After my last harddrive purchase I explained to my wife how much space I would have (note to self, don’t do that again), she asked “Does that mean you have enough room for the kids games, so we can get rid of their computer?”.

Of course I answer too quick for my own good “Oh yeah sure”. What was I thinking? They might infect it with thier harsh treatment of shutting down improperly, constantly reinstalling programs, and of course they’re DOS based games! But it was too late, I had said yes, and if it weren’t for my oldest I’d be sunk.

He spoke up (I think he suffers the same quick to comment problem I have) and said “We barely even use it anymore, so we don’t need to use your computer dad”.

Sweet, totally off the hook and I have a spare computer to boot!

So what to do, what to do?

Posted in Computers, Do It Yourself, Linux, MySql, Nerdom, Networking, PHP, Programming, Tutorial No Comments »

It’s no secret that I’m quite white and nerdy. I do nerdy things, I know nerdy things, I am nerdy!

Well the other day I noticed some issues with the home internet. My wife said she had been experiencing some issues too.

I didn’t have time to mess with it before I went to bed, but I woke up and found I was still having trouble, and I almost made myself late for work because I started fiddling with it.

As any nerd my know, once you engross yourself into something you could space off hours real quick, luckily I still didn’t have my pants on, so when our cat rubbed against my leg my concentration broke.

I decided I would deal with later, I suspected a DNS issue and figured I’d work on it from work. Then that wasn’t working either.

Posted in Computers, Nerdom, Networking 2 Comments »

I don’t think it’s gotten as bad as I’m going to make it out to be, but it’s something to consider for those who use a computer for a majority of their life, and those who have kids who are growing up using computers for everything.

I remember when when I was a kid being graded on penmanship, hey wait - I’m not that old, but I remember taking pride in my small neat cursive and getting marked accordingly. As I grew so did my writing, into a haberdashery of cursive mixed with block letters and scribbles. My signature is never the same even on one document (they loved me when I signed for my house). But what does it matter now? I don’t write much on paper, unless it’s to jot down a note or two or if I have to sign a receipt. In fact, except for the occasional thank you note I don’t think I’ve actually sat down and written a sentence in years.

Posted in Computers, General, Nerdom 3 Comments »

Before I lost data, you would have seen a few posts on my favorite flavor of Linux - Ubuntu. I’ve been a casual user since the days of Mandrake 7 and Fedora Core 1. But ever since Canonical Ltd started releasing versions of it, I’ve been hooked.

I tried out all the versions and watched as they’ve progressively gotten better and better. With the release of 7.04 I found it working very well out of the box, so much so I installed it on my laptop and forced my wife to use it (she wasn’t exactly happy about that but got use to it).

But like most OS’s in my house they come and go with a base install of Windows generally dominating the machines. The only real reason is for games. Other than that, Linux (Ubuntu more specifically) works out just fine. Even more so now!

Posted in Computers, Linux, Nerdom, Programming, Regular Express 2 Comments »

How many of you guys love music? How many have a music library at home, and don’t have enough gadgets to carry it all with you every where you go? Yeah me too. I mean sure I have a 2 gig flash drive, a phone that will play MP3’s (2 gigs), I have an Archos that will play audio and video (30 gig) but I still find myself wanting to play something I don’t have stored away on one of my devices - this presents a problem.

Well it looks like I found an answer!

I didn’t think it would have been hard to please me. I only had a few core requirements, everything else would have been icing.

1. I wanted to be able to access my music from anywhere (mainly for work, because…well that’s where I spend a majority of my time).

2. I wanted something simple.

Posted in Computers, Music, Nerdom, Networking, Reviews 1 Comment »

Having a crap load music, sometimes you forget what you have. This can be a blessing a lot of the time (or an embarrassment, when you have a one of *NSynch’s albums on disk because your little sister wanted it on a slide show). So I was perusing through the lo-fi section of Amazon’s mp3 downloads looking for some new music (I’ll review that purchase later) when an album came up that was at one point held a permanent position in my cd player.

Going back in time, when I owned my trusty Jeep Scrambler and ruled the roads (a local band even wrote a song about me and my jeep). At any rate, it was ‘95 and I was totally into Weezer (guess what my middle child’s middle name is - Jonas). In fact I had to purchase the venerable Blue album 3 times due to loss and destruction. Then I got wind of a band that comprised of a few Weezer members and some people from another band. I knew I needed to give it a whirl.

Posted in Music, Nerdom, Reviews 2 Comments »

The following video makes you laugh.

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