Of course there's not to much time for gaming...I just finished my Eng 102 class (haven't gotten my grade yet...hoping for a good one) and pretty soon here my summer math class will start up. I picked up a TI 84 silver calculator that's bigger than an original gamebody almost.

Also last night we had some freak wind storms, and poof....down went more of our fence. Still waiting to hear back from the insurance company on that....of course it couldn't have happened last year when we had already fulfilled our deductable.

Flash forward four years, and today we finally got them taken care of. Originally we had planned on putting pergo on them (and we still wish we could have) but alas pergo and bull nosing do not mix. So our next plan was to sand and stain them to match the pergo, but the quality (or lack thereof) of the stairs made that impossible. So we agreed the only choice was to re carpet them.

We wanted to change things up a little bit, so I decided to fill in the numerous marks and paint the risers and sides while I was doing the foyer:

It's been about fourteen months since that project, and with a one year old the wife had enough. She called Empire and the guy came out yesterday, took some measurements, made a few calls, and came back with an estimate of $250. Some paperwork and an oddly named berber carpet called "butter brickle" here we are:

Before:

After:

Going to take a while to get used to it.....

Excuse me, I believe you have something of mine

There's more in his photo album.

Sunday I seized the rare opportunity to get somethings done around the house while Jen's mom was in town, and could help watch Connor. Namely fixing the creaking stairs and replacing the broken garage door opener.

The stairs have been creaking and making noise for years now, so I finally had enought and went crazy on them. The shims were all loose underneath (you can access them from the basement stairway) so I pounded them all in nice and tight. Then I went construction adhesive crazy...killed two tubes of the stuff, but they are almost silent now. So I probably lost a couple hundred braincells from all the fumes, but I probably didn't need them anways. I mean I can still count to yellow, and my favorite color is R.

A few days ago, our garage door opener decided to shred it's main gear. After talking with some people who said this was a common issue, we decided that rather than replace the gear and bushing we would just replace the whole darn thing. So after looking around we picked a belt drive unit from sears.

It's scary to see just how small the box is. I've never installed a garage door opener before, so I really thought it would be at least a little bigger.

The whole installation went pretty smoothly, except for me dropping the old opener as I was removing it. The torsion spring prevented me from lowering it to the ground, so as I was trying to figure out what to do gravity decided to expedite the process.

My only real gripe was with the installation directions...Step 3 tells you to put up the header bracket for the new rail....and then step 4 tells you that if you have an old "clevis" style bracket (which I had) that you could use that instead of replacing it. Of course by that point I had removed it already....so I was a little annoyed.

So it's all installed, got the down force adjusted to back off a 2"x4", and everything is done. Sure is quiet compared to the old chain drive we had. In the end it took me about 3 hours to put it in, plus now we have fancy "anti child crush" sensors on this model.

Worth doing....we're currently looking at having a mitigation system installed due to some higher than comfortable levels in our basement (6.9 by the sump pit).

To this:

The best part? We finally get to turn his car seat around so he can see out while we drive.....no more rear facing. Heck his legs were bending at the knees....he was so ready to be done with that.

But yeah...a whole year, it's a little mind boggling still. I guess nobody is ever ready to be a parent though, if we knew what to do all the time life would be boring wouldn't it :)

It really did a good job of shredding itself, when I opened it white dust was everywhere. I'm sure when it was designed, Sears didn't even think the plastic gear would last thing long. God I love planned obsolescence.

Thank god it was still under apple care from the guy who sold it to us...because the cost otherwise would have been $800 bucks. And let me tell you that is more than what I paid for it for sure. Scary stuff man...I don't recommend the extended warranty on stuff, but these iMac's are almost impossible to service yourself.

So anyway that is all good, now the only thing on my plate is to find somebody else with an iSight camera. I'm really curious about how the video conferencing works on it...it looks like you can even do three way or more. Something I haven't been able to achieve on a windows platform.

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So I discovered something interesting last night...usually when I need to watch a video on our Xbox 360 I have to convert it to *.wmv from *.avi (usually xvid). Aside from taking at least 88 minutes to do that, the audio is always off by the time your 1/2 way through watching it because xvid uses a variable bit rate encoding. So little to my knowledge....microsoft upgraded the xbox 360 to be able to play xvid avi's without any type of conversion. That is super freakin' sweet.

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And the last little bit of geeky news....I wrote a script today that checks a directory for conformation to a naming standard, and for any zero byte sized files...then emails an alert out if any of those conditions are met. Nothing amazing by any standards, except that I did it and nobody else did. I'm pathetically excited about it....now all I want to do is figure out a way to check and see if a file is more than 3 days old than the current date....but I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Kinda sucks being out of the driver's seat honestly, but they were all pretty nice and the guy listened to everything I had to say. I guess the problem was pretty clear since he didn't really question me too much about it. They're going to replace the logic board, and then the power supply and blue tooth card if the issues don't go away.

Heck at this point it's all mumbo jumbo voo doo to me...I wouldn't even dare to take that thing apart if I could ever avoid it. They pack so much in there I'd be afraid of never getting it back together again. Sort of like a jack in the box.

holy crap...I feel gobsmacked right now.

I spent the better part of today trying to write a script that would use an array to check them a number of devices

Scripting is not my strongest ability.

I did figure it out eventually, and it worked like a freaking charm. But by cramming about a weeks worth of classes into a few hours, I'm left with a frontal lobe that has more in common with pre chewed bubble gum than anything else.

Speaking of mental capacity (or lack thereof) school has also been difficult. I'm in the middle of writing the "big" paper for my class....you know the one that is 50% of your grade, and for some reason I convinced my instructor to let me write it on the sub prime market and predatory lending. It beats writing about obesity or myspace, plus for some unknown reason I have an unhealthy fascination with the whole real estate bubble that's been deflating for a while here now. In a lot of ways it's like those gruesome death pictures you see....where you stare at it for a while but you brain still can't figure out exactly how that body part got to where it is. It just doesn't make sense anyway you look at it. I mean how does somebody think that a loan with an interest rate in the double digits is a good idea in the long run (or even in the short run). How do you sell something that smells so bad flies are buzzing around it? It's like having respect for the devil for getting Adam and Eve to bite into the apple....you have to wonder how he did it.

I am still playing video games, and right now I'm working my way through Xenosaga III still. I'm gonna take my time and savour it, which is easy since I don't have a whole lot of time anyways. I did get a chance to play through CoD 4 recently, a co-worker actually lent it to me (which was a huge help), and while it seems like it went by to fast I did enjoy it. I think Jen did as well....I'm just kind of on the fence about playing it through again to get some of the other achievements I missed. With all the reading I need to do for this college paper, I don't have to much time really.

Well I complain about time now...but in three months it'll seem like the world will stand still. Hopefully Jen's family will be able to stay with us a bit after the kid is born, because I have a feeling we are going to need all the help we can get.

Some cute pictures of Connor I've been meaning to post:

A lady we were walking by stopped and said hi to Connor and asked him if he was learning to walk. I assume she thought Connor was using the grocery cart as a walker of sorts. When he actually resumed "pushing" the cart she looked at me and said "scary". I thought that was pretty funny cause it's true. He grabs the cart and let's out a little grunt, then it begins to move....I resisted the urge to go "hercules, hercules, hercules".

Here's a picture of Connor seeing Steve's dog Polly again. He cried for a few minutes at first, but as you can see he warmed up right to him. I think Connor is a big fan of puppies, but for now he'll have to wait until we visit Steve's house again.

Yup, there's now a G5 iMac in the house. Holy cow....it's been 8 years since I touched a mac, there is so much I have no clue how to do. :) We bought it since Jen spends so much time out of the office and downstairs, plus we got a good deal on it used online from DSLR. Both of us were kind of excited to use one. Now I just need to figure out how to create L2TP tunnels off it.

-update #1: dammit....adobe photoshop elements 2.0 doesn't work on Leopard :(

-update#2: I need an apple keyboard and mouse, this dell one isn't cutting it and the only spare usb mouse I had has a ball :(