Blog Dump

Sorry. Apparently I slipped back to my ways of not posting much. Ok lets see… where to start:

Trailer in SG: I finally got a buyer for that. Mom was over there working and showed it to a couple different people. In the end we ended up selling it on contract to a kid that she knew whos mom lived down the road. It looks like a pretty good deal right now, as he seemed pretty well adjusted and hopefully he won’t have any problem paying the payments to me.

Work: Spring break just ended and Lamar and I took then time during it to really work on cleaning up the office. 3 trips to Sam’s Club and a weeks worth of work and it is really looking better. I will try to get some pictures of it here soon. We also just finished up a email migration from Exchange 5.5 on NT4 to Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003 Server. The state department did all of it and we lost a bit of control on it, but we needed the server upgrade really bad. I never really was that fond of managing Exchange on the server side, so losing that aspect of it is nice, but there are some real limitations on what we can do that I don’t really enjoy. We also migrated our district from Outlook version whatever to everyone using Outlook 2003. Let me tell you that the automatic MSI upgrade route that MS recommends leaves a lot to be desired.

Hardware: I sold my 19inch LCD and used the money from it to buy a new one with a DVI port on it. I wasn’t really expecting a huge different in clarity, but the investment for the upgrade was really small, so I went for it. In the end I really think there is a quite noticable difference and if you have a DVI port and don’t have to spend too much to upgrade I think it might be worth it. I also picked up a slightly better video card with some more memory and the DVI port. Mainly for the next topic:

Games: I have started playing a few more games on my PC. I built a new low power machine that runs in Linux all the time and serves out files on my network, so that opens up my normal desktop to be used for whatever I want. I have been booting it up every now and then and playing “Battle for Middle Earth 2”. It is a pretty fun RTS, though I can’t really stick my finger on what it is about it that makes it so fun. I guess if you sit and think about it too long you over think it. I am hoping to get Jeff over here sometime soon so that we can play co-op on it some. Speaking of which Jeff brought over a Crickett game for the xbox the other day. I didn’t really know anything about crickett, but Jeff really loves it and after a little bit of getting familiar with the rules it was pretty fun. It is somewhat like Baseball, but there is a lot of other stuff about it that makes it different too.

Blog: Upgraded the theme to a newer version. I put most of my changes back in from the original version of the theme. Most of them have to do with making the page width more dynamic so that you don’t have tons and tons of empty space on the sides of the blog. I don’t know why that style of web has become so popular, but with the increase in widescreen displays like on my laptop it should be a crime to hard code pages to a set width. I know all the arguments about pictures and making things look a certain way, but to me it just seems like a waste of space. Using the default style.css for this theme makes this page scroll forever on my laptop, while using this modified one cuts the page length nearly in half and saves me a lot of scrolling around. Wasn’t that the point of the web back before WEB2.0? To take data and put it on different computers regardless of size, speed or connection. It seems like things have gotten away from that some, and I think it is a shame.

More to come if I think of something else I need to write.