Looking for cheese...

Update 2:21 PM:

While they have TONS of cheese and lots of Wisconsin cheese they had no Brick Cheese.

So far we have not located Brick Cheese in Atlanta.

:(

Mmmm... Squash

I was out mowing the yard this morning and my neighbor brought me some nice yellow squash and a zucchini right out of her garden.

Looks like I know what I'm cooking on Sunday evening :)

What cats do while you are at work...

Not much.

Finally!

They've finally eased our drought restrictions and I can wash my car again!

I guess this means I need to order some more Zaino.

Now that people can use water again and use will go up, do you think municipalities will lower the rates? (since they had to raise them to make $ when we weren't using as much water).

Tiki Read

Here's a good article over at the WSJ about tiki drinks: Better Tiki Than Tacky

It's an almost lost art that you're really better off trying at home unless you find yourself at a place that specializes in doing it right.

(Thanks to Otto at the Tikievents list for cuing me in!)

Cleanup

I just booted up my old PowerMac 7300/180.

Then all the extensions started marching across the bottom of the screen... then OneClick loaded... Whoa! Now I find myself constantly trying to right-click on a one button mouse. Ugh.

The purpose of this is to salvage my data on here for backups. I'll probably keep the mac somewhere as it's the only thing I have right now that will read any of my old SCSI drives that are Mac formatted.

In the meantime I've also cleaned up two older PC's for recycling. I cleaned the drives off with DBAN and then installed a small linux distro. I've used both Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. For some reason I couldn't get Puppy to boot off the hard drive on the old AMD K6 (It was suggested that I needed a "K9" for that) but I got DSL to install just fine... and it's fast too. I'm impressed how these tiny distributions identify all the hardware and just work... even with my unknown 10T ethernet cards that I once bought for $5 off eBay. These are old but they boot, find the internet and find google. I wouldn't try to watch YouTube with these but they might be good for someone.

Close Call

Something odd happened this past Saturday. It was like I was on a different planet.

I ordered a Dell.

My recent experience with my little Acer netbook and Ubuntu got me to thinking that I could use a PC running Ubuntu at home for a desktop. I probably could have.

Dell had an awesome deal with one of the little Vostro's with a decent monitor. I went on the web and ordered. I thought the deal included free shipping and kept thinking it was going to be shown on one of the later pages of the ordering process. It never did. I finally figured out that I was DIW (doing it wrong) but it was too late. There's no way to modify or cancel an order on the Dell website (which is stupid). OK fine, I'll call them up. Nope... can't do that on Saturday. Monday morning I navigated the phone maze and dealt with some really helpful people that had no problem canceling my order and making a new one. I thought the price they quoted me for the new order was before tax so the numbers made sense. I ran the same deal through the web site again and it was $30 less. Two days and many emails later I finally got the explanation that they couldn't do the same deals on the phone that are on the web (which is also stupid). They offered to cancel my order and call it quits. I took them up on it.

Wow... that was close.

Really... what was I doing? Was I really wanting to find something that works almost as well as iTunes for filling my iPod with the latest episodes of the Rowdy Racing and Skeptoid podcasts? Was I really going to find something that would let me manage my photos as mindlessly as iPhoto? Was I going to find all the apps that do what I just normally do on the computer at home without having to think too much about how I'll do it? Did I really want to abandon my Mac heritage dating back to 1986 or so? After I got my wits back about me I went straight to the mall after work at picked up a new White MacBook.

I'd been looking at the Mac Mini's and some of the other new laptops for about a year now. I've almost jumped on the new Mini several times. However once you bump the memory up on it you're getting back up there in $$$. I figured I'd go ahead and get the recently updated MacBook. It's a zippy little box with plenty of features (and upgrading the memory in it is probably easier than upgrading it in the Mini). I'll probably use it mostly as a desktop machine but it's nice to have the portability option. It's been a breeze to set up and I'm getting a kick out of the built-in camera and the apps that use. Apple just has a good knack of doing neat things in an easy manner. I can't complain.

I still love my little Acer netbook. It's great to have a little lightweight (and inexpensive) lappy to take with you on the go. Ubuntu does most anything I need to do with it... I just now realize that as great as Ubuntu is I'm still not ready for it as my home desktop.

It's nice to be able to finally see what I'm typing while I'm typing it. The last upgrades to Firefox and Safari were making that a bit difficult on my old G4.

... and I'm glad I'm keeping my family :)

UPDATE 6/10/09

I actually took the white MacBook back and got the new bottom of the line MacBook Pro that was announced this past Monday. It's basically the 13" unibody MacBook with a speed bump and firewire added back. They dropped the price though and made it worth it to me. It's just plain pretty.