Gender No Longer Neutral Description of the baby

There's been two schools of thought on our child. One is that Mom's cravings of fresh fruit (Where did the 2 lbs of strawberries go, Honey?) would imply a girl. The other, Karma implied I need someone more stubborn than me.

Strawberries won. We're having a little girl.

I thought so initially when there was a brief moment and I noticed a lack of hardware as they scanned past the baby's legs. Given how stubborn this kid was being towards being imaged it took almost 40 minutes to get into a position that the sonogram could show something.

Therefore, most likely, it's a girl.

No bigger brother to knock down the barriers for her first- this will be a new experience for both of us as we're both from families where the son was born first.

Great States Reel Mower

Today I bought a push mower. This is different from my radial, gas powered push mower by the simple fact that there is no engine.

At first it was a little odd getting used to- the handles are much shorter than someone that's 6'2" tall can call comfortable, but once I got past the cramping in the hands I was able to bang thru the yard with very little difficulty. Grass flew off the back of it as if I were watching a cartoon- literally cascading in a parabolic arc off the cutting surfaces.

Maybe I chomped it a bit short.

The mower cost me 40$, it retails for 90$. The gentleman I bought it from advertised it as "I bought this, pushed it 10 feet, and realized I was too lazy to use it". It looks in great shape with some very minor rust spots. There's a significant amount of rubbing on the bar but I'll download the manual and see what that takes. Contrary to expectations it isn't 'quiet' but loud enough to hear and would probably not make phone conversation easy- if you could get past the pantings.

I figure I'll have to cut the grass 2x a week now with this, but I won't be using any gas in the lawnmower- about 2-3 yards = 1 tank of gas, 6 tanks per fillup, meaning I'll save about 1.50$ per time I cut my grass.

You may find this hard to believe but a single TWIG can jam the blades- which means come fall and leaf season the lawnmower is coming out again to mulch mulch mulch.

One thing I especially like about this is all the grass cuttings are neatly distributed across the yard instead of compacted under the right wheel as in my mulching lawnmower. Overall a great product.

Great States Reel Mower, Deluxe 18" version

Love the Neighbors

Today, while my wife was away, the neighbors all came over to give the downstairs a 'once over'. Mind you I spent most of the morning trying to track and exterminate a *#)($#8$# chipmunk that had somehow gotten into the house. And boy did they (the neighbors) lay in to all the things that had to go.

What stunk was I *KNOW* all this. I can't, however, do it myself. Usually it involves pitching craploads of stuff and junk- we have 3 shelves of cookbooks. What do we eat each week? Same thing. 'Nuff said.

Anyway They simply reiterated what I already knew: that pretty much everything downstairs has to go. That there was never going to be any more time to do anything. I acknowledge that and understand it, intellectually, from watching one of them 'ride herd' on the kids. That I can handle. I think.

And go it shall. I'm not going to lose my baby because a bloody bookrack fell on it... or it choked on some yarn... or it found a needle or coaster or frankly anything.

(Oh yeah, I hate dusting).

Hooray for the Fourth of July

We went to watch fireworks with the neighbors last night- had a blast, no pun intended. Lots of photos were taken of the air bursting shells. Music was rather poor but you can only have so many speakers I suppose. Greece does a pretty good job for that but a very poor job for crowd control.

WD10EAVS 1tb Western Digital "Green Power" Hard Drive

Yes, I know this reads like an advertisement but in a sense it is. I bought (back when it was a great deal) a 750gb WD Green power drive for 135$. A *steal* at that price.
Then suddenly 2 months later Buy.com offered a 25$ off coupon and a 1 tb green power drive (WD10EACS) for 187-25 + free shipping. A *STEAL* at that price. Since the green power drives spin so slow (5400 RPM) and are ultra quiet they make perfect HTPC drives. Now a couple of hundred movies later and things start to get interesting and you need more space, so you start looking for a new drive...
Which brings us to the WD10EAVS. This drive doesn't officially exist on Western Digital's website and, prior to my purchase, I had no idea what its specs would be. I had seen them listed on a few pages talking about MyBook external USB/Firewire devices, but for the most part these drives were just a big unknown. And so at 179.99, free shipping and a 35% rebate (Thanks Microsoft!) a 1tb drive could be had for 117$- a tremendous steal. Lots of stealing going on.
Unfortunately when the drive arrived it had NO WD warranty - I've contacted the ebay seller about that little tidbit- so this might become a very expensive lesson.
Fortunately I was able to plop the drive into my C2D system and run a quick pair of benchmarks on it- the sustained bandwidth transfer is incredible for this drive- starts at well over 100mb/sec and drops to a paltry 40mb/sec- but in either case this is STILL fast enough to record video with. I'm in LOVE. A little history- I currently capture on a pair of Maxtor 320gb HDs in RAID-0 running on a dedicated hardware raid card, PCIE-4x. The new C2D board I bought didn't have a dedicated 4X slot like the AMD 760 chipset I came from, so I had to settle for significantly degraded video performance. That meant disabling my 16x PCIE graphics card (passive cooled for noise) and castrating it- by telling the system that it should run both PCIE 16x slots as 2x 8x slots. Very annoying. Even then the RAID-0 is capable of capturing at 140mb/sec all the way out to 50%, and even then it only falls to 80mb/sec at the very end. MORE than fast enough to capture standard and HD video (for now).
The RAID-5 (dedicated card) is a bit slower, as you'd expect, and is built upon 4x WD5000AAKS system. These drives were pretty expensive at the time but, again, worth it. I was moving upwards from 4x 200gb Seagate RAID 5 system and I needed to expand. Digital photography and digital video consume tremendous amounts of space. I think at this point I may replace all 4 drives with 1tb as soon as the price comes down and continue to rotate them in and out for backup purposes, which leads me to dispose of my 200gb PATA drives for something other than a pittance.
Now, back to the real reason I bought the 1tb WD10EAVS drive- I needed to add more space to the media box that my gorgeous wife likes to watch. I found a live-cd called 'clonezilla' - and it was everything they said it was. Not only did it clone the 3.2gb partition of the main boot disk (I was running an old 7200 RPM WD drive that sounded like a muffled screeching vacuum) but it repaired GRUB and modified LILO/bootloader to work correctly. And it did it in less than 20 minutes- all I had to do was type 'yes' 2x for every question. Talk about working correctly... this baby is DEFINITELY going into my emergency supply kit. So what's all this got to do with a baby and being a new daddy? Well, I put the first disk on there- Baby Einstein. Heh :) That and a few hundred hours of music....

Partying with the Neighbors

Today, being the Fourth of July, is our neighborhood get-together. It's more closely related to someone buys beer, someone else drinks said beer while grilling, other people buy cheese platters, and we all pile into cars to go watch fireworks.

Most of this morning was spent outside watching kids run around and play.

The neighbors little 4 year old asked why I had a bike in my shed instead of the garage. I told him it was because I broke it. Since he was being a turd (parents words, not mine) I went on with "In fact, I ran over a little kid with it and it broke. A little kid just about your size, with black hair".

His response? "You should have slowed down".

Ya can't win ;)

Addicted to WheresGeorge

I have more minions.

WheresGeorge.com is a website in which you can 'track' where a dollar spent ends up. It relies on users and regular people to enter a bill when they find it- usually with a bright stamp on it- and can calculate the locations based upon the zip code that the user provides.

Most bills end up locally- as you'd expect, and some show up in weird places (like Cape Town, South Africa).

Where do they go? They follow lines of commerce- I've found that 20$ bills go directly to the bank and almost inevitably show up in ATMs some place else (Ohio is popular from NY).

Interesting, no?