Year: 2004

Blast! Someone buy me a digital switch box please! I share 4 computers between 1 monitor, keyboard and mouse. This analog switch box doesn’t support the usb mouse and frequently drops the keyboard and mouse when changing machines causing me to do a hard reboot.

I love watching the wife and kids play store. It amazes me that they value it so much. My wife keeps a checkbook for each child and as they do chores or other things that earn them “money” they can use it to buy things from “the store.” This is a cache of trinkets and items that my wonderful wife has bought or collected for the kids. Sometimes she puts specific things in there for a certain child knowing he or she will end up with it. To watch from a far, the wife picks a task to do while the kids take a half an hour or so to finger through the goodies. They diligently add and subtract making painful decisions between this and that. It could be “do I want the hair pin or the pencil?” “If I buy the matchbox car I won’t have enough left to buy the pad of paper.” Every couple of minutes one of the children looks up and says “how much is this?” and the wife without batting and eye or getting distracted throws out a figure so matter of factly you’d think she had been part of the manufacturing process. What’s more, she remembers every price she says so when the child challenges “how much was this again?” the same price immediate spits out! Logically I wouldn’t think the incentives outweight the efforts for the kids because many of the treasures are things they could have simply by asking or receive regularly anyway. I love the kids! I love my wife!

I borrowed some video training tapes from the American Red Cross before Christmas. Every week since the staff person’s voice booms in my head “please try to look at these are return them this week. If you don’t do it in a week, you won’t do it at all.” I don’t even know where the tapes and paperwork are.

This is the kind of thing that makes it hard for my mind to focus. I have thousands of undone little things. Ugh!

Pulled the case out to find that it has so much dust in it that the extra nic card just sitting on the bottom of the case isn’t visible at all. Perhaps this is a contributing factor to some of this machine’s problems. And perhaps the paper clip lying across one of the boards.

Next step: thoroughly clean this case with no static discharges (in this dry humid house)!

Network cable now run through the floor to the hubs and switches.

Next problem: power. I have lots of power supplies boxed up in either the garage or the bedroom. I may even have one under my desk somewhere. The ones under my feet are a rats nest of shared power; the unspoken implication of course being that all computers will have to be shutdown for this move and then some devices may be left without power. Wife’s computer will need a power strip, preferrably a decent surge protector and beyond budget, a nice UPS. Hmm. I wonder if the old UPS removed during the “short hunt” awhile back works? Alright. That will give me a reason to remove the cobs webs. First I need to download all pictures from the Compact Flash cards because I want to photo document the office clean up and the computer move. Meeting in 2.5 hours.

Follow the trail of bouncing digressions…

Upcoming problems. What to do with her printer? Possible solutions: 1) move it with the computer, 2) hook it up to a different computer for networked printing.

I’d really like to build an addition to the house right now.

I also like having my wife near me and this is going to separate us; however, it could be a nice transition for me moving into an office job.

I am upset with myself that I can’t move faster and that I have not put ourselves into an economic situation to be able to setup the household computer network the way I have planned. I am moving the wife’s computer upstairs but I have a bad feeling about this and it’s not the correct operating system for a shared environment and it needs to be behind a separate firewall that is more filtered and controlled. Time and money; time and money; time and money; mostly money.

Played and read with the baby for a bit then gave in at 8:25 and turned on the television.

Had some coffee and read the paper.

After the 5am noise patrol, I fell back into a deep sleep. I should have stayed awake and worked. I had a bizarre dream that centered around the wife and I meeting some people with secret words in a cemetary. Had something to do with this elegant old historic house that was going to be sold off.

At 7:30 I heard the baby prancing around laughing loudly. The 7 yr old saved her from the crib (normally we let her play in the crib some but he did good). I medicated the 13 yr old and brewed coffee.

This basement is fridgid today.

A New Day!

Let’s start the day off with a PayPal donation link:

This Morning

* Woke at 4am and tended to fire. Should have stayed up.

* 5am noise wakes me. 10 yr old girl awake in bed; I check fever and she seems fine (I think). 13 yr old boy awake in bed

Going to take a break to regroup my thoughts and maybe read. This is a bad sign. It’s usually followed by deep sleep.

Returned home with the 7 yr old and unloaded the car. Began cooking pizzas for dinner and refueled the fire. Checked on the sick 10 yr old. Fever still high but feels cooler to me. Cooked 2 pizzas and fed the wife, the 7 yr old, the 13 yr old and myself. Cooked cup cakes for devouring tomorrow. Refueled fire.

Whew! Shopping done. I can’t step foot in Walmart or Home Depot without dropping $100. Anyhow, minus the forgotten milk, we are set for the next couple of days.

Cooking home made pizzas tonight. Maybe some treats. Ran into the guy hired to be a meat cutter at Walmart. He was hired before they changed business models. Now ALL meat is shipped in prepackaged. He sounds bitter but exclaimed “at least I get paid meat cutter wages to be a stock boy.”

Time to check on the sick 10 yr old then run to the store for supplies.