We visited Ana’s sister this weekend in Marshall, Il. Ana helped her work in a booth for the town’s fall festival while I spent the day doing some coding. What I built was a small utility for entering my telescope observation logs and exporting them to wiki-markup, in the format of those found here. I got tired of copy/pasting from old observations so the app should come in handy. It also looks suprisingly good for having been written in just a few hours.

Today is my 25th birthday. Ana suprised me with a few things for my telescope which include a solar filter and camera mount. I can’t wait to use them both, it just figures that today is a very overcast day.

We went to Lowes today and bought everything needed for me to add the new circuits in the basement. I decided I would just work on the circuits one at a time so I could find out if I’m doing something wrong early on. I’m not a fast worker, so after a few hours I had 5 outlets wired (one is a GFCI) and was ready to open up the breaker box and add the new breaker. That was the first time I’ve ever been working 3″ from the main power lines coming into the house – more than just a little unnerving! Anyway, as I was ready to pop in the newly wired circuit breaker…. it’s just barely the wrong physical size! So I had to unwire the ground and neutral and pull the wire out of the breaker box until I can get to Lowes tomorrow. Testing my new outlets will have to wait until tomorrow.

Today was an unexpectedly busy day. It started off with me making a computer repait visit (someone I’ve helped out for years now..) at 8:30am. His computer was in pretty bad shape and resulted in me bringing it back to the house for disinfection and general cleansing. Windows ME is such a horrible thing.

The remainder of the day involved cleaning, buying storage and shelving, and more cleaning. The first cleaning was our general all-over-the-house kind which takes a couple hours. We then went on a shopping spree at Lowes, resulting in a Muscle Rack for the basement, a cabinet with baskets and doors for Ana’s sewing room (pics soon), and an organizer cabinet for the office closet.

After putting everything together I decided to start cleaning up the office and made very good progress. I finally got around to finding out what was on a bunch of used and unlabeled CDRs as well as pitching a TON of old software (CD and floppy) I haven’t touched in at least 4 years. It feels good to get it out of the way once and for all.

I just finished up building a pair of computers for Ana’s sister and cousin. Her sister’s computer was fried by lightning about a month ago and she was cut an insurance check last week. Ana’s cousin is headed to college for her freshman year and needs a computer. Both machines have this Shuttle board and have turned out to be pretty speedy machines. End price was $350 and $450, respectively. Not too shabby.

Thanks to David bringing this deal to my attention, I now have a barebones kit sitting in my living room for $20. I’ve got a few parts to buy still, but that’s a pretty tought decision to make since I don’t have a clue what I am going to have the machine doing. Ana says I’m a real nerd since I bought a computer just because of the price and I don’t know what I’m doing with it. Oh well, nice problem to have I suppose.

Here are a few items we found indispensible on our road trip. Highly recommended for those travelling in a car for any considerable amount of time.

Igloo KoolMate 40 This is a thermoelectric cooler/heater which plugs into the cigarette lighter in the car. It cools to something like 45 degrees below outside temperature or heats to 155 degrees. It was the perfect size for keeping all of our lunch foods cold on the drive.

Earthmate GPS Receiver in combination with the Delorme Street Atlas allowed us to trapse all over the place without the worry of getting lost. The trip planning portion of the software makes some questionable decisions, but the capability of knowing exactly where you are at all times is priceless. We borrowed this from a friend of my dad’s but are planning on buying it for ourselves since it was so useful.

We also borrowed my dad’s XM Radio so we didn’t have to deal with searching for radio stations every 15 minutes. I don’t have a need for one all the time, but it’s great on trips.

I used my Treo 600 with PDANet to have an internet connection on my laptop in the car and anywhere else we went with cellular service. This is GREAT for passing time in traffic jams.