blur

ok, i’m sorry, i’ve been pretty quiet of late. here are some thoughts.

i’ve stopped reading. i don’t know why. ever since i hit college, my reading has decreased rapidly. frighteningly rapidly. my freshman year, spring semester, i went to the oklahoma library book sale and bought about 30 books. i haven’t read 5. i haven’t even looked at 5. of the books i bought, i’ve read Blind Man’s Bluff and parts (most) of The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America. also, i remember having read The Walking Drum and… and… The Last of the Breed (both by Louis L’Amour). i know i have a bad memory, so there are probably a few i’m forgetting (besides required reading, most of which i’d like to forget…), but that’s 4 books in 2 years. ouch.

yahoo seems to have rolled out a new front page. that’s great – i’d be happier if they could keep messenger.yahoo.com and scs.msg.yahoo.com up. i can’t remember the last time AIM has been down. i think it’s been down once since i’ve been using it (5 years?), although, to be fair, i haven’t gone online much in the last two years (college). so… i’m cleaning the garage and waiting for y! messenger to come back up…

5 days.

1600 miles.

320 emails.

26 hours in the van.

5 minutes of video.

roughly 20 sessions.

0 photos.

it was a good conference – it is nice to be home.

I finally pulled it all together and set up a network. Wireless. It’s quite spiffy. It used to be that my laptop was the ICS “server” of our two laptop “network.” It didn’t work out well. I don’t want my laptop on all the time, especially when I’m gone 10 hours a day for work. My mom’s laptop is having problems and cannot dial up to the internet – not sure why. So, here’s what I did.

I pulled out an “old” (2 years) Dell 5100 (or is it 5200…? 5150? not sure.) I think it has 256MB DDR. It’s a speedstep 1.66/2.6 GHz, 15″, 30 GB HDD. No integrated WiFi. That’s ok. Integrated sound doesn’t work. That’s kinda ok too. Resets randomly when moved. Not cool, but that’s why I made it the server – you don’t move a server around.

So, I have a laptop. And a wireless router. And an external sound card (Sound Blaster MP3+) . And… power for all of them except the sound card. So the cables go like this: 1) Power to laptop. 2) Power to wireless router. 3) Power to speakers. 4) XO CAT5 from wireless router to laptop. 5) USB from external sound card to laptop. 6) Audio from speakers to external sound. 7) Telephone in for internet. I think that’s all of them.

So this server 1) serves up internet 2) plays music and 3) we can (I’m going to set it up soon) use the screensaver to display photos. Pretty spiffy. And it can be (and is) controlled wirelessly from any laptop on the network (the other 2).

I like it! Looking for more uses for my “server”… ideas welcome. or …