Archive for October, 2006

Some people seemed to think that the jack-o-lantern that we carved this year looks a little bit like Yours Truly. I’ll let you decide.

Every few weeks a bunch of us (mostly) married guys congregate to rot our brains and enjoy some much-needed multiplayer video game action. Usually we are content with just one television and taking turns, but someone began spreading rumours of an unused television in Dan’s apartment, but he was still at work. Spencer finally got up and walked out. Minutes later he kicked the front door open bearing a second one-eyed monster! Dan’s wife apparently let him take it! We immediately hooked it up to Mike’s NES (that’s Nintendo Entertainment System. Aptly named when Nintendo only had one video game console on the market.) and Matt made sure the first game played was RBI Baseball. There was some difficulty getting the game to work. I pitched in and even though I hadn’t done it for over eight years, I knew just how to exhale into the cartridge and then place it almost all the way in, then push down and diagonally toward the back of the system simultaneously to achieve the perfect connection with the contacts. The title screen came up, but there were still some artifacts. Mike did it again and took care of those. Everyone laughed as they recalled the long-forgotten techniques we all employed in our youth to wrestle the NES into action.

The rest of us played Super Monkey Ball 2 and Mario Party 7 on the Gamecube. I can’t wait to get a similar picture with the Wii on one TV and the NES on the other.

I didn’t bring my camera but Michael Whiting, our gracious host (and awesome sculptor) let me use the one he took below.

Yes, it is. Well, almost. You technically can’t apply until January 1st, but now is the time to start thinking about it and planning ahead. It almost always seems to sneak up on me. I never seem to have the inside track on applying for financial aid… that is, until this year. There is a great free resource for information about applying for the FAFSA online this year. Not only does FAFSAonline.com have information about maximizing your award, but they also have some helpful MP3 guides to help anyone fill out the FAFSA. After you fill out the FAFSA and get it submitted you can get info about student loans and make sure that you know about every opportunity to get money for school. This will be especially important for me this year because I’m transferring to a university, and that means that the price of schooling is really going up for me this year.

I have some homework that’s due by midnight tonight. One would think that since this homework has a deadline so near and since I know it will take me about two hours worth of work to get it done that I would have picked it up first thing, right? Well, I am really good at finding things to do when there is a task I don’t want to work on. I filled out the rebate form for a product that was recently delivered and got it ready to go. I listened to a podcast while I looked up some information for another assignment that’s due in a couple of weeks that I haven’t started yet. I had some candy and I drank some water. I looked into the newest version of Wordpress and the steps needed to upgrade. I noticed that there was a new version of Freevo just released and that got me thinking about DirectFB and df_xine. I looked and saw that DirectFB just released 1.0-rc2 and I downloaded that and started it compiling. I wrote a post for PayPerPost, and I decided to blog about how I’m procrastinating too much.

It’s time to start getting stuff done. I still haven’t decided exactly how I am going to implement it, whether I go paper or digital. Expect progress reports to come.

I have been doing PayPerPost for almost a month. In three days the money starts rolling in. I can’t remember where I heard about PayPerPost, to be honest. All I do remember is how excited I was when I realized that I could make enough money to do something that I would never have been able to otherwise. When the Nintendo Wii comes out on November 19th I will have enough to get the console, an extra controller, and a couple of games. Within a week after the release of the Wii I will have enough for at least two more games. After that I foresee that I will be making enough to pay the monthly rent, or at least almost all of it. That means that I start whittling away the consumer debt that we have accrued as a young married couple that likes expensive toys (and furniture). I never thought that something like this would be possible while I was still in school. But here I am in school and getting out of debt at the same time. I wish PayParPost the best of luck in their business as it has been nothing short of amazing to me and the many bloggers who have benefited from its business model.

I looked for two days for a Ninja costume. That’s what I was going to be for Halloween. I was playing video games with a bunch of guys and one of them asked what we were going to be for Halloween and three people said,

“Ninja.”
“Ninja.”
And, “Ninja.”

So I said that I had been planning on being a Ninja, but that didn’t seem so appealing anymore. I’d have to say the most popular costumes this Halloween are Ninja and Pirate. So I took a sharp left turn and went with Jailbird. The stripes just look cool, and I don’t even have to put on any makeup to give me that stubbly effect!

Some astute readers may have noticed the new Disclosure Policy link on the sidebar. This was created using the Disclosure Policy Generator and is an attempt to make it obvious what motivates the posts on this blog. I am confident that this was created by people who are not happy with the model that PayPerPost.com has come up with to pay bloggers, but I see no harm in a disclosure policy so long as it is honest. Click on the link above if you would like to generate your own disclosure policy. I did.

So I have been slowly learning how to do things the “Arch Linux Way” these past couple of days. I am really impressed with the way it is set up. I still haven’t run into a package that I want that isn’t already in the repositories, so I haven’t had occasion to compile my own software or make any packages yet under Arch. I hope that process is as smooth as everything else so far.

My brand new Nova Tech mini PCI card arrived today, and I was really excited to try it out. I got the kernel module installed and gave it a go. It couldn’t see anything. So I started doing some research. It turns out that the Dell Latitude c600 requires an additional tiny little hirose u.fl cable. You’d think a thin little 4-inch long cable would cost maybe between $3 and $5, but that’s not the case. Dell seems to have forgotten that people might actually need this part and have kindly removed any mention of it from their website. Reports I read stated that calling tech support results in stupefied silence. The item has become a wonderful specialty part that some companies are selling for as much as $40! I found one on eBay for $7.77 plus $3 for shipping. I was hoping to just pop into Fry’s and grab one, but now I have to wait another week for one to come in from Rhode Island.

Speaking of Fry’s, I wanted to check out their prices on 256MB sticks of PC100 SODIMM RAM. So I poured over their confusing grid of memory prices until an associate finally acknowledged me. I asked him what the cheapest price for the RAM I needed was. He punched i up into the computer and then called someone else. I couldn’t hear the conversation. Then he turned back around and said they didn’t have any! I thought he might tell me that all the good priced RAM was gone, but not that I couldn’t get it at all! I only have 64MB right now and I get programs dying for lack of RAM.

One last thing… I was all set to get this ultra-portable laptop ready to go today because all I needed was the proprietary Dell IDE connector that arrived in the mail today. I had to preload the OS onto the hard drive because the laptop I was installing it into has no drives but the single hard drive. I got everything set up to the point where I could connect it to the network and transfer the rest of the files onto it that way. I went to install it and it was too thick! I hadn’t even considered that that old laptop would use the slim form factored hard drives found in current systems. So all that work was for nothing. Now I’m looking for another hard drive.

I’ve talked before about the coyotes that come out at night and make all sorts of noise howling and attacking one another across the creek from us. I love using my binoculars and a maglite to try and spot them and get them to leave. What would really be great is to get out there with some night vision goggles, though. Then I could see them wherever they may be hiding. Optics Planet is a great place for all things optical. They offer the latest and greatest binoculars, scopes, lasers, telescopes, etc. They have guaranteed low prices and stuff made by practically every company imaginable. Best of all they offer free UPS shipping on all orders of $29.99 or more.

If you don’t know where to start with these kinds of optical products they have a gift guide showcasing all of the best recommended items available this holiday season. One of my favorite items is something that I had never thought about before but seems like a natural merging of technologies: the Digital Camera Binoculars! Not only do you get a great close up view of the action, but you can take a picture of it as you are watching it. Use the binoculars as a viewfinder. I’ve tried to take a picture with a camera by holding it up to the eyepiece on my binoculars. It just doesn’t work. If I had one of these I could finally get pictures of those coyotes attacking each other at 2am. There is some great stuff available for Christmas gifts this year.

I bought a 20 GB laptop hard drive off of eBay a week or so ago. I was looking for the cheapest way to get a Dell Latitude C600 back on its feet. It is a pretty snappy machine considering that I got it for free. It had no hard drive or even hard drive connectors, only one stick of 64 MB RAM, a pretty nice battery, and no wifi. So I had my work cut out for me. I ended up paying a total of twenty dollars and some cents for this hard drive. It was sold “as is” which basically can mean one of two things on eBay:

1. I am selling a lot of products and am in too much of a hurry to test them all

or

2. I am a scammer and can sell broken crap without my buyers having any recourse

Fortunately for me the laptop arrived on the same day as the proprietary dell adapter for IDE drives. When I plugged it in it was recognized by the BIOS. I booted up Slax from a CD and the NTFS filesystem still had files on it. They all looked like the usual Windows 2000 files. I repartitioned the drive and formatted it. I ran badblocks on the drive and it didn’t find anything wrong. It looks like I got lucky! Now comes the difficult decision. What distro should I put on here. It’s a 700MHz Pentium 3 CPU. I plan on buying 256MB of ram for it, but so far I don’t have more than the 64MB it came with. At the moment I am leaning toward Arch Linux because it seems customizable like Slackware, but looks like it might be updated more often. I am apprehensive to switch away from Slackware, but I figure I ought to experiment with something new. I’m afraid Ubuntu would be too slow. But that’s probably more Gnome and KDE’s fault than anything else.

Pioneers in blog marketing and promotion, PayPerPost.com, provide unprecedented opportunities for bloggers to make their blogs pay off. I blog for fun, but fun doesn’t pay the bills. PayPerPost pays my bills. Check them out and find out just how much you could be making with only a few minutes worth of work. Find out about new products and services and be the first to know about them. You can have the latest news and get paid to talk about what you already would talk about anyway for free!

By the way, the picture at the right is part of the payperpostbluemonster contest worth $500 to the winner!

I hate the telephone. I hate answering the phone. I hate calling people on the phone. I don’t like the telephone because it is rude. If a person were as inconsiderate as the telephone is they would get a punch in the mouth. No matter what you are doing it just rings when someone enters the magic numerical incantation. When it was first invented it would just keep ringing until the person on the other end of the line gave up. That’s why answering machines were invented and why they are so popular. They make the phone shut up when you are in the middle of doing something. Most of the time when people call me they are requesting information or asking if I can do something in the distant future. When people call for these reasons it really aggravates me.

For the longest time I have been against putting any sort of personally identifying information on the answering machine. I worked for a short period of time in a call center where we called businesses and conducted surveys. I can’t believe I ever took the job because of how much I hate the phone. I actually used to call people for eight hours every day. When we got any sort of recording we were usually able to verify that we had the right telephone number and even, sometimes, the name of the person we needed to talk with (we only wanted people that could answer financial questions about the company, so they needed to be at least a head accountant). You ask the secretary (who we affectionately called the “gatekeeper”) if we could talk with the Accountant or the CFO at the company. Usually asking a vague nameless question like that gets you voice mail. Well, the Voice Mail usually had their first and sometimes their last name on the recording (”Hi, you’ve reached the office of Dale Higgins…”). So then you write that down and call back later and confidently ask for Dale Higgins.

Where am I going with all this, you might ask. Well, I really want to change my answering machine message to simply give my email address and then say something like: “If you have a request you would like to make of Shawn please email shawn dot dowler at gmail dot com. That is the fastest and most reliable way to get a timely response. We are not responsible for unreturned phone calls.” I have another address I could give out that would leave out my last name. I think that might be vague enough. I don’t know how people would take such a message, though. Maybe I could add: “If this is an informational call not requiring a response, please leave a message after the beep.” I figure that that’s probably the most cordial way to handle the situation. Then it’s goodbye phone, hello email!

PayPerPost has allowed some people to make the money they need for all kinds of things. I make enough in one month to pay the rent on the apartment Krissy and I live in! It’s like having the money from a part-time job but still having the time to focus on school!

If you are interested and want to make money, and you would like to help me out then please use my email address (shawn dot dowler at gmail dot com) in the referral field when you sign up. The sooner you sign up the sooner you can start making money!

Making web pages used to be fun. I started back in the old days around 1996 with my first attempts to learn HTML. It wasn’t complicated. There weren’t very many tags. There was no such thing as CSS. You just made invisible tables to position everything. Life was good. You didn’t have anything so complicated that it “looked wrong” in another browser. Then things started to change. People started using Microsoft Internet Explorer and making their web pages with it as their rendering tester. After their designs were finished they would start getting complaints about how their site was all messed up in Netscape Navigator (that’s what the web browser was called back then). So instead of trying to make their site work right in all browsers (which is still hard today) they just slapped a little image on their site that said “This page best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer Version X.”

There has been a push for web standards in the hope that pages might render the same on all browsers. No browser implements all of the standards correctly, unfortunately, but some didn’t even try. Internet Explorer has historically been the most popular among web users, but at the same time the worst when it came to standard compliance. The biggest problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer, though, has been that it had been years since it was updated with any new features. New technologies have emerged that were simply unsupported in the most widely used browser in the world. It appears that IE7 seeks to change that. I still don’t recommend that people use it over Firefox, but at least with the world shifting to a more feature-rich browser web designers can finally start using the advanced technologies that have been supported by Firefox, Opera, Safari, and others for years now.

Maybe Microsoft Internet Explorer’s best contribution to the Internet will be that it makes web design fun again. Let’s home it doesn’t end up like IE6 in a couple of years: ignored and outdated.

All I have to say is that this new mosaic puzzle must be huge to have this many pieces. This time PayPerPost.com, the company that pays bloggers for blog ads online, has got something really exciting planned. At least that’s what they’ve said. It’s still a secret, but it won’t be for long! Remember, the first person to assemble the entire payperpostbluemonster picture out of all the little puzzle pieces gets $500 for their trouble. Let me know what it’s like when you win!

On my way home from the Church Membership Records Audit I stopped by the dry cleaner’s to pick up Krissy’s clothes she had left there. We always go to the same place where there is a really nice woman that works there with her surly husband. I always hope she is manning the counter when I go to do anything. Today the husband was vacuuming behind the counter when I walked in, ticket in hand. I handed him the ticket and he went over to the clothes roller coaster. When he came back he said it was five dollars. I always pay with a credit card, it just makes things easier to keep track of finances that way. I took out my card and offered it to him. He didn’t move. He just stood there and snidely said, “It’s only five dollars.” So I stood for a second with my hand outstretched, not moving. Then I finally said something like. “Oh. Alright. Let’s see if I have any cash.” I knew I had a 50 dollar bill on me, that was a gift I had received, and it is part of the Wii fund. I honestly didn’t know if I had five dollars. I found one, though, and gave it to him.

I just couldn’t believe that he would scoff at my plastic money. I understand that each transaction with a credit card costs him money, but I would assume that that cost is already factored into the price for the dry cleaning service. I’m just proud of myself that I didn’t get mad.

Here is a rather interesting looking payperpostbluemonster puzzle piece this time. PayPerPost.com provides an easy meeting place for bloggers and advertisers to help each other through blog marketing. Whether you want to get your product or service out there or you want to pay your blog hosting costs, PayPerPost is the way to accomplish your goals online.

Over the past few years of waiting and watching many sites slowly switching to a reliance on Flash 8, Linux users have been left out in the cold. Adobe originally promised a version of Flash 8 for Linux, but then they decided to jump over that release and just work on getting a Linux version of Flash 9 out the door. I can say that in my preliminary usage of the new plugin it is much more stable even though it is still in beta. It is more stable than Flash 7 for Linux (which kept crashing Firefox). So I say upgrade now to Flash 9 for Linux and enjoy a more stable, more compatible Flash experience online.

I admittedly don’t know much about Sytropin HGH or Human Growth Hormone or any other nutritional supplements. My Aunt, Dawn, knows tons about these kinds of things though. HGH is still a relatively new discovery. Sytropin triggers the body to produce more HGH than it normally would, so it’s all-natural. Accordion to some studies HGH can have results similar to what many would consider to be an age reversal in physical terms. I don’t know all of the information, but Sytropin appears to be one of the most popular ways to stimulate natural HGH production. There is a good article about HGH supplements you should also check out. I’m all for anything that makes you feel better. Give it a look-see.

Our neighbors across the way has a habit of leaving a bag of trash outside the door of their apartment. You’d think they would get it on their way out in the morning, but such is often not the case. Krissy and I thought it might be a nice gesture to take it out to the trash for them when we were already going that way anyway leaving the apartment. After a while it got to be kind of a running joke. The missionaries came over once when the trash was there and they took it down when they left. It looks like the fun might be over, however.

Today we got one of our apartment manager’s infamous letters telling us that we’re doing something wrong. They try not to target any individual for some reason, which only leads to inaction. This time the wording was in the passive voice: “We have received several complaints that there has been trash left outside apartment doors in the hallways of building 1726.” I doubt that it will really stop until someone actually knocks on their door ant tells them in person to quit it and hands them a written letter with their name and apartment number on it telling them to stop or else.

I wonder if they will ever know what happened to their trash when they left it outside their apartment.

Every time we have to cut up an onion for a recipe it’s always a coin toss, paper-rock-scissors, or choosies for who has to cut them up. It’s always difficult because the onion always wants to fall apart mid-chop. On top of that, though, it takes too long and that makes you cry as you hover over the onion and get the fumes from it reacting with the water in your eye which produces sulfuric acid! What we really need is the Ultimate Chopper. This thing makes short work of practically any chopping task. Check it out!

Well, Tommy, they finally did it. It finally happened, and we weren’t there for it. Tommy and I had this idea when we were kids that people should have a soundtrack for themselves when they walk. I’m sure the idea came from video games where there is always background music for no apparent reason. Now there is a wearable computer called PersonalSoundtrack that plays music from a playlist based on your current walking speed. Minor variations in speed are measured and the music speed is dynamically adjusted to match your footsteps. If a deliberate speed change is detected then a faster, more speed-appropriate song is started. I think I would have the slow Peter and the Wolf song for slow walking. I don’t know about fast walking, though. There are so many possibilities it would be difficult to choose just one.

The hardware and software upon which this is built is open source and there is a section for source code on the web site. I’m assuming this will become an open source project soon. This would be a fun project and a great way to annoy people and have fun at the same time.

It’s amazing just how difficult it can be for those who are addicted to painkilling medication like Vicodin. I know someone who had this problem. They didn’t realize they were addicted until they decided to try and cut back on their dosage and soon realized that the pain they were feeling was from withdrawal symptoms and was completely separate from the pain they were trying to get rid of when they started the medication. It is possible for some to break the addiction on their own, but for others the pain is unbearable. Meditox offers a solution that doesn’t require giving up anything in your life. Their drug detox method includes a replacement medication along with individual help and support. If you know anyone who has wanted to get off their prescription pain medication but has found it impossible, now there is help available.

I decided that I ought to test out the Dell C600 laptop I got from Krissy’s dad. I only have one stick of 64MB RAM, so I put it in the machine. I popped in a bootable Linux CD and off I went. I was able to verify everything. I ran memtest on it all night, too, and the memory I have now is good. That’s surprising considering that it’s been hopping from laptop to laptop for longer than I know anything about. I got a 20GB hard drive off of eBay that’s on its way. I’m trying to do all of this as cheaply as possible so I took a gamble on an “as is” sale. Let’s cross our fingers. I also put a bid on an Atheros based mini PCI wifi card that someone pulled out of an old Toshiba laptop. Let’s just hope I can figure out a way to connect it to the Dell laptop’s internal antenna.

While I was looking for a PCMCIA network card one of the pictures was of a scantily clad woman. I thought it must be a prank or a mistake, so I checked out the seller’s profile. They seem to be a high-volume seller basically running an eBay-based business selling computer components. The list of their sales showed that almost all of their products had, as the primary photo, which is supposed to be of the product in question, lingerie models posing. I guess it’s true what they say, as the seller seemed to be doing pretty good business.

Many people think that finding a unique gift is hard. Some people just go out and buy everything they really want, so coming up with something they don’t even know about is the answer. Some of the best sites out there for getting good gift ideas are surprise.com, Gifts.com, and FindGift.com. My personal favorite, though is surprise.com. You choose whether you’re shopping for a man or a woman and then pick a theme. For me I would think things I might like would be under “Gadgeteer.” But there are other categories like “chocoholic,” and “manly man” as well. You are sure to find something for that hard to shop for person on your holiday list.

Krissy was having so much trouble today with staining all four sides of the table legs that she had to figure out a way to hang them up. If we had a garage that would really make things so much easier, but we don’t. Krissy got the ingenious idea to hang the legs up in the bathroom by the shower rod. So I rigged up some twine (hooray for Boy Scouts!) and get it all ready for her to hang them by the bolt near the top of each leg. I must say that it worked out perfectly! That means no more showers until the stain has dried, though. And we have to run the fan in the bathroom 24/7 until the fumes stop wafting off of the wood, but it’s still better than what she was doing before!

Pictures coming soon.

I know a lot of people are excited to see this new payperpostbluemonster promotion. A whole lot of people are also trying to grab as many of these puzzle pieces as they can so they can get themselves a cool $500. This is put on by PayPerPost.com who allows companies to pay bloggers for blog ads placed on their blogs. Good Luck!

I have three programming classes right now. One of them is actually a class about computer history and structure. My 160 class has tons of homework and takes me hours to finish even though the material is all stuff that I already know. My 221 class is data structures and algorithms using Java and I’m learning Java as I go, so that’s a fun class. The only homework is a program due every two to three weeks. My 222 class is Assembler Language using i386. I thought it would be a pretty difficult class. The biweekly homework assignment is to read and then answer 4 questions then do a super-simple program that takes about 10 lines of code and 30 minutes to work through. So, what I’m wondering is: why is my intro class (where I’m not learning) more difficult than the more advanced classes where I am learning? Maybe it’s all in how you rate difficulty. I think the concepts learned are less advanced in the 160 class and probably anyone who was willing to do the work would get an A. You could get lost in the 221 and 222 classes and not even know where to begin, I guess.

I still think more work is harder than more advanced concepts, though.

Shopping for insurance is not an easy thing. There are so many things to consider it can drive you crazy. I remember the last time we looked at the health plans we had to choose from and there are some things you could easily see but other things you would know about unless you had already made use of the insurance you had chosen. Vimo is out to change everything by letting you compare local insurance carriers and showing ratings of doctors. Thew welcome anyone to rate their doctors and they use this to help you make your decisions. Right now you can get a free t-shirt for rating your doctor.

If you are looking for insurance or if you just need a better plan or better rates head on over to Vimo, enter your zipcode and see how much better you could be doing.

Krissy got to work tonight on staining the entrance table a dark mahogany color. We went to Home Depot hoping to get just what we were looking for. They had the right color but we still had to buy a can of stain at least twice as big as we needed. They had smaller ones, but not for the glossy stain only for the “satin” finish. When we got home we moved the dining room table into the kitchen blocking access to the dishwasher, sink, and trash can. Now we have a pile of dishes and trash on the counter next to the sink! Let’s hope it gets even higher tomorrow.

Krissy laid out a tarp on the linoleum in front of the piano and got to work. It says to do two coats sanding after the first with a really fine-grained steel-wool. Here’s what the table looks like so far. Pictures coming soon.

It’s difficult for most people to realize how easy it can be to use the Internet to make money. It’s not really so difficult once you know what to do and how to do it. The problem for most people is that they don’t have anything to sell and if they did, they wouldn’t know how to attract people to their website to sell it. The Information Product Creation Course is a five-hour course that shows you step-by-step how to turn your desire for Internet sales into a real money-making opportunity. This guy starts from scratch. He doesn’t even have an idea when he starts, but you will learn how to brainstorm and come up with a real winner.

After he gets the idea he needs to get going he shows what tools to use to bring your idea to like online. He goes over choosing and registering a domain as well as how to effectively advertise your new product’s website. You don’t need anything fancy to do all of this. If you have access to the Internet, Windows, and a web browser then you are literally in business. I can’t wait to get started myself. Get started today and watch as you earn money while you sleep!

Nintendo added new video recently of people playing games on the Wii for the very first time. It looks like these people probably wouldn’t play video games on their own normally, but they are having a lot of fun with the Wii. Unfortunately they use Flash 8 for the videos. It’s not their fault, but Linux users are out of luck viewing these. Watching these videos, though, made me even more excited for the Wii release.

Most firewall security analysis tools either look at past activity and warn you about what has already happened in the past or they look at your current settings by hammering the network with tons of packets and telling you about the results. AlgoSec takes a different approach. They analyze your network’s settings and run simulations without sending a single packet over the network. They then warn you about possible future breaches of security so you can fix them before someone exploits them.

I first saw this at ldswebguy.com. I tested this myslef and was quite surprized. The #1 spot on a google search for “church” returns lds.org, the official homepage of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Result #7 is a link to mormon.org, a site geared toward people who are not memebers of the Church who want to know more about it. This isn’t meaningful in the long term because these things can fluctuate. But it does indicate trends on the web and what people are linking to when they talk about church.

At the payperpost blog they have a video up of the newest crazy idea they’ve come up with. At payperpost.com you can get paid different amounts for different types of blog posts. The payperpost crew has decided to take this out of the computer and into real life. These guys seem like a lot of fun. They give a random postie, Victor in San Francisco, a choice of three different tasks and each one has a different dollar amount associated with it. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so just give it a look-see. And by the way, if you want to join payperpost after watching this use my email address as the one who referred you and I get $5. PayPerPost just keeps getting more and more interesting. Did I mention that they are funding my impending purchase of the Nintendo Wii?

I wish Dell wouldn’t use weird connectors for their laptop hard drives. I opened up an HP laptop and there was no unusual connector, it was straight IDE. Two of the laptops I have gotten from Krissy’s dad are missing the converter from IDE to some proprietary thing. Now I get to troll around on eBay and bid ninety-nine cents and pay six dollars in shipping on these things. I can’t wait for the UPS ground to get from Florida to California. Let’s see how long it takes.