- October 31, 2007 -

I discovered a very nifty program called Stellarium - It's an open source planetarium program that is designed for astronomers so they can hook up their telescopes to a computer and locate stars easily, and it's a full planetarium for your desktop. You can set your location, the Earth rotates at the same rate to stay where the stars actually are in the sky, or you can adjust it faster or slower, you can easily locate nifty objects, and you can zoom in on nebulas and see what they'd look like through a telescope.

- October 29, 2007 -

Today was chili day at KSHS. I was a judge for administration, and there were eight contestants that we all diligently sampled, took notes on, sampled some more, selected our favorites, and then we went through it again with the top four until there was a winner. Matt also brought his Nintendo Wii which everyone loved.

- October 28, 2007 -

This weekend I went to Eunjoo's with Carrie and Jason so Eunjoo could meet Jason... we went out to eat and I looked at her new laptop which would start to read a flash card and then it'd just vanish... I couldn't figure out why. Earlier that day I went to help Donna move, but mostly we were just waiting for the lock guy to come. Friday Teresa and I watched some BSG- we're mid-way through the third season.

- October 24, 2007 -

Technology arrived on the doorstep today. I got a gigabit network card with a crossover cable and another hard drive. First thing I did was remove all my network cables, junky old hub, and connected the two computers with the one cable, Woohoo, 100Mbps, ten times faster than what it was. Then I installed the gigabit network card in Chroniton... Woohoo 1000Mbps!

- October 21, 2007 -

I ordered a new network card and a hard drive today. Right now my two main computers are only communicating at 10 megabits per second, which is the slowest possible, so with the new network card and a different cable I should be able to boost it up to 1000 mbps.

I saw this Geico commercial on TV the other day and thought it was very funny.

- October 20, 2007 -

Friday was my first day without Jesse as he and Reggie are now in Hawaii. It was actually a very quiet day- there were no server crashes, the phone system didn't flip out, and there weren't even that many calls. I started to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10, which it reported would take more than a day to do- I knew it'd take a while, it just came out Thursday, but my computer asked if I wanted to upgrade- and I couldn't resist. I also brought in my rubber band ball Friday. I started to build it my sophomore year of high school and now it's about basketball size- I don't add to it much anymore, mostly I will just add a new thin layer to the outside every couple years so it looks good.

Saturday Mary Lou, Bob and I went to the Greek food festival at Marsha's church. It was the perfect day for it and the food was great!

- October 14, 2007 -

This weekend I brought home a couple laptops to work on. One was just a checkup sort of thing, it's old, but it works OK for what it is. The other laptop was brand new, but it got a virus that messed up Windows and it wouldn't boot any longer. I did discover a wonderful trick to recover data off a computer when Windows messes up. Usually I'd just pull the drive and put it in another working computer, but with a laptop you can't really do that as easy, so I used an Ubuntu live CD to mount the drive and then copy the files off with a flash drive.

I noticed an interesting thing at work this week: Internet Explorer 7 has been removed from Windows Update for some unknown reason. Where'd it go... Why did it go? I couldn't find a reason.

- October 12, 2007 -

Teresa and I watched the rest of season two of Battlestar Galactica, so now we're ready for three, which isn't out on DVD yet.

- October 7, 2007 -

Today I scanned a few images from a genealogy book Linda Sprague loaned to me. Her son Lance found my website while searching for his ancestor, my Great Great Grandfather Christian Pfister. Linda volunteers at work, so that was a very cool happening.

- October 6, 2007 -

Teresa and I have been working our way through BSG, and we're now starting season 2.5 (they break their seasons up into halves), but with so much TV watching I've not done too much else that is worthy of note.

Friday at work I went somewhere where few get to go.... a neither region between the ceiling in the museum lobby, and the roof... it's a most precarious location and not easy to access. There's a small hatch in the ceiling above the museum snack area that you must push open with a tall ladder... Then you scale the ladder up into the ceiling and there is a one foot wide plank you must walk that takes you from there all the way over near the front door of the gift shop, which was our destination and mission, to run a network cable to the gift shop desk so we can put a computer there. SO- you get near the gift shop front door and there is an eight foot drop to a lower ceiling, and there is another beam (just a two by four) that runs about twenty feet over to where we need to work. We didn't traverse the small beam, I was nervous with the one that was a foot wide... there are pipes and wires that crisscross everywhere.