With Apologies To My Mother

Posted on by Jordan

So this is a somewhat embarrassing statistic, but what good is a blog if you don’t post this kind of thing?

I was clearing out and sorting through a lot of the storage in my room last night, preparing for the move that’s coming up here soon. I ran in to a surprising amount of stuff that I haven’t used for over a year. That was a little sad, realizing I was storing all this stuff I had no use for, and then I found the irons.

Yes I said “irons,” as in plural, two to be exact. Both of them in mint condition, never been used, one still in its original box! I think my mom gave me one of them when I moved to college EIGHT YEARS ago, and the other she probably gave me when I got out of college. Its not to say I never ironed anything, I am pretty sure I used one of my roommates ironing stuff once back at my old apartment!

The moral of all this is that you can’t blame my mother if my clothes always looked a little wrinkled, she tried!

I told this to Heather last night, and she said she was pretty sure she had a new iron, still in the box somewhere in her apartment… so I am in good company I guess 🙂

-Jordan

New Toys

Posted on by Jordan

Heather, for some reason, didn’t want me to bring the huge ugly table I am using for a desk now over to the apartment when I move.

as I mentioned before, we picked up a new desk to replace mine. Its a lot smaller, which would be a problem for my current situation, but Heather also thought I should replace the CRT monitor I have been using. I had sort of been planning to get rid of that monitor for a wile, but it was still working fine, so I couldn’t quite replace it. With Heathers encouragement, I ordered a 24 inch LCD monitor from Newegg.

I have to take a moment and point out how awesome it is to have a fiancee who talked me into buying new stuff for my computer. It makes me smile every time I think about it.

I was a little worried about the monitor as some reviews said things about the color being a little off, or having a lot of dead pixels. Newegg won’t replace a monitor for color temperature issues, and it takes a lot of dead pixels to warrant them replacing the monitor. I un-boxed a shiny new monitor (and it really was shiny) last night, powered it up, and…

No dead pixels!! In addition to the lack of dead pixels, the colors seem true from what I can tell. My only complaint so far is that the stand leans just a little bit. It might just be because the desk isn’t quite level, combined with a little bit of flex in the stand, but one side of the monitor is about 1/4″ above the other. I probably wouldn’t notice that, but its a rather large span so its easier to see.

Actually using it is… interesting, its big enough I don’t feel like I can see it all at once. I am sure I will get used to it. I also realized that I don’t have any video clips hi-res enough to really challenge the monitor, and that my set of desktop images simply wont work when stretched that much. I guess I can’t complain too much, there are worse problems to have 🙂

-Jordan

Prepping The Apartment

Posted on by Jordan

As some of you may know, my current roommate is getting married soon, leaving my without a place to live.

The plan Heather and I came up with was for me to move into her apartment, and for her to move in with her grandmother for the 3 remaining months until we are married. Heather wanted to have a few things ready before the move, primarily a desk that wasn’t as ugly as the table thing I have my computer setting on currently.

We stopped by Nebraska Furniture Mart Sunday, looking for a desk. Checked “Mrs B’s” the “scratch and dent” section of NFM. from what I can tell they don’t actually have much stuff there that is truly damaged, so much as maybe odds and ends of discontinued items, and just their more discount oriented products. We found a desk that would be about ideal, the proper size, and color almost as soon as we walked in. They had two of them, one that had a somewhat obviously backwards brace holding up the keyboard tray. That wasn’t a big issue for us, because to actually fit me comfortably at the desk, my plan was to remove the keyboard tray.

On our way over to find a salesperson, we stumbled onto mattresses. Heather and I had decided to just use the mattress she had in her apartment for the time being. we hope to not be in the apartment too long, and a bedroom set would be high on the list of things to buy once we moved into a house. The problem with the current mattress is that it has a feather pillow thing giving it most of its padding, and I am slightly allergic to down. We asked about mattress pillows in NFM, they didn’t have any but the sales person pointed out how cheap a mattress alone was. We picked out a new mattress for a price that was within $40 of what I was expecting to have to pay for a new pillow cover.

back to the desk… we lead the same lady that just sold us the bed back to the desk area to add that onto our order. I pointed out the assembly problem it had, and asked if we could get a discount. She took 25% off the desk, and we had all the furniture we needed to fully outfit the apartment for a *lot* cheaper than ether Heather or I expected.

moving the new stuff in, and the old mattress wasn’t the most fun way to spend the rest of our Sunday afternoon, but it was really satisfying to get that taken care of. I am almost looking forward to moving the rest of my stuff, it feels like I will be moving into a “home” instead of another apartment.

-Jordan

Wires and cables

Posted on by Jordan

With only three weeks remaining until I move out of my current apartment, and having a free night last night, I undertook to reduce some of the computer-parts mess that was in my room. I had one small-ish plastic tub full of things, two extra computer cases with almost functional computers inside, and an entire drawer of my dresser full of wires and spare parts.

** editors note: this is probably not the most interesting thing to read, sorry 🙂 **

I started with the cases, stripping out all the parts that looked useful, wound up with:

  • 3 IDE hard drives of unknown size
  • 6 sticks of PC133 SDRAM of mostly unknown size, a few marked as 128 meg sticks
  • A 16 meg TNT2  AGP video card
  • 2 PCI ethernet cards
  • An AGP video card of unknown stats
  • A PCI sound card

After a minute of though I realized nothing was worth the storage space to even salvage… most of that stuff is so far beyond obsolete I couldn’t use it for anything. I suppose somewhere there is someone looking for those parts to keep an old system running, but that’s not me. (and if that person is reading this, price out what $500 will buy you in new hardware, cry, then put in your newegg order)

Then I moved on to the plastic tub, it was mostly full of empty CD cases, converter plugs, case screws, anti-static bags and IDE cables.  I have been storing the CD cases from my freshmen year in the dorms as I recall… after 8 years without needing them I think I can part with them. the IDE cables are rapidly becoming useless, but I kept a few. There was some DDR memory in there, but again I have no idea what size the 2 sticks were, or why they are setting there. I have vague memories of mothballing some memory that came out of an unstable system, but I can’t remember if that’s what this is or something else. Couldn’t bring myself to toss the DDR, and the bags of screws will be sticking around, I always wind up needing one or two more than they ship with a new system. (unless of course they always short me on the same kind, and then I just have a huge collection of the wrong screw)

Last, but not least, the drawer full of cables! It turns out I had about 20 basic computer power cables, probably 100 feet of S-Video cable (in 6′ sections), and enough ethernet cable to rewire my entire apartment network 3-4 times. I tossed out all but 2 of the S-Video and power cables, but couldn’t bring myself to part with any ethernet cable (its only been in storage for 1.5 years, I might still need it!)

In the end I managed to compress my entire computer junk storage into the single plastic tub, and threw out well over 50 pounds of computer-related junk.

On reflection, a few notes:

  • Storing more than 2 spares of anything is just silly
  • I need to label things that go into storage
  • Hard drives, even when installed into a PC should have their size and date purchased written on them
  • All driver disks should have a date, and what computer they go to written on them

hopefully I can prevent myself from getting that much stuff piled up again, but at least if it has labels on it, sorting will go faster the next time 🙂

-Jordan