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

A Few Links

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I just wrapped up a HUGE weekend, and I can’t wait to post about it, but I just don’t have the time / energy right now!

Teaser: we drove over 1000 miles

In the mean time, add one of these to my Christmas list: Quadrotor UAV

Also I wanted to share a cool little application I found out about as of late, called Launchy

It pops up a launcher when I press “ALT + Space” that I can start typing the name of the application I want into and then within a few letters I generally have the program I want right there ready to go. It is so much faster than picking through three or four levels of a cascade menu in Windows!

For example, I wanted the calculator,

Using the mouse it is:

Take right hand off keyboard, find mouse, click: Start->All Programs->Accessories->Calculator

Using Launchy:

Press “ALT + Space”, type “cal” hit enter

As far as I know it works fine in Vista and Win7, but I am still living in the XP era here… I guess I could load it on Heather’s laptop… maybe I will update this later.

Stay tuned, hopefully I will have the real weekend post up shortly 🙂

-Jordan

Speaking of Winter

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned the apartment being cold yesterday. It still is by the way, but what I wanted to post on today was the window situation.

back at the end of June, there was a major wind storm that knocked out power for most of Omaha for a few days. Some parts of town were without power for over a week. Lucky for Heather and I, she never lost power, and I only lost power for about a day. Heather’s apartment (now ‘our’) was however rather exposed to the wind. The storm did some impressive things to the building, such as tearing off siding and breaking two windows in the bedroom. They were double pane glass, so nothing to into the apartment, and functionally they were still windows. I took a picture of them the day after the storm:

img_0142

(well one of the windows anyway, you get the idea) As you can see from the picture, The window is very visibly broken. So visible we could see the broken window from almost a block away when we went out to look things over the next day after the storm.

Fast forward to November, and I move into the apartment. My first night sleeping there I could here a strange rattling sound coming from the windows. The next morning I peek behind the blinds, and there is still a pile of broken glass where the second pane should be! I have no idea how the repair team missed something so glaringly obvious, but nobody realized there was a broken window or two on the building after 4 months. I talked to the office later that week, and they didn’t doubt for a second how the window had been broken, or that it was broken. It took them over a week to actually get it fixed, but at least its fixed now!

The point of all this is just to say that I am happy the window is fixed now! I don’t know how much insulation value the double pane windows selected by the apartment actually provide, but it has to be better than the pile-o-broken-glass we had before.

-Jordan