Not much doing up here. Ross has moved into a dorm at U of O (Eugene). I bought him a Mac Book Pro. It was supposed to be a high school graduation present, but someone told him Intel was coming out with a new processor that Apple was going to use in a laptop and he should just wait. So he waited and waited and waited until he couldn't stand it anymore and decided to go with what was available. Still waiting for Apple to announce.
Diligent daughter is working about 15 hours a week at the Spaghetti Factory as a hostess. Not very happy, doesn't like the people she has to work with, but we told her she should stick it out for a while, maybe it will get better. We shall see. She makes better money babysitting for the occasional rich client, but that is the problem, it is occasional.
Johnny is in geek heaven (or is it nerd heaven?). He just bought a new motherboard and a 600 watt power supply for his computer. He wasn't satisfied with his last motherboard. It was supposed to support IDE and SATA hard disks, but we could never get it to talk to the SATA drive. So he deemed it junk and refused to use it at all. He spent last night and this morning lapping heat sinks. For better heat transfer you know. Not enough to use Artic silver heat transfer paste ($8 for 5 gram tube), you have to spend hours sanding the surface of the heat sink to make it as flat as possible. All this is so the processor can run faster, and that means more heat. To run it faster, you sometimes need to increase the voltage, and that means even more heat. The BIOS these days lets you adjust the voltage to the CPU in one-tenth volt increments. And you can adjust about four different memory timing parameters. Reminds me of hot rodders from back in the sixties.
We went to Home Depot and bought a piece of aluminum stock, brought it home and cut four pieces to make a short duct for the cpu fan. With the fan sitting right on top of the CPU, there is a dead spot under the central hub (where the motor is). By moving the fan away from the heat sink, he hopes to eliminate this dead (aka hot) spot.
Nobody likes the mirrors on my truck, not even me. I've almost run down pedestrians twice because they block my view. I called the dealer, they have smaller power mirrors available. $350 installed. If it would save me from buying a new car, it would be worth it. It wouldn't, of course, but I could use that argument to justify buying them. Then I thought I would check on E-bay. $9 for a pair. Of course I have to install them myself. And I have to figure out how to seal them. And I have to make a trip to the store for electrical connectors. And they have fake carbon fiber texturing painted on. I am about half way through the installation.
Hired a bookkeeper to keep track of our household expenses. I would spend all weekend avoiding doing it. It was getting ridiculous. She came in this morning and did in two hours what I have been stalling on for weeks.
Anne is getting ready to buy new furniture. Got new carpet and had the inside of the house painted this summer.
Work goes on. I have finally figured out that the powers that be do not have any idea what I do. So I don't worry much about getting anything done there anymore.
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