This afternoon I decided I would buy the parts for my barebones kit that has been sitting for a month. So I went and purchased an Athlon XP 2500+, 512 MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo. Started to put it all together as soon as I got home, but 2 hours later I’ve determined the memory is bad and the store is now closed so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to continue. That just sucks.
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Solar Filter
Today was completely cloudless, so I rushed home after work to setup the telescope and try out the new solar filter and camera mount. The solar filter lets in roughly 1/10,000th of the light – pretty cool. This is one of the pictures taken, albeit a bit out of focus since I was hastily taking picture before the sun went down and it was pretty windy outside. Next time I’ll take more time and hopefully come out with some clearer pictures. -
September 6, 1979
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.
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Electricity, part II
As mentioned earlier, I had purchased the wrong type of circuit breaker. Today we went back to the store and got the right one. An hour later, all the computers downstairs were plugged into their very own 20 amp circuit!
Within the next few weeks I hope to get to wiring the two remaining circuits.
In other news, we picked up a cheapo 20″ tv for our bedroom, I got tired of trying to see our small 13″ one from across the room without my glasses. We found the name, Konka, to be pretty funny so we’ve voked to never call it a TV… it’s Konka.
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Electricity
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.
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A couple of pictures
The first one is of Ana’s new sewing cabinet, and the second one is of her most recent sewing creation – a pair of cat beds that Dozer and Neo just love. -
Where’d the day go?
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.
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Scott’s Turf Builder Plus SummerGuard
I put Scott’s Turf Builder Plus SummerGuard on our yard about a month ago, and it has done its job very well. That picture is from Sunday.I’m following their recommended product cycle which has me applying a different fertilizer every 6-8 weeks, so some of the credit goes to the preceeding product applications too. Our new strips of sod (from the sump line work) in the back yard are even growing and blending into the yard quite nicely.
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PostgreSQL 8 Beta
This evening I went and downloaded the new PostgreSQL 8.0 Beta which now runs natively on Windows. I’ve installed it but haven’t setup the Chef database yet because of my reliance on the fulltext module for text indexing – I’m not yet sure what fulltext searching options are available in 8. Anyway, it’s on my machine, with the intention of getting the Chef db running like it does on linux so a few people I know only running Windows can also run my software. I’ll provide more info as it comes.
Shortly I’ll be ordering a processor, memory, and hard drive for my new barebones PC. I think the plan is to make it my desktop, turn Windev into my web server, and maybe retire the current webserver. The only thing that is going to be hard about that plan is turning Windev, my longtime Windows DEVelopment machine, into a Linux server. Oh the humanity!
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New Computers
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.
The Johnson Blog 