Category: General

Sometimes the Gullible Info RSS feed I have set up on my Google personalized homepage spits out some astonishing facts. This just popped up a minute ago:

“If all the diamonds stored by major diamond companies were released, a perfect two-carat diamond would be worth about three dollars.”

Wow. Here’s another one:

“The computer mouse was almost called a “dongle” until researchers with Xerox had a last-minute change of heart.”

Last Saturday my mom and I took Connor to the NC Zoo while Amy was in insurance classes all day. He liked the animals but all he talks about now is riding on the “choo-choo” (aka – the tram) and the zebra bus which take you back and forth from the American to the African side of the park. The thing about the NC Zoo is that you seem to walk FOREVER to get from one exhibit to the next and when you get there, the exhibit is either closed or non-spectacular. The polar bears and elephants were the only animals really close enough to get hyped about. But even they looked bored to be alive. Connor would look at them for about one minute then say “bye, bye elephant….ride the choo-choo now?”

1-800-Pack-Rat now has an on-line quote utility at our corporate site. We’re cheaper than PODS! Get an on-line quote of the same container specs and see for yourself. Leave a comment to this post to request a special price code.

I made it through my first week of a new job. There’s a lot to be done and a lot of planning required but nothing is broken requiring constant, emergency attention. We’re building, not fixing. It makes for a enjoyable environment. Some of the things that I’ll be doing soon include transitioning a 2003 Small Business Server to individual domain server components, building a new 2003 Exchange server and migrating the existing mailboxes, installing new AD servers and terminal server licensing servers, and putting some new 3Com TippingPoint VPN concentrators in place to bump up the VPN tunnel count while integrating SNMP monitoring. No rocket science, just some straight forward tasks that if planned correctly will be simple and painless.

On to other topics since the new job info’s getting stale: Amy loves her new job at Jefferson Pilot Financial. We went out to lunch today an discussed the timing of our next baby. She may want to work into next year before getting pregnant again. It will help if Connor’s a little closer to kindergarten too. Connor is the big man now. He really thinks he’s about 16 now that he’s in a big boy bed and getting potty trained. He can actually sit at the kitchen counter in the morning and have a little conversation with us. Every morning he tells me about the dreams he had. It’s so cute it’ll almost make you cry. But he’s still suckin’ his thumb and carrying around his blanky. He won’t go to day care without it. And lollipops and Elmo are the most important things in the world.

Athlon Demand Squeezes AMD

Another AMD success story. Apparently AMD can’t make enough Athlon 64 chips. Their recent success leads me to beleive that Intel has spent too much on their new Apple tree. So what if they made Mac laptops faster. I still can’t afford one.

On the other hand AMD continues to align themselves with affordable 64 bit hardware manufacturers. They’ve also aligned themselves with Sun for dual core servers which Intel has yet to approach.

Intel… Mac… I can spell o-v-e-r-h-y-p-e-d. And I can’t afford the hype. For now I’ll just stay computer literate so I don’t have to buy a machine that’s dumbed down to keep me from accidentally breaking any mp3’s.

Apple did do one thing right by using EFI by Intel . The old PC/AT BIOS retirement is way past due. AMD better answer with a compatible equivalent.

Google Analytics was a flop for me. I could never get the required code installed in WordPress. Google got overwhelmed with requests for this service and quit accepting new accounts. I think they grossly underestimated demand for this service.

I got frustrated trying to install the code in the version of WP that I refuse to upgrade to any of the new theme based releases, I like my current css. So I went and checked out statcounter.com. It automatically emails me all of the stats I need each week. The free version is limited to analyzing the last 100 visitations in the log but I don’t foresee needing to gather any information about any more than my last 100 visitors. So analyze this google – I’ll come back when Analytics tracking code is easier to integrate into WP 1.2.1 and you can track the stats of current subscribers a little faster.