My wife got me the Krups BeerTender for an early Father’s Day gift. We will be out of town on Father’s Day and I am having a poker game next Saturday. So getting the gift today is extra special. I am not a huge fan of Heineken beer, so I am going to be weighting with bated breath for other brands to make these mini-kegs for the BeerTender.
It’s too early to make a judgement call, but that will come at next week’s poker game. I am sure l will love it when I can use it with a variety of beer.
My New/Old PC is up and running. All the parts came Friday, except the TV Tuner card which arrived on Thursday. I put the main computer together on my bed while I watched the season finally to Lost last night. I installed the TV tuner card this morning.
I don’t want to give away too many details on the components I purchased (I am saving that for an article on my main column). I hit some limitations with the motherboard. I went with the cheapest motherboard from ASUS or GIGABYTE that met my minimum requirements. These are two companies I trust, and I wanted a motherboard that could support gaming performance later. I got a GIGABYTE board and I realized why I saved money. For 1, there are only two memory slots. Not a problem yet because I bought 2 GB of memory with 2 memory sticks. Should I upgrade the memory I will have to replace my current memory. Not a huge deal, but something to consider if you know you will upgrade.
The next issue hit right away. The motherboard only has 1 IDE connector. And this connector only supports two devices. Damn. I was collecting all my hard drives and optical drives to install in this rig. I have a 100 GB SATA hard drive, a 120 GB IDE hard drive, a 20 GB IDE hard drive, a Plextor DVD/RW drive and an old ASUS 52X CD-ROM drive. I was hoping to use each hard drive as a bootable drive to play with other operating systems (Vista, XP, Linux). Well, I was left with only being able to install the 120 GB IDE hard drive and the DVD burner on the sole IDE connector. This not too bad, but it was kind of disappointing. I still have three SATA connectors left, so any future hard drives will go right in.
Overall the performance is very good running Windows Vista Home Premium. I have not activated it yet, because I have not made up my mind if I will stick with it. There is always Windows XP or Windows XP Media Center Edition (to go with the TV tuner card).
I’ll keep you posted.
As I mentioned, we were recently forced to upgrade to Office 2007 at work. I have my first legitimate grip. Yes, I think Office 2007 is a pain to use when coming from years of experience with previous versions of Office. I also think the ribbon bar takes up a lot of screen real estate. Oh, and each application is significantly slower to load than previous version.
All that aside, my first true complaint is with the title bar of the applications. The title bars do not use standard Windows colors for the title bars of an application. For instance, the default color for a title bar in Windows XP is bright blue when active and light blue when inactive. This gives you an immediate clue as to which application has the focus. Office 2007 applications use an even lighter shade of blue than the inactive windows color, with much less color deviation between applications with focus or without.
This breaks standard user interface guidelines… guidelines that Microsoft wrote. This is just plain wrong.
If you haven’t read it yet, you should read my article about resurrecting my old PC.
Last year my desktop PC was struck by lightening. I tried replacing the power supply, but it did not help. That meant I would have to replace the motherboard and its component (CPU, memory and video cards are all different from those in the fried motherboard). I don’t know if some parts are salvageable, but it does not matter. At this point all I need to re-use are the hard drive, DVD drive and the case.
All the new parts should arrive Friday (tomorrow). I know what I am doing this weekend.
I am not going to tell you here what parts I used. I am saving that for the next part of the article coming out on June 1 and part III which will be out on July 1st. However, I will tell you when it is running and any issues that come up getting it running.
Stay tuned…
Recently we purchased a Marcy SM 4000 home exercise setup. Well, the workouts are working. I took 4 quick measurements and weighed myself when I started. I just remeasured myself this morning and I am already making gains. My arms increased from 15-1/2 inches to 16-1/4. That 3/4″ in 5 weeks. Cool! My thighs increased from 23″ to 24″, but my chest is the same at 47-48″… depending one how I can hold the tape measure. My weight has gone from 219 to 225 lbs. This had me worried since I don’t think I can gain weigh “properly” that fast. But the ultimate proof came when I measures my gut and it went down 1″, from 42″ to 41″.
I can’t wait till I have those 17″ arms and a belly much smaller than my chest.
I just read that GM thinks its new “plug in hybrid” is going to be priced around $40,000. Ouch! I had high hopes for the Volt. I understand it will run about 40 miles on electric alone. That’s a bit short for me with a daily commute of 75-80 miles, but it is promising.
GM is trying to convince Congress that they should get a tax break that would make the car more affordable. In other words… everyone would help pay for the Volt through taxes. I am not sure I like that. I don’t know the answer, but I would rather they beat Toyota at the hybrid game without needing a tax break.
They are forcing everyone at work to upgrade to Office 2007. Whether we like it or not. My Operations Manager keeps saying we will love it after a couple of months. My wife has been using it for quite a while and she still struggles with it sometimes. I ran Office 07 briefly on my laptop when I installed Vista. I did not like it. I think the ribbon bar takes up too much screen real estate and the software is slow. When I switched back to Windows XP on my laptop I installed Office 2003 and find it to be more than enough for all my needs. In fact, Office 2000 is all I need, but I thought I might like Office 2003.
As you know, I have a page dedicated to Office & Outlook running on Vista. All my testing and all the posts to that page leave me to believe you should NOT run Office 2000 on Vista. Office 2003 works very well though.
I will report how I like Office 2007 in a few weeks.
Well, all is working with my new domain name, ScottLewisOnline. I am currently hosting it on my home server. I bought the domain name through GoDaddy, and I am using FreeDNS to point the name to my IP address. Finally, I am using FreeDNS Update to keep the IP address up to date when it changes.
I like how it all seems to be working. So far my total out of pocket expense is $10.18. That covers the domain name for 1 year. The other items are free (as their names imply). It has been over two years since my IP address changed, so it may be a long time before I know that FreeDNS & FreeDNS Update are working as expected. I assume I could always change my IP address manually on GoDaddy’s web site. But that is not the point. I want it to happen automagically.
If FreeDNS works well, I will send them a donation. It seems fair. So, here’s to waiting for my IP address to change. Maybe I should power down the next time I go out of town. That would likely force an IP change. I’ll keep you posted as we are going to Rockport next month.
The IP address at my house changed. I host my web site from there. I am trying to do this on the cheap, so I registered a domain name with GoDaddy and am trying to use FreeDNS to maintain pointing the doman name to my home, dynamic IP address.
I registered www.scottlewisonline.com. At the moment that is not working. I may be impatient. I will check it tomorrow. Time for bed.
