spacebar on my keyboard suddenly got all "mashy", and I replaced the 'board, as related elsewhere in this riveting narrative.


It's good to be Blogging again

Lantiers 1 : Routers 0

After a couple of weeks, a moderate amount of online research, several phone calls, and endless fiddling, I now have our router configured and our network firing on all cylinders.

We tried several things, me and plesant Indian woman "25219" (I didn't catch her name - something like "Veesha" - but that's her Linksys Technician ID), but the thing that worked was changing the LAN IP range from 192.168.1.x to 192.168.2.x. I can't imagine why that matters, but there it is. It took about 40 minutes. Well, like 3 weeks of poking at it and 40 minutes on the phone.

Anyway, Cindy and I are now both online, and firewalled by the router. Now I'll blow up my hard drive and re-do it to get the spyware and junk off.


For my next trick, I will DHCP my slackware Linux box on and get it Internetable. (You ought to know the rules before you break them - I can get an A in any English class you give me, so I can occasionally throw out words like "Internetable")

DRM: We are not amused

I had my first encounter with DRM, and it wasn't pretty.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a way of putting controls on digital media (MP3 music files, most notably) to restrict its use.

Cindy and I went to Del Taco the other day, and I idly pulled off my peel-and-win sticker. I won a free download of one song!

After a couple of days I got around to claiming my prize. After a couple of small hassles (confusion about where to get the song, and having to give my email address) I downloaded the song of my choice. Yay!

I double-clicked the song in my MP3 directory. Windows Media Player came up. I don't like WMP and try not to use it. So I closed it and opened WinAmp.

The file was not playable in WinAmp. But, but but . . . I got the song legally - I won the right to have the song (not quite as good an argument as 'I paid good money for it!', but hey, I won the right to have it!) but I can't play it the way I want to? My song? On my computer?

*sigh* Whatever . . . it WAS free . . . so load WMP and try again.

"Downloading License"

Uhhh . . . license for what? I won the song . . . I picked out the song I wanted, and you let me download it. I need a license for WHAT? For my song? On my computer?

Windows Media Hassler connects to Internet to download the license (whatever that is) and . . Cannot Reach Network.

What do you need a network for? I want to hear my song.

Click on Internet Explorer. Google (the start page) comes right up. Clear out Windows Media Nazi and try to load my song again . . .

Cannot reach network. *I* can reach the network. But WMN can't.

Fie.

It was three more days before I got my song. The song I can only play using the player it tells me to. The song I can't play on any computer except this one.

This is why I don't buy music downloads.

Showing My Web Age

John and I were talking a few days ago and he asked if I remembered the first web site I visited. I promptly said that it was Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches. I remember it well; I was at a little mini-class at the University of Arkansas on web design and the speaker demo-ed this page. Totally cool in 1994.

Today, out of nostalgia, I decided to see if this page was still up. Then I realized -- This couldn't have been the first website I visited because it has pictures. When I first started surfing the web, there were no pictures. The reason Grant, the instructor, was showing us this page was because it was the wave of the future! Up til then, if you wanted to share a picture with someone, she had to download it and then look at it with her own software on her desktop. And she was happy to do it!

Now, she'll surf to a new page if your pics take too long to load. We've really come a long way in eleven years.