The upgrade that wasn’t…

I decided late last year that I was going to take the year off from the computer upgrade process. That doesn’t mean that I planned on absolutely zero upgrades, but that I would defer the “big stuff”. This came after a tremendous amount of hassle and fuss trying to get Vista and my 2006 PC upgrade working to my satisfaction, and after the satisfying experience I had with my MacBook Pro.

But things change… and the upgrade that wasn’t going to happen, did…

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Server outages due to office re-org

I am in the midst of another office cleanup. Unlike last year, I don’t think I’ll bore / shock you with too many pictures. But as I shuffle things around, I have to occasionally shut down the network- including the server that provides this website. I expect the outages to be fairly brief: so far, there have been three outages of under thirty minutes each. But you have been warned.

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Google Adsense year three… still not rich

Back in December of 2005 I added Google Adsense features to my site. As I said back then, I have no illusions of actually making money off of Adsense. Starting year three, my “a buck or two a month” estimate is holding remarkably true. I’m up to about $45 sitting in the Google coffers, waiting to reach $100 so I can claim my riches.

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Why do I do it?

It started innocently enough… ah, crap, that’s how I began that other post.

Okay… here’s the deal. I’m weak. My weakness is gadgets, particularly computers. You know this if you’ve been reading this site for any length of time. It is rare that I make it through a given six month period without doing *something* that involves partly or completely gutting one or more computers.

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Co-creator of D&D, Gary Gygax, dies at 69 years

I clearly remember how I first got into Dungeons and Dragons. I was 15 years old at the time. My friend Tim was a member of Mensa, and told me that they had this thing called Dungeons and Dragons that they played. Since I was a big fan of Tolkein’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Tim’s description of D&D sounded perfect. I wrote an IQ test and discovered I missed the grade by a couple of points: the fact that I wrote the test on the day I found out my Dad had died might have had an impact, but I also never really claimed to be a genius. But the desire to play D&D remained.

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