Author: cosmo

I’m looking for some new memory for a few of my servers, and I came across a really interesting product on Amazon. It says it’s 184-pin DDR PC3200 RAM, but I’ve never heard of memory chips formatted as audio CD’s…

Dolores Sandoval, whoever and wherever you are, I keep getting phone calls for you. I’ve had three today…

It seems these days that when you buy a bag of potato chips, you open the bag to find that it’s about 60% air. Thanks, Lays, for giving me an enormous bag that could hold two gallons of something but actually holds about fifty medium-sized chips! And everything from peanut butter to Carmex lip balm seems to have clever packaging where the bottom is indented, giving the impression of a good-sized jar which turns out to be missing 10% of the volume of the cylinder.

So it was refreshing to open a can of peanuts today and notice that they were actually filled to the top.

Thank you, generic Kroger brand peanut manufacturer, for not cheating me out of my goodies.

Laralee made something called “black lemonade”. I have no idea what that is, but I moved a milk jug in the fridge and saw it hiding in the back.

Yikes. I’m not sure if that’s the black lemonade or a science experiment gone bad.

I encouraged everyone at work to dress up for Halloween, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I wore my fancy four-dollar afro wig all day– scratchy, but awesome.

Brent also had some big hair, although he had a sweet leisure suit jacket that really added something.

Ben was some comic character named Princess Purple or something.

And Brian… well, Brian apparently dressed up as a long-haired PHP developer.

Happy Halloween!

Tonight we had our annual pumpkin-carving party. Laralee worked hard on hers:

Zack carved a really cool set of flames (?) but accidentally broke one of them. We assured him that super-glue probably wouldn’t fix it, so eventually he reworked the flames into a sort of creepy octopus (??).

I carved my usual “traditional” pumpkin:

I’m looking forward to the big day on Wednesday.

I just completed my mail-in ballot.

Johnson for President.
How many of the other presidential candidates have climbed Everest? Or compete in triathlons? Seriously. And on the topic of presidential candidates, I was surprised to find that Roseanne Barr– yes, that Roseanne– is on the ballot. Who knew?

Thumbs up for legalized marijuana.
Let’s face it: the War on Drugs is an abject failure, and the real reason marijuana is illegal is because the paper conglomerates back at the turn of the century were worried about hemp paper eating into their profit margins. Plus, this is Boulder County.

More money for schools.
I’ve seen the results of massive budget cuts in my kids’ schools, and hopefully a slight raise in the mill levy will get a few more computers and a few smaller classes.

I wonder how many of the things I support will win.

One of my clients is a yogurt company (!) and I’m included on the comments their consumers write on their web site. This one caught my eye:

Now that’s a fan!

The kids at the Denver Aquarium a couple of weeks ago…

As part of the Great Re-Carpeting of our house, I had to empty most of my basement office. It was amazing to see all of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the past decade… there are so many computers it’s embarrassing.

After a bit of thought I decided it was time to get rid of the hardware that I’ll never use again. It included a couple of old desktops and an ancient Power Macintosh…

… as well as three of the original servers from BitRelay, my hosting company. The term “server” is being used loosely– in truth these were cheap iMachines desktop systems that were on sale at Best Buy when I started the company.

Perhaps most interesting of all was the stack of eleven old desktop systems that my friend Mike scavenged from a business many years ago. The company was tossing them out, and they were brand new in the box. He and I each snagged about two dozen of them, and over the years I’ve used them for a few hobby projects or to let the kids rip apart and learn how a computer works. I gave several to the local Boy Scout troop for their computer merit badge. But in the end, I really can’t think of what to do with eleven computers sporting 150Mhz processors, 4MB of RAM, and ancient ISA slots.

Practicality won out over nostalgia. So long, computers of yesteryear!