For lack of a better title.

2008, January 17. Bi-Monthly update 2 of 2.

The most newsworthy thing in the recent past was our trip to Ikea last Saturday. We were able to find some fun things, such as a nice cast-iron fondue set and the poang ottoman for our poang chair. One more item of note was Lisa's lemon zester. For shaving lemons. I'll not pretend to understand.

I talked with Beck the other day, probably a few weeks ago, and she mentioned some inexpensive airfare rates she found on kayak.com; tickets from Salt Lake to Frankfurt for comparatively cheap! We decided that it would be a good idea to look into this and save our pennies. We are both very excited at the prospect. When we remember, we have been trying to remember our German, with some success. At some point we should label everything in the house in German, phonetic and cyrillic Russian, and Portuguese. It can't be that hard to learn a new language and it's alphabet, re-learn another, and keep up to speed with yet another, right?

In other news, HAL may need an operation. His third monitor, an old CRT donated from the Business college a few years ago, decided to only display shades of blue and green. In addition, one of his hard drives failed. His power supply died during the move, so I have a very weak 250 watt spare sitting in him at the moment. That was cannibalized from the other machines that I haven't been able to yet install because we don't have a computer room. I was previously considering of replacing his video card, since it is getting towards four years old. The only problem with this is that the current card is an AGP, and nobody makes AGP cards anymore. In order to get a decent card to last me another four years, I would have to replace the motherboard and processors, unless someone happens to know of a relatively inexpensive dual processor Xeon board with PCI-Express. Do feel free to let me know. In review, the following items are needed to overhaul HAL:

1. Hard drive
2. Flatscreen
3. PSU
4. Motherboard
5. Processor
6. Video card
7. Probably RAM, now that I think of it.

On the plus side, I can take the current board and put it into an older box, and actually use the server board in HAL on a server. Wouldn't that be fun!

My Legoing hasn't been going all the well, I have had neither the time nor space to build anything. It becomes even more difficult when one factors in a dog. It was bad enough when all I had to worry about was the cat jumping into the middle of whatever I am working on, but the dog is bigger and clumsier. I bet she would eat them, too. Once I get the computer room set up, I will have it to construct things with. There should be new castle sets coming out soon, as well as the Speed Racer sets and a Secret Agent line. Add these to the new Indiana Jones sets, new Exo-Force, and the Star Wars sets, and suddenly the wallet looks awfully small. Oh well. I suppose one can't have everything.