New Laptop!

Posted on by Jordan

As you probably recall, the laptop that Heather had when we got married is in the process of dying.

I have been watching for sales on laptops fairly closely, and finally found one. Amazon had an Acer Aspire 5251 for under $400 shipped.

I realize Acer isn’t really on the good end of the reliability spectrum that I linked before, but when you consider price and features in the equation, I felt like a little failure risk was acceptable.

I was going to post a picture, but … well you know what a laptop looks like.

We have actually had the laptop for a few days now, but I just finally finished doing all the setup today. Acer didn’t load the machine down with as many junk applications as HP did, but there was still a little more junk installed than I would like.

This is my first brush with Windows 7. I have absolutely zero complaints so far. The old HP laptop was painfully slow to do basically anything, despite having a passably beefy CPU under the hood (it was on the low end of desktop-replacement-class laptops, with the heft to prove it)  This new machine is wonderfully snappy!

We haven’t had a chance to use it much, but so far the slightly smaller screen doesn’t seem to be that noticeable.

I think we are going to enjoy the fact that the battery life is longer than 15 minutes. Granted, that isn’t really HP’s fault so much as what happens to battery packs when they age, but it sill makes the new laptop seem pretty nice.

I wish I could think of more to say… I am really excited about having it, but laptops do end up being somewhat generic. … “Yay a computer, it does computer-type things!”

Hope you are enjoying your weekend!

-Jordan

RSS Hax!

Posted on by Jordan

Well… to be honest, not really hacks, I installed a plugin that (in theory) will seamlessly migrate the RSS feed to the blog through a feedburner feed.

If you don’t know what that is don’t worry about it. I just like to play with addons for the site once in a while, although this one shouldn’t really be visible.

While I am thinking of technical things, have I mentioned Lastpass?

It is a password management tool, that is frankly amazing. I was getting really uncomfortable with the number of passwords I was trying to remember, and getting more and more lazy about using the same password for “unimportant” logins. I knew that was a bad situation but I didn’t really trust a plugin to deal with that kind of thing.

Then the Security Now podcast that I try and keep up with, did an episode on Lastpass. I was really excited. I installed it, really with the idea that I could offer to to Heather as a way to help her beef up her password system. (side note, Heather HATES the Security Now podcast. Her life usually gets more complicated after I learn something new and terrifying on the podcast) So far I love Lastpass, but I don’t know if it is really something Heather is going to put up with. The fiddle-factor seems just a tiny bit too high. Also from what I can tell it would be a little hard to share a computer with the plugin running, unless I suppose you both knew the master password… I am not saying I wouldn’t tell Heather what mine is, I just don’t think she would be crazy about a 15 character password. 🙂

-Jordan

oh! I almost forgot, if you happen to be interested, the plugin I used is here:  http://flagrantdisregard.com/feedburner/

And a big hat tip to my sister, who actually told me about this four months ago, and I never got around to setting it up.

State Fair Reflections

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I have been to the Nebraska and Iowa State fairs.

Iowa has what people consider to be a successful fair, and Nebraska recently closed their fairgrounds.

(Granted Nebraska build a new venue, but the impression is that their fair wasn’t so hot)

Having been to both, I can’t really tell the difference. Maybe I am just not a fair person.

My suspicion is that Iowa having slightly more than double the population density of Nebraska helps a lot more than people want to admit.

Omaha being the largest city, not the capital, and not centrally located, all count against the Nebraska fair.

From what I can see in Iowa Des Moines is basically it. The state appears to have more large towns (large from my prospective having grown up in a town of 1000), without having a real competition for “big events.” A concert tour isn’t going to stop in Ames, or Cedar Rapids, or anywhere else in the state… it is going to be in Des Monies. I am imagining that most people are more willing to travel there thanks to it’s status as the big city in the state.

I don’t know how many people come in from out of town… also I am not going to spend the time doing any research… so this is just my musings. It just seems like geography plays into their favor way more than I would have realized a year ago if you had asked me about the relative fairs.

I guess maybe I should re-emphasize my point both fairs are largely ag shows, with food and some live music. I have no idea what would draw someone to spend more than one day wondering around eating a corn-dog looking at sheep. I had always assumed the “successful” fairs had some amazing special things that made them awesome, and Lincoln was lacking. Unless we missed it, they don’t.

-Jordan

Weekend Grilling

Posted on by Jordan

Heather has been out of town for a few days thanks to a work trip.

A few notes from the odds and ends I stayed busy with:

It is possible to cook bacon on a grill:

If you try it, be aware that your going to have to give the grilling process 100% of your attention, as there is going to be a lot of fire. Maybe have a bottle of water handy or something.

This is exciting because Heathers primary objection to bacon (well ignoring the packing-plant episode) is the fact that it makes our entire apartment smell like grease for days. I may have found a work-around. 🙂

I went to the local gun range for a little target practice. If your like me, and maybe don’t shoot as well as you would like with a pistol, you might feel self conscious with all the other shooters around you. I realized though, if you just keep shooting the same set of targets, eventually you look pretty competent. Also I think I was improving rather quickly as time went on… still nothing to brag about, but improvement.

I thought I had a third point for this list but it seems to have escaped me… Hope your having a good weekend! 🙂

-Jordan

State Fair (The Story)

Posted on by Jordan

Well, somehow the entire week got away from me before I sat down to write down some of what we saw at the fair…

Better late than never I hope!

Heather, a friend of hers and I went to the state fair over the weekend.

The fair here is a big deal! I haven’t ever lived in the city that hosts a state fair before, so maybe some of that is normal. When I say “a big deal” I mostly mean that the majority of the people I talk to have plans to at least visit the fair. Often those people speak highly of the fair, again not something I typically saw a lot of in other cities. (I guess I have really only lived in 3 cities, despite my habit of frequent moves) The website for the fair promised 57 different foods on a stick, among other attractions. I didn’t really dig into the website just figured people were positive on it, I would just show up and be amazed.

We set out for the fair late afternoon Saturday, with only a vague idea where the fairgrounds even were. Once we started seeing people hawking their lawns as parking we figured we should find something and start walking, eventually settling on the local VFW chapter area, selling their lot at a slight discount to the average yard (three dollars instead of five!) They made their money back by selling us all water on our way out of the parking lot, but it was warm, and they promised it was cheaper than on the fairgrounds (turns out this wasn’t strictly speaking true, but at least they weren’t over-charging)

Another ten dollars a head got us onto the grounds, and we were at the Iowa State Fair! First up… empty lots, and some combines. I was trying to let the ladies guide our trip, but those combines looked pretty cool. I guess they came up with some neat features in the (20?) years that have passed after the manufacturing of the combine I last had a chance to really look at the internal workings of.

We then headed to a large building that had tiles all around it vaguely hinting at quilting or crafts of some sort. Once inside, we found out it was an arena, and something having to do with horses was currently in progress. There weren’t any signs, and the guy wanted us to buy a ticket or leave so we left, not sure what we missed.

Then we found our way into the adjacent barns, full of the horses not currently participating in the unknown event. I kind of forgot how big horses can be! I also started to realize how much domesticated animal knowledge I had that was new to Heather. We then headed over to a cattle barn, apparently full of dairy cattle. I don’t know if it was heat stress, or something about dairy cows, but practically every cow in that barn had visible ribs and extreme hip-points. I think it kind of set off my subconscious “there is plague and pestilence here, get out!” warnings… so I was glad to leave that barn, but we got to see lots of cows, and again I found I knew the answers to more questions than I would have guessed.

(update, I just did a quick search for “dairy cow” pictures, apparently they all look like they are starving… weird)

We then found our way into another arena, this one free, featuring a two-horse-team pulling competition. I have no idea how it really worked, but  it was kind of fun to watch! Eventually that got old though, so we headed out in search of new things.

We found the 4H steer auction. I have vague memories of going to a stock-auction with my dad when I was a kid. It was kind of fun to see one again. It was also another first for Heather, and technically a first for me as I hadn’t seen an auction where they did it one bovine at a time before. As with the team-pulling the novelty wore off quickly, and it wasn’t like we were planning on buying beef-on-the-hoof.

Somewhere in transition to the 4H craft barn I found an ice cream cone, and we walked past the Iowa Pork booth, featuring the one and only “pork chop on a stick” however the line for that was probably 75 people long. I figured there would be other exciting “on a stick options later”

After the craft barn, full of nice but not really noteworthy fruit, vegetables, flowers, and craft type things, we headed to a nursery barn. The barn featured young examples of most of your stereotypical farmyard animals. To be honest, my thoughts when I walked in were basically “eh, I have seen this before” but I figured it would be fun for the rest of our little group. They had video playing of a live sheep birth, not the most photogenic thing you can imagine. I think it kind of shocked Heather. I don’t know if it was the video or just the fact that we had been browsing a lot of barnyard animals, but we didn’t give that venue much coverage, and then headed out again.

We stopped to get a Falafel for our guest in the main vendor area, then headed over to the non 4H food building to see if we could locate some winning sticky-buns a woman from church had entered. We saw a lot of tasty looking food, but the sticky-bun entries were no longer on display.  A little more wonder-by sight seeing and it was starting to get late. I realized I hadn’t actually tried any foods on a stick, so we headed back to the main food vending strip, to see what we could find.

I have no idea where the exotic options were, maybe I was just being overwhelmed by choices and didn’t notice them, but it appeared that everybody in the area we were in only sold corn-dogs as their “on a stick” option. I didn’t really want a corn-dog so I searched a little and eventually settled on cotton candy. Not really exotic, but it was on a stick, and I thought it sounded good. For the record I don’t really like cotton candy… I don’t know if that happened because I haven’t had it for so long, or if I didn’t like it that much before and just forgot.

After our last pass of the food, we headed back to the car, feeling like we saw at least a good swath of the fair.

-Jordan

P.S. Sorry for the mammoth post, I just wasn’t sure this was interesting enough to warrant splitting into several posts.

Laptop Problems

Posted on by Jordan

A few days ago, Heather’s laptop suddenly didn’t have a wireless ethernet adapter.

That was rather interesting,  mostly because the adapter is built-in so I didn’t expect it to go missing. A few minutes of tweaking and poking around convinced me that this really was happening, so I got online to see what I could find.

Turns out, this is a known issue with that model laptop. For reasons unknown to me, Hewlett-Packard decided that starting in 2010, even though this is caused by a known defect, they won’t fix it for free. If this would have happened a year ago, we would perhaps have been better off.  Somehow heat causes damage to the motherboard, eventually causing the wireless to die. My research indicates this damage will continue to spread across the motherboard eventually killing the sound and video as well.

The Hewlett-Packard tech on the phone helpfully offered to repair the three-year-old laptop for $450… quite a bit more than the laptop is worth. When I pointed that out, he managed to find a $200 discount  laying around somewhere. I was actually starting to think that maybe the repair would be such a bad option, even being three years old, it still surfs the internet without any problems. Then he informed me that the motherboard replacement came with a complementary drive-wipe.

Let me explain something here… there is ZERO reason for that! I suppose someone in their tech support staff realized that, without some preventive maintenance, computers start to get slower over time just to accumulated stuff. Our laptop does not have that problem. And speaking as a member of the technical support community (in a loose sense) I would rather people retained all their data instead of saying “whoa, this computer is so much faster after HP worked on it!” It makes me so sad whenever I hear people talk about loosing thousands of pictures thanks to the tech support people just nuking their machine and starting over. … and I better stop on that tangent or I will turn this into a 2000 word rant…

All of that being said, we can’t really live with the laptop being a wired-only model, because we already know its just a matter of time before it dies.

I have started looking into new laptops, and thought I should share this little chart. Notice who is on the “fail” end of the graph? Yeah… I wasn’t too happy with HP going into this process, and then seeing that (technically again, it was published in November) I realized there might be a reason for it.

The downside is that the $250 repair cost is not going to buy a one-to-one replacement for that behemoth of a laptop. All of my frugal living enthusiasm kind of points to doing the repair anyway. I am honestly still torn about that. The thing is, a three-year-old laptop is knocking on deaths door anyway, so patching it up isn’t a great use of money. The batter life is down to maybe 20 minutes unplugged, and will only continue to decay I am sure. That alone kind of makes the wireless connection issue silly… you have to keep it plugged into the wall just to use it with our without a wireless connection.

Stay tuned, it is only a matter of time before some sort of replacement is selected. (and it will be posted here, because… really I don’t always have that much to talk about)

-Jordan

Quck Book Review, And Other Weekend Notes

Posted on by Jordan

I finished “Pandora’s Star” and it’s sequel finally!

I thought a lot about how I would sum them up. I think my feelings are that it was good, but after plowing through a little over 2000 pages I wanted great! I feel a little unhappy with the author for making me plow through that much book for something that didn’t end up being amazing. I suppose maybe there are people who enjoy having a more substantial read, with well fleshed out supporting characters and tons of trivial sub-plots, but I just didn’t feel like the pay off was there.

If you are ever in the mood for an absolutely massive space-opera style read, I can loan them to you 🙂

Other news this week…

We actually made corn! I don’t know how the entire month of July slipped past without us stopping at a local stand to pickup some fresh corn, but I somehow it happened.

I am forming plans to get some tomatoes from the same stands and make BLTs, but Heather’s aversion to the smell of cooking bacon has been somewhat compounded by a tour of a hog packing plant. Not the most uplifting side of our food production chain I am afraid. The tomatoes should be in season for at least a month, so hopefully there is time for some of the traumatic memories to be repressed or something 🙂

-Jordan

My Brain Is Full!

Posted on by Jordan

Well, maybe backlogged is a better word.

And actually, I feel like I am starting to catch back up now, but I felt pretty overloaded earlier this week… Might have had something to do with my taking so long to get this post up.

I spent the past weekend at the “No Fluff Just Stuff” conference. It was really good, but doing ten 90 minute sessions in a weekend left me feeling a little numb. The sessions were without a doubt non-fluffy. I learned a lot, but it was probably more than I could really absorb.

The last session I went to “Hacking your brain for fun and profit” while non-technical has been the easiest to start using. It covered ways to make yourself smarter/more productive. First up: getting more sleep. I don’t know if I can keep it up, but I really felt like I should try harder to stay on top of that one. The next point I tried to apply was avoiding distractions at work. I now have all my “new e-mail” sounds turned off, instant messenger can’t make noise ether, and my toolbar is set to auto hide. After nearly a week of that, I think I can tell that it is easier to focus on a task.

As sort of a byproduct of that, I found that Eclipse seems to prevent the taskbar from popping back up like it should sometimes, leading me to look into ways to improve task-switching. I hear there have been some great improvements in operating systems over the past… eight years or so, but my place of employ is still using XP so most of the cool things I initially found weren’t going to work.

Eventually I found out Microsoft labs had a product “Alt-Tab Replacement” in their Power Toys for Windows XP collection. It isn’t perfect, but it improved my situation fairly drastically.

And, that little tip is probably only useful to me… but hey the subscription was cheap right? 🙂

A (nearly) free weekend coming up, can’t wait to see what Heather and I end up filling it with!

-Jordan