It’s been 5 years since this small chunk of the internet where I put some of my thoughts on display for the world to see, went online.

Thanks to a few internet archive sites, I got a chance to see a sort of compressed view of how my home on the web evolved to what it is today. From a somewhat clunky looking place with rather short blurbish posts to a more polished look with structure and posts with some meat to them, even though there may be somewhat more time between posts thanks to changes in work or personal schedules.

Thanks go to everyone who stop by and read the occasional post I may have made or check out a few of the links I thought were worth sharing at the time.

I also must give a big thanks to a guy I’ve known for a long time, a good friend whom I’m always happy to have visit and camp out on the couch, Jim Williams of Mindstorm Hosting and Digital Drivel.

Thank you all for 5 years and hopefully more to come.

Scott E

I really haven’t had much to share since my last entry other than I started a new job in mid May after being out of work since the beginning of January, being sacked after only 3 months in a new place, in other words I unwittingly worked there as a holiday stooge. Feels good to have money coming in.

My main storage drive decided to give up the ghost this last week, taking with it most all of my music and video files. I was able to pull the readable stuff off of it mostly video files and am planning to do the “last resort” trick of putting the drive in the freezer and cooling it with dry ice while I try to pull more off of it, as the failure appears to be heat related since it starts acting up as soon as it reaches a slightly than higher than normal operating temp.

The drive in question is a WD5000AAKS 500GB WD SATA unit that is a year old, and of course was made just before WD upped the warranty from 1 year to 3 years. To be honest finding this out after checking the warranty status, seeing that WD’s “Customer Loyalty” prices for a replacement or upgrade are pretty much the retail price ($3 below MSRP to be exact), and seeing failure rates/causes similar to the data destroyers made by Maxtor before the Seagate buyout (Maxtor really hasn’t improved much since the buyout though other than fewer models are being made).

I have decided that WD can suck it and will only use Seagate, Hitachi, or Samsung drives in the future. Mainly Seagate since they have the best warranty and the last time I had to replace a barely out of warranty drive, which was years ago, they replaced it with a larger drive at about 75% of the retail cost of the dead drive for “Customer Loyalty” and they even sent me the new one with a return label to send the dead one back. Something that has made me lean toward purchasing their storage products ever since.

Lastly, I’m 36 today and, of course, in grand tradition I’d like to say thanks for the birthday wishes and would like you kids to get the hell off my lawn. If you’re still here after I go inside to change into a comfortable tshirt, tacky plaid shorts, black socks, and sandals, I’ll have no other choice than to turn the lawn sprinklers on.

Thanks all, I’m off to drink my birthday Guinness.

I’ve sort of resurrected a project that I never got around to finishing.

The mini MAME/Jukebox that has been sitting at a friends for the last couple years.

I’ve been testing software on the system and have got the jukebox software working properly and am now almost done with the MAME arcade emulation software selection, just need to test a few more to narrow down what works best and is easiest to set up as far as input devices are concerned.

Just need to get with my friend to work out the specs of the half finished cabinet.

I’ve been patiently waiting for a CPU that I ordered as a final upgrade to my main system.

An Intel Pentium D 935, 3.2GHz dual core, 2MB per core L2, humdinger of a CPU which made it to my door.

I manage to perform a coolant drain, CPU water block removal, processor swap, reassembly, and refill the cooling system in record time to flip the switch and get nothing, not even post.

I then find out after some spec digging for 30 minutes that the board I have is an early revision and does not support the processor.

Now I have a CPU I really have no use for sitting here. Sure I could get a board and build another system, but if I’m going to do that I might as well perform a full system upgrade by getting a more recent CPU, mainboard, memory, and graphics combo and do it right.

I should have known my pre CPU purchase research went a little too easily. And of course in the time I order and get the thing the board manufacturer managed to slip in an update of the supported processors.

After getting the old processor back in and the system working again, being tired from the marathon speed I worked at and having been up almost 24 hours, I decided going into a temporary coma was in order.

Now I’m wide awake at almost 5 AM writing this.

The Central Plains Severe Weather Symposium is next weekend, Saturday March 29th to be exact. Open and free to the public.

Visit http://www.cpsws.unl.edu/ for more info and the schedule for this day long event.

Received my prescription sunglasses I ordered today.

Once again I went through Goggles4u.com as they were the one online site that had a frame I liked and thought would make a good pair of sunglasses.

The order arrived in the same 12 day time frame as the two pairs I had previously ordered, came with a spare set of nose pads and screws, and cost the same as the other glasses, $26 for the frames and lenses with an 80% black tint, with shipping included.

A bargain online purchase considering a pair of prescription sunglasses aquired locally would easily cost about $200 to $250 depending on the vendor, frame cost, and lens costs after figuring in the tinting.

I am now officially sold on purchasing my glasses online, not only due to the quality of the lenses and frames being the same if not better quality wise, but the price simply can’t be beat by the local shops here.