If you're an Internet geek, you're probably not overly impressed that I'm getting this kind of connection speed... until I tell you that I'm sitting in a laundromat outside of Black Mountain, NC!
At 3:00 in the afternoon today, on Wednesday, I'm waking up from a 90 minute nap, and Adam has been asleep for 40 minutes. I'm estimating that Lydia has been asleep for 30 minutes. Some of you reading might be thinking, "so what?" If you've ever had a newborn at home, your reaction might be, "how does he have any idea what day of the week it is, let alone how long his nap was, and when his son and wife fell asleep??"
Enter Trixie Tracker. This website allows you to keep tabs on your child's "telemetry:" how often he feeds, how many diapers he has, when he sleeps, and more for older children. It was developed by a stay-at-home Dad whose medical resident-wife wanted to be able to see how her newborn daughter was doing from work. He really expanded it to be a full fledged web application tracking all sorts of statistics. And it's not complex. For most entries, you just click a button and "boom," it updates the time and all the characteristics.
I know by now, you're probably thinking several things, including "geek," "how anal retentive," etc. It's already saved our brains several times in the hospital... when the nurse asked, "how many diapers this evening?" instead of "uh..." I clicked a button and said, "poopy at 4:54 and poopy at 11:53." And when I woke up from my nap to my wife and son asleep, I didn't have to wonder, "gee... should I wake them up?" I just checked the site.*
Tomorrow, we take Adam to the pediatrician for the first time, and I'm bringing a printout of his stats. I'm sure she'll either be thrilled or mortified.
*Okay, I cheated on knowing how long Lydia was asleep. The Tivo was 30 minutes into a program!
A geek rite of passage is about to be eliminated. CompUSA is closing its doors for good.
CompUSA is the first store that I and my brother ever camped out at for an early-morning sale. Now I forget even what we were trying to buy... probably something like a 120MB hard drive and SimCity 2000.
Ever since Tandy's ill-fated Computer City failed, there was only one source for last-minute computer parts around. CompUSA filled a niche that WalMart does for non-tech items - if you needed an IDE cable or replacement modem in a pinch, they probably had it in stock. But even WalMart is muscling in on that game.
In recent years, CompUSA has been for me, and probably a lot of other people, the "try before you buy" store. You go in and play with all the mice, then go online and order what you want for 30% less from someone else. Unfortunately, that's a pretty bad business model.
Now, Nashville will be without a "big box" computer source. Sure, we've got the Best Buy and Circuit City mafiosos around, and Mac Authority does a great job for the Apple-centric crowd. However, now would be a GREAT time for a Fry's expansion plan to include Music City (hint hint hint.)
Our Uninterruptable Power Supply was interrupted. In the course of the storms this week, we must have had a power surge, and the UPS did its job. We have a new one coming from Circuit City (hat tip to fatwallet.com of course.)
Irony of ironies though, our UPS is coming via FedEx.
This week, we picked up a new "point and shoot" camera. Our requirements were sort of complex: Secure Digital memory, a good zoom, non-proprietary batteries, reasonably priced, and a good review at Steve's Digicams.
We ended up with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ3. It's a 5MP, 6x optical zoom camera, and it's small enough to throw into a fanny pack. Plusses are: video recording, several auto modes, 2" LCD (we would have liked 2.5 or 3", but you start shelling out lots more for that) and something that I'm thrilled about - two levels of auto image stabilization.
Here are the first shots:
According to several sites, my mini can boot from an external firewire hard drive, no problem. Using SuperDuper, it was easy for me to create an image of my boot drive on my 80GB, 7200RPM firewire/USB 2.0 drive. However, that just got me a faster... not bigger boot drive.
I also have a 200GB, 5400RPM firewire/USB 2.0 drive. That would give me the space increase, but not the performance boost, especially over firewire. Plus, it's currently my backup drive for the various computers we have around the house (and then some.)
I have tried every combination... one FW, one USB, both daisy chained through FW, one in front of the other... and the mini only seems to like one combination: the internal drive and one external drive. It sees both drives and can do things to both drives... but it sometimes hangs in the middle of operations. I don't know if that's a limitation of the mini, or the interface standards, but I can't seem to get around it.
Ah well, I guess I'll just have to save up for one of these.
