tinkr.net

I have been quiet on my blog about it, but I have been tweeting it. We bought a house yesterday. Today they accepted our offer, so we are planning on moving on July 25th. Hopefully everything works out this time. Our new house is pretty similar to the one be bought last July and had to back out of because the people buying our current house backed out. It’s a three bedroom, two bath, 3 level. It has central air which our other house didn’t. I have been living in central air for the past five years. I am glad I don’t have to give that up. I will be glad when everything is all done though. It’s going to be a pretty hectic month.

One of my favorite punk bands of all time is Screeching Weasel. They have been broken up and haven’t released an album since 2000. Their front man Ben Weasel just released his second solo album though. He is releasing the album in digital form only. I think that is great. Especially for lower volume sellers like this. No CDs to make, no shipping the CDs, and no guessing at what stores the CDs will sell in and not. Now everybody who wants to can get it. You can get a lower quality DRM encumbered version on iTunes, but why? It is also available at the same price, better quality, and no DRM at Downloadpunk.com. That is where I bought it.

My “not to busy” July just got busier. Yesterday at work I got a call from our realtor, and our house sold. We are going house shopping this afternoon. They’re tons of houses for sale around here, and we pretty much know what we want. I won’t be surprised if we find and buy our new house today. The people that bought our house want to close on July 25th. We will talk to our realtor to see if that is possible. It will make July hectic, but I would rather hurry up and close as soon as possible. It would be torture living here for a couple months knowing we got a bigger better house.

What did we do before the internet? Today at work a conversation started and we were wondering who was the last Minnesota Twins pitcher to hit a homerun.

I did a little research and in five minutes I came to the conclusion that it was Jim Kaat. He hit two in 1972. In 1973 the designated hitter was adding to the American League so pitchers were no longer batting in the American league. Now with interleague play, AL pitchers do bat from time to time, but they usually aren’t very good.

A friend of mine just recently lost his hard drive. It was his laptop hard drive which luckily didn’t have much important data on it. I was shocked when he said he was thankful it wasn’t his desktop system because he would have lost a lot of data. I thought it was crazy that he didn’t have backups. I am anal about my backups. My backups even have backups. In fact next weekend I am due to create another backup.

My backup plan works like this.

I have a 500 GB NAS (network attached storage) that stores a copy of everything that is irreplaceable, or hard to get back. It includes a copy of all my pictures, and my complete music library. It would be a pain in the ass to have to re-rip all of my CDs. So that gives me two copies of everything at home. Then every six months I burn a DVD with all my pictures on it and bring it to work. I have a stack of DVDs in my locker at work. Each one contains my entire photo collection at that time. So if any of the DVDs go bad, I still have many copies off all my pictures. The only think I don’t store off site yet is my music library. It’s just to much of a pain in the ass to burn 45 GB to disks. I should get another external hard drive for my music library, but it’s only music. If our house burns down, the music can be replaced. The pictures can’t. That is why I am very diligent about backing up my pictures.

Do you have a backup plan? If not, go and make backups now.

Lazy Saturday afternoon, so what did I do. Well, I finally solved my Rubik’s Cube.

Ok, so I had a little help from this guy, but I still solved it.

I can’t stand insurance companies. They are all a bunch of crooks. For the last couple of months my wife has been having allergy problems. She has taking all kinds of stuff including Claritin and nothing seemed to work. Then her doctor gave her a sample of Zyertec and it cleared up in a week. So since she found something that worked she got a prescription for it. Of course insurance won’t cover it. You pay and pay into insurance companies for noting, but when you actually need it do you think they would pay out? No way! They want you to keep using the stuff that doesn’t work. Probably trying to by some time until winter when the allergies would go away. What a joke.

I don’t believe that a person can be either a morning person or a night person. I think everybody can be a morning person if they want to be. It’s all about getting into a routine. WIth my work schedule I switch from working nights to working days every month. I am working days now, so I am up at 4:30 every morning. Some mornings I sleep in until 5:00, but I am always up by 5:30. I enjoy getting up with a cup of coffee and the internets, and I found it much easier to get up on the days I have to work if it’s my normal time to get up anyways. They when I switch to the night shift, I say up until 6:00 AM every night. I stay up late with my coffee and internet just like I am getting up early with it now. I keep the same routines and just switch back and forth between them.

Last week I saw a link on Lifehacker to a site that has 15 tips on waking up early.

1. Have a good reason to get up.
2. Be productive in the mornings.
3. Get enough sleep.
4. Go to bed earlier.
5. Sleep more effectively.
6. No more another 10 mins.
7. Jump out of bed.
8. Use an alarm clock, just not the snooze.
9. Establish a stable routine.
10. Have something to look forward to.
11. Be aware of the consequences.
12. Remove the option completely.
13. Have a similarly motivated buddy.
14. Keep track of your times.
15. Review all the things you got done.

I agree with all of them, and use most of them. Now you have no reason to hate getting up early. Go check out the site for more explanations.

Ok, I saw this on three blog posts in a row as I was reading my feeds. I thought it was hilarious, so here it is again:

Big ass table. lol.

Ok, maybe it’s only funny for people that have been on Second Life.