Weblog

I have been thinking about purchasing a new laptop for some time. My IBM laptop is big and clunky, and it has enough junk running on it that it's not really enjoyable to use more than I have to. I wanted something that I could take on vacations and use around the house in front of the TV. Ultimately, I decided to buy a Dell Mini 9. It's one of those newfangled netbooks; it's incredibly small, and also very cheap. It's no speed demon, but it fit what I wanted perfectly. It has a 64GB solid-state drive, and absolutely no moving parts. It's completely silent. The processor is an Intel Atom, and I bumped it up to 2GB of memory. It even runs Windows Vista, and it does so quite well. My only real complaint is that the battery lasts only a hair under four hours, but considering that it only has a four-cell battery, I'm willing to be forgiving. Considering that it cost me just over $500, I'm pretty pleased with it.

In addition to the laptop, I recently had to buy another hard drive for one of my servers. The box runs on a RAID-5, so theoretically I just needed to pop the new drive in and rebuild the array, right? Well, when the drive failed, the computer must have fun chkdsk or something and messed up the data on the two remaining drives, because when I rebooted it, I got a bluescreen, even in safe mode. So, I had to reinstall the operating system, and I also had to recover all of the data on the box. I have a remote backup at my parents' house, but I can only get around 120KB/second from that box to mine. Luckily, I had about two thirds of the data backed up locally as well, but I still have had to download about 80GB from the remote backup. The process has been slow and painful, but it's nearly finished.

Well, I just closed on a refinance of my house on Friday. My new rate is 5.25%, which is substantially better than the 6.5% I had previously. I refinanced through the same broker that helped me with my initial loan, Trent Peaker of Megastar Financial. I got a fairly good deal, and the cost to refinance will be paid for in only thirteen months.

Perhaps more importantly, last month I finally got around to purchasing some real living room furniture to replace the folding chairs I had been borrowing from my parents. I bought a reclining couch for the "dining" room, which was already home to my 52" Samsung LCD. I got a sleeper sofa and a loveseat for the living room, along with the requisite coffe table and two side tables. I also bought a matching server to go by the stairs. All of the couches are leather; brown for the living room, and black for in front of the TV. Everything came from Sofa Mart, which had a pretty good deal going; I have two years with no payments or interest.

Seeing that the painting is done and I finally have most of my furniture, I thought I'd take some time this weekend to take some photos of the inside of my house. I have posted them to the photos page.

In the past week, I have been witness to three car accidents. The first was my mother backing over my poor 1996 Honda Civic with a very large 2006 Toyota Tundra. Twice. I was not actually there when it happened; my dad, brother and I were having dinner with my grandparents when I got the phone call. She managed to hit the bumper, hood, headlight, and left front fender. Surprisingly, this only amounted to around $1500. The car is still in the shop, but I should get it back this coming Friday.

The other two accidents were less than a mile from my house, but luckily did not involve me. When I passed by the second one, I saw a man or woman laying on the grass, and a few people had stopped to help. The emergency crew weren't there yet, but I then passed a fire truck, ambulance, and two police cars on their way; apparently it was serious. The third accident happened blocks from the second. The small truck in front of me apparently didn't see the brake lights in front of it; the driver slammed on his brakes and swerved trying not to hit the car in front of him. He was nearly successful, but managed to nick a taillight. Both cars pulled over, and I drove by.

These incidents made me realize how lucky I am to have never been in a real accident.