And Even More Snow

Two inches overnight. Crazy.

Google Maps Rocks

Under Google maps click the tab that says "My Maps", then click "New Map" and you'll have some drawing tools up top. You can use the line tool to draw and it will give you mileage. This is freakin awesome! It used to be limited to streets, but now you can draw around the high school track, across the lake, down the Burke Gilman. This is so useful for any kind of distance training, especially for triathlons! It's also useful for the bored, the neurotic, and the collectors of random meaningless data.

Crotch Warning

Our friends John & Shireesha just got back from India with many great pix and stories, but I just loved this sign from a lake they visited. John's caption is great...


"This sign warns people not to swim in the lake at Kodaikanal, or apparently something bad will happen to your crotch."

I'm Cool by Association

I love having friends who do remarkable things. And I know quite a few remarkable people. Fil, however, seems to have a better publicist because he keeps ending up on billboards and newspapers. Check out the article yo.

Adventures in Computing

Our TV died a few months ago, so we have been working on the transition to a media computer in the living room. We want to get rid of all the stereo, vcr, dvd, and big ass speaker business. We decided to use my old Hot Rod computer, but it needs some additional mods.

First of all, it sounds like a jet engine, which simple will not do for living room entertainment, so I bought a silent heatsink (that's the fan and radiator coil thing on the processor) and a new energy efficient and quiet power supply.

Here's the old set up with custom power graphic and two-tone paint job, complete with chrome wire sleeves.

The new heatsink was too big to fit on my motherboard, so I had to cut some of the extruding peices off.

Here's the exposed processor with power supply and heatsink gone.

And it would have been to easy to be able to just snap the new heatsink in. I had to actually disassemble the entire computer, pci cards and everything, as the new heatsink required mounting brackets that had to be installed from behind.

And here it is with the new parts squeezed in. When I turned it back on it was a little quieter, but not a huge difference. :(

I need a quiter vid card and then it should be ship shape...

I tried to add a wireless card, but my computer wouldn't take it (kept freezing), so I sent that card back and went and got another brand and same damn thing! So after multiple reformats and hours or troubleshooting, I just decided to run a CAT5 cable under the house and go hard wired. It was fun to work with a new type of cable - very easy to splice.

Here's the finished product in the living room. I feel so high-tech having CAT5 plates in my walls now!

And the final addition was a TV tuner card that also picks up FM radio. It was only $40 and it comes w/ a remote and it works great. You can even record live TV, like Tivo I guess. Now we need to get an antenna on top of the house. Did you know you can pick up over the air HD with rabbit ears?

More Snow

It seems like in the past we would get snow once about every four years. This winter we've had snow four times. We got about an inch a couple nights ago and it's still here!

2 Pix

Letter Press Printing

This is a repost from a few weeks ago. I had to move it cuz all these political whackos kept bugging me.

I went over to my buddy Chris's house and helped him crank out some posters off of his old letterpress. I had used something similar in college in a print making class, but it was so long ago that this was like a completely new experience. The posters are gorgeous, too. Each one comes off the press a little differently, so they are all unique. You have to do the colors in stages, so we did the black, and he'll do the final red ink after a couple days.

Chris has a company called Henceforth Press and does some great stuff, check it out.



Update: I just put one of these rare posters on eBay.