Entries from September 2008 ↓

This is my second trip to the Christianburg area of Virginia. Last time, on the way back to DC my dad and I took a drive up the the Blue Ridge Parkway. Yesterday, I decided to head down there and check out the southern section.

I got a bit of a lazy start. didn’t leave the hotel till just after 11. Took a bit over half-hour to go down the winding Hwy8 through Floyd until I got to Tuggle’s Gap. Last time dad and I had breakfast here. Was good food, so I decided to stop again. Lunch this time, a cheeseburger with lettuce, onion, ketchup and pickles. It was a square burger, and better than Wendy’s. Oh yea, side of onion rings along with that - hit the spot and I was back on the road before 12:30.

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Smoking or non-smoking? It’s odd question for me to be hearing after the year-plus of smoking bans up in MN. But I’m not in MN right now, I’m on VA. Christiansburg to be a bit more specific, and sitting at a table in O’Charley’s to be exact, waiting for my dinner as I write parts of this. I’m down here on business for the second time in a couple months.

That’s the reason for the picture actually. We’re building a Ben & Jerry’s down here and I’m here to try and get things wrapped up. The two smaller cows on the mural are my contribution to that. The larger cow is “Woody”, a Ben & Jerry’s Trademark by the way.

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Ok, I have a page on here that’s a sort of wish list/personal gift registery of suggestions for friends, family… or even strangers who might be looking for some gift ideas for me. But this “wish list” is going to be about some things I come across that I reeeeeeeallly want, but either just aren’t quite available yet, or maybe a wee bit out of my price range.

Here’s the firt one…

I’ve peeked at the Kindle and such, though have yet to hold one in my hands. But something just tells me this would trump them all… the as-of-yet-unnamed Plastic Logic eBook Reader.

An e-ink based reader that’s bout as large as a pad of paper. Give me the ability to “jot notes” in the margin and I think I’d be hooked for sure. See some videos from the company on YouTube, and read some more about it at BetaNews.

The next one is for when I’m done reading, and want to watch something… a pocket sized video projector from 3M. I first read about it on Popular Science. Eventually they want to put this thing in a cell phone, but heck.. I could see tossing this in my laptop bag right now. I don’t really need it, but would be so kewl to show off.

I could probably come up with lots more to add to this list… and probably will down the road, but these two are good enough to get me going.

So I picked up a couple of DVDs the other week, Airplane and Jackie Chan’s Police Story. I wanted to watch Police Story while surfing, so I popped the DVD in the drive and…. nothing.

I couldn’t get it to work with Mplayer, not with Totem. I futzed around with a couple things and it was probably a good 15-20 minutes before I realized… hey dummy… you never installed the codec’s after you installed 8.04 on this box. duh!

Ubuntu really does word “right out of the box” for.. well.. 99% of what you’d need it to do I suppose. That last 1% they can’t do because of licensing issues - least not without charging fees and crud. But they do make it easy as heck to add the codecs you need. (For those that don’t know what a codec is, think of it like the driver software you need to get your computer and printer to talk to each other, but this allows your media player to read what’s on commercial DVDs.)

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Wandered across this site by Phil Selby, Mike Jacobsen, and Adam Burke, and just had to share.

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No, this is not a shot of the Minnesota landscape in January, this is the inside of my freezer.

How do you really defrost a freezer when you’ve got a fridge and freezer full of food? Well, you go out and buy a chest freezer, put everything in there and then hack away at the inches of accumulated frost.

I was able to get a couple big chunks out before taking this picture. As I write this,  I have three pots of boiling water steaming up the freezer so I can go back and hack at it some more.

Just thought I’d share this in the meantime.