“Last Night”

March 11th, 2010

So there’s a fairly good chance this is my last night at this particular housing situation. Tomorrow I should moving everything out. My computers, my switch(es), my…bed. It will be exciting being in a new place all on my own but I’m sure it will get old after not very long. Well maybe it won’t get old I don’t know. I’ll have easy access to places to jog and a down town area.

Of course I’ll have all my possessions conveniently organized and mostly accounted for and due to the lack of room in the new place I’ll have a built-in motivation to stay lean on the amount of stuff I get. So you know it will be pretty easy to move again should the need arise. I hope I don’t have to move again for at least a long while.

I will be living up a rather steep hill. And in some unseasonable years like this one it seems to snow an awful lot. So if I have the where-with-all to think of it I’ll park down the hill the night before or something. Then trek down the long hill to my car which I can hopefully dig out and that will hopefully start. It’s a tough old car. It’s kind of amazing on some level it’s even running.

Okay I seem to rambling from one subject to the next at random now. Seems like around 9:00 or so this fatigue just hit me like a ton of bricks. Not sure what the deal is with that.

Since I may or may not have a three-day-job next week I’ve decided to start waking up at 6am now so as to acclimate myself to the whole idea of being awake at such a time. I know I’ll have to leave at 6:30 or 7:00am at the latest to arrive at wherever this work is by 8am. That seems to be just how it goes. And it’ll be worse now since I’m moving 15 miles further away from where all the work is. But I didn’t see much choice. If I could choose of course I would move closer to the work. But as I see it closer to family is the better option. And I don’t know if they rent apartments to people with no jobs. I think I have a decent credit score but still the no employment thing would probably be really bad. At least that was my assumption.

I received this email instructing me in how to sign up for this dell web site to get a Dell certification for this job. A job I didn’t even know I was confirmed to be apart of. But if you’re handing out free dell certs and then I’m obviously not complaining now am I? I mean a lot of job ads mention some kind of Dell or HP cert as a plus or required in some cases. So even if I don’t get the job maybe I will at least get that Dell certification. Something to stick on my resume.

I’ve started to notice a weird thing about WP lately: I’ll be typing, making typos all along the way and getting those convenient red underlines and then I’ll hit enter for a paragraph break and the lines will go away. The typos will remain but the red underline is gone. This could be an attribute of Firefox actually and have nothing to do with WP. But when I publish the post all the underlines show up again and I go back through and correct the spelling as best I can. It’s just strange.

Okay I think that’s it for tonight. This was probably a lame post but too late to worry about that now.

“Hopes not up”

March 10th, 2010

The title is referring to whether or not my hopes are up. In other words it isn’t a typo, there is no apostrophe.

I sent my resume to a guy yesterday in response to an email about a three day job that would start a week from today. Then I emailed a follow up later on yesterday. Didn’t get a response to either one. Then this morning a guy calls me about it saying my resume was forwarded to him. He asked me a few questions then said to sign and fax/email back a background check form.

Well it wouldn’t let me attach an image of my signature so I had to print out it then run down to the UPS store to fax it. Then when I got home I realized there was a typo so I wrote the guy an email mentioning this. So he told me to send it again. Which I did, this time from a super market. The UPS store charged $1 to send one fax (with complementary coversheet) and the super market charged $2 and didn’t even offer a cover sheet. I think I’ll go to the UPS store from now on. If the need ever comes up. Which it probably won’t since I’m going to be moving in the next week and the closest place is an Office Max with a fax. I don’t remember how much they charge. Even $1 some how seems excessive. Not like I have a lot of choice though eh?

Actually after spending I don’t know how long yesterday ordering DSL online I got a call today telling me my order was canceled because of an incomplete address. I went out of my way TWICE to ask the chat agent I was talking to about why the address seemed incomplete and he assured me it would go through. Well once again demonstrating the competence of certain people as support on web IM I guess eh?

Anyway this time I went through the process with a guy on the phone and it went a lot smoother and also he pointed out how I could save a lot of money. Namely if he set me up with the absolute cheapest phone line and bundled that with DSL I would be paying like $15 less a month for the DSL. Which sounds good to me.

I also set up the gas/electric to be under my name which wasn’t nearly as complicated as I thought. Actually the guy ran a credit check to see if he could waive the security deposit. And apparently I passed because he didn’t charge me the security deposit. So that’s good I suppose.

So it’s all coming together. The DSL is supposed to be up and running by the 12th I think it was so that would be a good time to move everything. Because I really can’t be without Internet on account of I’ll need to send/receive job-related emails. That’s kind of important, yes.

I moved a really large number of bins over to the new place today actually. There was like five in my backseat and a couple more in the front and another thing in the trunk. So I really do have hardly anything left to move. Just the setup I may or may not need on daily basis sort of thing. My computer. My server. My media extender…maybe that’s important maybe it isn’t…the only big thing left is is the giant pile of clothes I still have to go through. And all the actual clothes on hanger. I mean besides the actual large furniture.

I would like to complain about one thing in current events: the possibility of over-regulation in fishing off the coast, in large lakes and some inland streams. The only thing it reminded me of for some reason was the border-line cliche scene from various adaptions of Robin Hood where some one is arrested for hunting “the King’s Dear” or “in the King’s woods”. Even though the transgressor was only hunting for food to feed his family due to the high taxes. This streams thing just seems some-how related. We can’t fish in the King’s streams without paying tribute. I’m sure those in good favor with the King would be allowed to fish wherever they for as many fish as desired. But all the little peons, peasants if you will, will be stuck unable to fish. Welcome to the future.

No, it hasn’t been passed yet. It’s not guaranteed that it ever will be passed. Of course the President won’t exactly be popular if he did sign such an executive order so it wouldn’t mind that much if he did. It’s his presidency to lose after all. If he wants to do so then he an do so. Lose that is.

Okay, with that I think I’m going to bed.

“Almost”

March 9th, 2010

Today there were a lot of almosts. I almost finished packing everything for the move. I almost went to my sister’s. I almost went for a walk if not an actual jog, although it looked like it could rain at any moment all day. I don’t think it did. But in the end I hadn’t really accomplished anything really.

I will mention a few of the things I have watched recently. One of the more memorable ones was Ctrl, a short little web show. The episodes are only five or six minutes long and there’s only like 12 episodes. I found some what creative, a little original but really well done for what I can only assume to be a really low-budget production.

The only other thing I watched was something called The Angry Video Game Nerd. It’s this guy with a rather large and extensive video game collection. Everything from a bunch of 70s pong consoles to who knows how many NES games. Some more recent consoles as well. Anyway he reviews usually a particular game that is really horrible and rants about how broken it is. His rants usually involve four letter words, middle fingers and a creative graphic of a game getting blown up. But sometimes it’s just a general console type of review, like of the Atari 5200 (yes, it’s 5200: I think I got that wrong in a prior post). I watched a bunch of them today when I figure out he had organized his videos by year and my bookmark was still pointing to 2009. Anyway that was a waste of time.

Oh and last night I felt like re-watching that “Indian Thriller” a few more times. Then I found out there were a bunch more videos featuring the same singer/performer on you tube. Perhaps not as hilarious as Indian Thriller but still made me laugh quite a few times. A lot of shows try to be that funny on purpose and manage to fail, this guy I can only assume unintentionally was hilarious in a great number of his videos. Maybe it was just combination of what was popular in India and that it was the 1980s after all. I don’t know.

I think I was slightly less exhausted today then I have been. I guess that caffeine I inadvertently took is starting to wear off or something.

I guess it was a short entry today. Perhaps I will get better tomorrow.

“Coming together”

March 8th, 2010

Today was largely similar to yesterday: this time I was helping to move my sister’s furniture around in her newly moved in house for a large chunk of the day. Although at some point I broke off and spent some time trying to entertain the toddler. As always the toddler had more energy than I did. And I’m still amazed how incredibly intelligent she seems.

Actually I really had zero energy. Like nothing. Like sleeping standing up or something. I don’t really know why it was so bad. Except that my body has been acting as though I have had some caffeine recently. I stopped all caffeine intake a few years ago ya see because of the way my body was reacting to it. I did order a decaf mocha a few days ago. That must have had caffeine in it. That’s the only explanation. See when you can recognize the effects of a caffeinated mocha from several days ago you know you really shouldn’t be having caffeine I think maybe.

I did go to the new place and set up some plastic sort of shelving probably intended for inside a shed or to be left outside. But I used them inside. They’re going to be where I stick my computer/server and stuff like a DVD player, 360 and media extender. And what ever else I need to store and have immediately accessible.

One maybe note of relevance is that I rented the movie roughly as old as I am The Muppets Movie. I am going to show it to my niece tomorrow if I can. I remember watching it over and over as a kid. It was released in 1979 apparently which is roughly the year I was born. I’m sure like a lot of childhood movies it will be something that seems way different as an adult. And obviously over the course of thirty years I imagine values and what is acceptable for kids has shifted.

I have realized I should really kick this packing and movie stuff over thing into high gear. I am at t-minus-less-than-a-week after all. I have no idea what I’m going to be doing with these last bits of furniture. I suppose to could brave the wilds of Craig’s List. Then again I’m not sure sure about that.

Well since I really have nothing what-so-ever left to write about I think I’ll stop here. Here’s India’s Thriller knock-off for no reason at all:

“Movies”

March 7th, 2010

Well all of 15 minutes earlier to start writing this time than last night. Horray for me. I moved more bins into my new place and helped my sister move her stuff to her new place. That about sums it up so this time I guess I’ll review two movies I have seen recently: The Informant and The Hurt Locker.

Review: The Informant

I have to say well I had certain expectations going in. I mean the trailers and the general tone of the ads around it kind of implied like some kind of comedy of errors around a happless man some how dragged into being an all-purpose informant for the FBI or whatever. Well that’s only paritially right. First it’s loosely based an actual events and the main character is only informing for the FBI.

The fonts and motifs some how imply the movie is taking place in the 60s or 70s but notifications come up periodically that by the way this is 1994 or whatever. Which is kind of strange if you ask me.

Slowly over the course of the movie the revelation about the informant is made more and more apparent. I’ll try not to spoil anything since it is such a relatively recently released movie as of this writing (on DVD anyway). But I will say Matt Damon makes a really good inadvertant genious. I mean it’s like he’s an idiot that should be a mental hosptial some where with the intelligence enough he could have been the CEO of a major corporation. You’d think those two things would be two side of the same coin but this guy managed to be both sides and do it while some how not even realizing it. Or something.

When it comes down to it this movie is an extremely well made, well acted and well written movie but really it’s just what I would call a highly stylized caper/bio movie kind of like Catchi me if you Can (I think that’s what it was called). I hate to make that comparison. I don’t know it’s like the same plot points or whatever I just mean it follows one guy for a story arc ultimately leading to a conclusion that was some what some how reminiscent of movies like Catch me if you Can and similar like that.

So is it a movie I actually want for my media library? No. Would I mention it to everyone as something they should see? No. But it’s certainly not a bad movie. In fact if you like caper movies like Catch Me I’d say you’ll love The Informant just as much or more. But they’re just not really my kind of movie.

Another Review: Hurt Locker

I just saw this one tonight on DVD. I don’t really think there’s a lot to spoil about this one. It simply (so to speak) follows a group of soldiers, and one in particular, in Iraq disarming bombs, living day-to-day. I could tell the director or whoever that lady is that made this film was trying to do some subtle symbolism reminiscent of one or more Vietnam movies. I’m too tired to remember tittles or director names at the moment but I could definitely see it. I will say I seem to be relatively sensitive to gross generalization anti-military type material and my detector didn’t really go off this time. And that main character definitely can act. Assuming he’s the one that got nominated for best actor he definitely deserved the nomination. I didn’t see all the nominees so I couldn’t sayif he deserves to win.

The movie mostly follows the bomb squad and having to disarm EIDs and other bombs of varying sizes. There are also some other sequences like like a sniper skirmish back and forth over a great distance some other things. There’s also some exploration of the depth of the main character and what makes him tick.

Perhaps I need to see it again but this movie is also not the sort of movie I would add to my media library. At least I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy it so I had it. But it was definitely not a bad movie. I have heard of Iraq War vets mocking it for whatever reasons. Inaccuracy I guess.

Well since I can barely see or think straight I think I am going to stop writing now. I hope this was useful. To the commenter or was probably spam asking about the format of my blog and linking to site advertising an offer for a free TV: this is the default WordPress theme. There’s not really anything to share. You just set up a WordPress blog and then don’t change anything. That’s it. Oh, and spam is annoying.

“Accepting Comments”

March 6th, 2010

Since I have can’t think of anything better to write about and I have only 30 minutes left to midnight this time I thought I would think out loud about the comments this blog is apparently receiving.  I am of course grateful for any and all comments from legitimate readers and welcome as many possible. The problem is with the spam comments or the comments that could be spam but don’t have any of the tell-tale signs of spam. For instance a lack of spelling errors and coming really really close to actually being relevant to the contents of the post but not quite.

For instance for my last post about my knowledge of WordPress there is a comment pending that talks about carefully testing software and unnecessary speed hacks of the code. That really has nothing to do with the post at all really. So either a human posted this who is being payed 25 cents or whatever to post comments to blogs roughly related to the blog whilst attaching some site URL or it is actually is a bot of I would assume some sophistication.

I think I’m going to start getting a lot more liberal with the SPAM button from now on. And if a comment does seem legit I’m going to first edit the comment and remove the attached URL if it’s anything other than a real site/blog. In other words if you’re only coming here to advertise your torrents, whether a legit comment or not, I’m deleting your plug for a web site. Those are the rules. Or I could just turn commenting off all together. That would work as well.

I was also thinking about changing that headline or byline or whatever they call it. I was going to change it but then Just another WordPress Blog started to have a certain charm to it. I am just another WP blog aren’t I? Hmmmm.

The last thing I’ll say is that installing stuff on or interacting with in any way with that Zipit is beyond frustrating. Sure there’s lots of packages available via apt-get, an impressive amount to be sure. Unfortunately they sometimes quit half way through installing with no clear way of clearing them up. No clear way to me anyway. And then most of the time there’s not really a way to tell what the keyboard shortcut controls are even normally never mind on that Zipit keyboard. It’s quite frustrating. And I never did find an MP3 player that could auto-resume playing of a track. I cam pretty close with this little experiment with VLC on my Windows machine involving play lists and bookmarks. That’s about as close as I have come so far. It won’t do it all on it’s own though. It’s like I need a way to auto-grab the last time position upon bring up a player then auto-export the last time position upon exit the next time. I have no idea if there’s an MP3 player out there that would support such an idea.

So apparently iPod and rockbox and which ever other devices have this fancy feature that no one has apparently thought to implement in an actual software player for real computers. I mean I think WMP might have a feature like that but this being a linux device that doesn’t really do me any good, does it?  For that matter I suppose iTunes does as well. Again, not doing me a lot of good. This also is as you might have guessed very frstrating.

Okay I think I’m done for tonight.

“More Zipit”

March 5th, 2010

Today I again got very, very little done in the packing department but I did some more stuff in the Zipit area. Namely I was looking for a good MP3 player when I found a program that claimed it could both download and player podcasts. Some kind of padcatcher or whatever they call it. So obviously, logically, if the software specifically has podcast in the name I can only assume it is in fact capable of playing MP3s with that auto-resume type feature. Well I guess I’ll never know. You see I tried it with apt-get install and it worked in that it started to download and install both the program and the associated dependencies which it did warn me would take 200+ megs of storage space. Being the Linux noob I am I have no idea how to check how much space I have available in storage so I just said yes and let it do its thing whilst I went to my Dad’s for dinner. When I got back I found out I ran out of storage space. So then i got to have fun trying to figure out how to remove all the dependencies and whatever that was now taking up so much space. I think I caught at least a portion of it but I’ll probably end up re-imaging the memory card and starting over.

The next thing I want to do is two fold: figure out how that shell script for connecting to my local network works then also install an application that auto-syncs with some Internet time source. Then write my own script that just does those two things and have that run on start up. This way I can connect to the Internet and always have a corrected time on the clock. Which is mostly only important because sometimes debian packages will say something about a package dated in the future. Which since the zipit defaults back to January 1st 2000 is understandable. I don’t know that it’s really an issue

The other thing, the trip to my Dad’s for dinner, turned out to be entertaining as well. You see he moved from a modestly sized house (1 bath/3 bedroom) to a mobile home park, single-wide trailer thing. So he didn’t really have any room the PC he had been using. And since I had an Artigo PC, smaller than your average 5 1/4″ CD-ROM drive, just sitting idle I set up him up with that. Well it’s been working perfectly well for at least a year now amazingly. And he has a tone of stuff plugged into it too. I don’t even know how that think is actually running considering the number of USB devices plugged into it. Anyway he says all he did was move it from one place to another and it subsequently decided to boot up to a frozen CMOS screen or just not boot at all. I suggested taking off the hard drive and/or remove the CMOS battery for a few seconds to see if that would help. Well actually when he took it apart and put it back together it wouldn’t even power on any more. And the CMOS batter seems to be glued into place for some reason. I don’t even know what that’s all about.

We worked on it for quite a while. I already knew it was kind of a fragile thing and wasn’t really expecting it to come back to life. I took the whole thing apart, put it back together and tried plugging in the various (unlabeled) wires into difference sets of pins. I was about to give up when my Dad noticed a set of pins which was immediately next to another set of pins seemed to be segmented off in a very subtle way from the rest of the pins. If that makes sense. He plugged the wire plug for the power switch and LEDs into that grouping of pins and then it started working all of a sudden. So it was booting. Which was much more than I was ever expecting out of it. Then the new problem was that it wasn’t detecting the hard drive. Well this also involved some taking apart of components and putting back together. I have no idea when we ended up changing to make it work but eventually it did find the hard drive and boot into Windows.

So perhaps in this instance I was just giving up too early. I also really wanted to look at an actual set of instructions which I did not have on me.

Guess I’l interrupt again and mention I found a script for setting the clock for me. And it works at that. It’s not a an auto-set but it works.

Ok I’m out of stuff to write anyway so I think I’ll end this here.

“Zipit Z2″

March 4th, 2010

Today started and I was getting ready to baby sit my niece for several hours. But then that fell through and it started snowing so it even more fell fell through. So I spent a large portion of the day working on Linux on my new Zipit Z2 gadget. I ordered it I don’t know how many weeks ago. Then I had to order a memory card to do anything useful with it. Finally I had all the ingredients and I followed the stereo-typically poorly written instructions to get it installed. I got the idea from a video webcast I watch called Hak5. I followed their instructions as well as reading instructions I found. There were still details left out and and typos but I still manged to get it done.

The device is basically like a miniature laptop. Or more accurately the form factor is a lot like a laptop, the hardware is more comparable to that of a smart phone. It’s completely open and everything, the manufacturer has no problem sharing the kernel and releasing all kinds of technical specs and source code and whatever.

Anyway I installed this initial Linux image by “raw-writing” a gigabyte image to a microSD card. The Zipit basically boots off the memory card into a little X.org setup. I went through all this trouble then found out there was a simple “average user” image available that installs in a fraction of the time. Kind of wish I had just jumped directly to that one.  Anyway I decided my new bright idea was to install this web-based admin tool on it called Webmin. But first I had to install all the decencies. This was made relatively easy with the availability of apt-get install it still took me a few hours just to get the dependencies. Then, finally, at long last I went to install the main Webmin package itself. But it took so long with the CPU at 100% and the memory card going full-write speed that the Zipit’s back light went out and I couldn’t wake it up. So I rebooted it.

Let me take a minor detour here and mention the clock on this thing. Maybe there’s an easier way to set the clock on this thing, maybe there isn’t but it took me literally hours to find the combination of date and time to feed the various date/time utilities in this Linux distro before I finally got it to work right. And now of course I had to reset it again and didn’t save that page so I don’t know if I’ll ever have that time set right again. Hopefully there’s an internet time-synchronization type package I can install. Now, where was I?

When it came back up from the long installation routine I managed to get the thing back connected to wifi and tried the default address of the zipit along with port 10000 and to my amazement it did actually come up. I logged in as root and there was webmin.

Unfortunately the CPU stays at 100% and the pages are loading agonizingly slowly. So if I can manage to get this thing’s CPU back down to normal I am going to remove webmin and all those dependencies. It was a fun experiment and I proved I could do it so I still count this as a net gain…

In between the webmin stuff I also tried to find a decent MP3 player. The kind that would be able to pick up where it left off the last time the player was running even if the player was shut down. I’m not sure if that is actually possible. I was really hoping I could use this zipit as kind of a strange Mp3 player-replacement thing. I did actually manage to install VLC although I’m still not sure if that will fulfill my needs or not. I need something that will just play my list of MP3s every week and just pick up where it left off before. Actually the “alternative firmware package” rockbox already fulfills all these needs. The only thing missing is rock box on the zipit. I think rockbox even supports the CPU, although I’m not sure. In any case I wish I know that kind of stuff I knew how to port it over so I could just boot rockbox off of a memory card when I wanted to do that and use a different memory card otherwise. That would be pretty neat. Or be really fancy and have a dual-boot setup. That would be extra really.

And the theoretically user-friendly image I’m using has a FTP and telnet daemon already running by default. So I issue commands via telnet and transfer files back and forth via FTP. Makes it much easier to issue commands on a real keyboard. And since the one Ext2 driver for windows sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t FTP works as well as anything. A not about the web site of the user-friendly image: I didn’t ever resort to using a linux machine and managed to get it set up perfectly fine thank you. Nor did I install coLinux,  Wubi, Cygwin or whatever else. I just used basically a convenient GUI to a dd-link utility, called PhysiDiskWrite. The GUI is in German but I somehow managed.

So yes, as you can see I’m feeling enthused and excited about the Zipit toy I have here. Just hope I can manage to find a good MP3 player or someone figures out how to make rockbox bootup on the zipit.

I did actually also do some packing and organizing as well. Just not a whole lot because the zipit was quite distracting. Okay here’s some useful links related to today’s post:

“My Knowledge of Wordpress”

March 2nd, 2010

I’ve been getting some comments lately. Some of them are obviously spam and others may be legit but have some kind of strange URL attached to them. Since I grow tired of trying to decide one way or another on these I have decided to split the difference: I’m responding to a specific comment while simultaneously not approving the actual comment. The reason is because he links to a web site that while it may not be technically illegal I would view at the very least as unethical. Should this commenter see this post feel free to comment again just don’t link to that site.

First of all I would not consider myself a “WordPress Webmaster” in any sense of the term. I always assumed installing WP would be extremely difficult and require lots of knowledge of PHP and/or SQL coding. Finally, with this most recent attempted spurred on by Blogger’s announcement that FTP support would be ending I did more reading and figured it out.

The part of the install that may be most difficult for some is figuring out an acceptable URL for your provider’s MySQL server. My web host happens to post this rather plainly in the control panel interface for the web space. I also manually created a SQL user, although I found out this isn’t really necessary. Basically you need only a couple pieces of information and a web host with the relatively basic requirements of PHP and MySQL. After that you simply copy all the files from the WP zip file available from the WP site to your FTP space and bring up I believe install.php. Something like that. This page prompts you for your SQL address and user name/passwords.  It then creates a database and tables and does whatever it has to in order to set it up.

As I mentioned in a prior post you can install the XAMPP package on your local machine and play with WP relatively consequence-free to your heart’s content.

Once install there are a number of plugins and themes easily browsed from the WP dashboard and enabled/disabled at a moments notice with no difficulty what-so-ever.

One thing to keep in mind however is keeping WP up-to-date: it’s rather simple. A notification will come up upon logging in to your dashboard and let you know an upgrade is available. It’s just the matter of click the package is downloaded, extracted and installed for you as you watch. It’s literally one click.

There are a number of further steps to be taken to enhance security as well as powerful plugins and features that can be utilized among them something I should have installed to begin with: a spam detector/filter plugin.

To the original commenter I hope this is sufficient for my information. It’s actually quite straight forward. If you’d prefer something more encompassing there are the official codecs at the WP.org site as well as some wonderful books available on Amazon (I already bought the WordPress 2.7 cookbook, which is good so far). I hope you found this helpful (although upon re-reading your comment I imagine you did not).

Here’s the comment that inspired the above post sans the email address and the URL:

Hi, how are you doing? I genuinely like your blog ! I was wondering if you might help me (I am certain your other subscribers may also be interested). I want to get into creating a blog also and I currently have a blog with Word Press, but it is quite difficult for me to build and I would like to attempt to find several good training guides or courses (preferably free) that can assist me in making use of wordpress correctly. As a word press web master yourself, do you perhaps maybe know where i can learn online tutorials to be able to do this myself?? Thank you

“Sunny”

March 2nd, 2010

This time I truly have no idea what I could write about to fill out an entire blog entry. It was sunny today so I went for my five mile thing. I hesitate to say it’s getting easier but I’m not sure it’s really take as much out of me as it once did.

I came home and took a shower and then started doing some additional back ups of Steam. I still haven’t copied these back ups to my WHS or to DL DVDs as I had planned. Although on some level I wonder if buying lots of 16 gig thumb drives would effectively accomplish the same thing without the annoyance of optical media. But then optical media is still king when it comes to cost-per-gig. Although I think that seperation is continuing to shrink with each passing year.

At one point there was talk of picking up the key for my new place but that was passed over at some point because my future land-lady is recovering from some kind of medical treatment. As soon as I do have this key though I’ll be able to start moving over some of my bins.

Speaking of which it really feels like I have made a lot of progress in organizing all my stuff. For instance I have one bin full of shoes. It’s not like I’m a shoe horder or something. I actually only wear the one pair regularly, for everything from around town to jogging. Then a second pair I only use on interviews. So how ended up with such a large collection of shoes I have no idea. They all seem unworn as well. Most of them. Maybe I should donate some of them, I don’ t know. They all fit in the one bin right now anyway so it wouldn’t make that much of a difference I don’t think.

I also now have a box of game consoles. Non-Atari game consoles that includes two SNES’s (that in all likelihood don’t work), a DreamCast, also probably doesn’t work and a Nintendo64 which does work. I should probably throw out the DreamCast and atleast one of the SNES systems. I also have a collection of SENS game pads, one of those adapters that allows you to hookup lots of game pads and a copy of Bomberman 2. Still have yet to play it either single or muli-player.

I also have a bin reserved for the two Atari 2600 consoles. I do actually have a large collection of 2600 games some place. Actually another system as well. I always forget which one. I think it’s the worst of the three: the 5400 (out of the 2600, the 5400 and the 7800, if I’m remembering my Atari model numbers correctly). I think I’d prefer the 7600 actually. It has backwards compatibility with the 2600 ya see. The 5400 isn’t compatible with the 2600 nor is the 7800 backwards with the 5400. And it’s a horribly designed system with few games to begin with never mind GOOD games.

I think I’ve strayed off course here. Bins: I believe I have stuff organized in them. Ready to be transferred to the new place. Well this was a rather boring entry but at least I made an entry. I think I’m going to watch an episode of Caprica and go to bed now.