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My cutting board came with instructions in 18 languages. I’m almost surprised that English was at the top. It cost me $10, 75% less than similar ones I found at Bed Bath and Beyond. And by appearances, it is one of the better and more attractive cutting boards I have owned. The instructions it came with are clear, concise and useful. All hail the Swedes!

My new kitchen table is just about exactly the size I needed, 47″x30″. It’s stylish in it’s simple lines and real wood construction. It’s rather small but it’s a small eat-in kitchen. I’ve been shopping around and I nearly bought a set at Macy’s that wasn’t quite the right size for $750. I found some that were close to right at “Furniture 2000” near my office. But no.

I’d like to find something that totally grabs me but I’m getting tired of shopping, and tired of eating dinner on the edge of my bed. I’m not sure the table I got is exactly what I want, but the Swedes took 85% off the price and sold me a quality eat-in-kitchen table and chair set for $100.

Purchases like this are blowing my budget for shopping for my apartment. I had set aside $6000 (great thanks to my folks) to furnish the place and so far my expenses, top down have been:
$900 bed (that I might get rid of, it’s giving me a back ache)
$400 tableware for 4 (they make me happy :-)
$120 office desk off craigslist (It’s the right size, I can’t think of what more expensive things would replace it)
$100 table and chair set (see above)
$90 overpriced but fabulous santoku kitchen knife (satisfying my kitchen nesting instinct)
.. umm..
$18 cookie sheet
$15 shower hanging thing
You can see where I’m going with this…

My budget is being blown in the other direction. I can’t think of what to spend this money on. Though I still have 2 rugs, a desk chair, some kind of comfy chair and wall art to buy. Four grand for all that stuff? I’m going to have to get like… real art or something. Now I’m seriously thinking about that Sharper Image massage chair too.

Oh and I need a bike (motorized?) but that comes out of the transportation budget and not the housing budget. Maybe Housing will float a bond ;-)

I’m getting a lot of my stuff out of storage tomorrow. We’ll see what that spurns.

“Lee, you sure use a lot of plugins on your site. Could you give me a list of all of them?”
“Sure thing. I’ll give you the whole rundown..
Continue reading ‘How Does the Site Work? Plugin and Mods Rundown’ »

Someone told me long ago that Escape from New York Pizza near Haight Ashbury had real New York Pizza. Quite simply, no. It is not.

Arinell Pizza at 16th & Valencia, they make a New York slice. I was in the city (I hear that San Franciscans gingerly call SF “the city” but folks in LA know that “the city” is New York) in October and had Rosa’s Pizza in Penn Station. The two compare very well.

If you have multiple computers with multiple monitors, Synergy is a great way to keep your hands on a single keyboard & mouse. It’s kind of like a KVM, but it’s not.

I have 2 monitors on 1 computer (my main desktop PC) and a laptop that I haul from home to work. Now, I can keep my hands on one keyboard and mouse while I slide my mouse from my big 19″ main screen, over to the right to my 17″ screen and then … magically to the right again onto my laptop!

You can slide from your PC to your Linux to your Mac. Keyboard input follows the mouse. You can copy/paste across boxen! It’s magic, and it’s FREEE!

Get Synergy
Read a good tutorial. (I thought it was overly verbose and then I needed to read it to figure out one concept)

I was up and running in < 5 minutes.

1-27-21 update:
I hadn’t been using Synergy for a while but with COVID, I needed a better computer setup. I’ve got 2 Windows computers with a total of 3 monitors. It’s wonderful! I paid $30 for it and it’s, no brainer, completely worth it!
I have 2 monitors on the bottom and 1 on top. So I used the custom configuration option to align the cursor movements better. Here’s how:
– Start Synergy
– export the current configuration with File | Save Configuration as…
– modify the configuration file with tips from Synergy (1)
Mine looks like this:

section: links
PSC-ALT-49:
up(50,100) = Tobuscus(0,100)
Tobuscus:
down(0,100) = PSC-ALT-49(50,100)
end

– Point Synergy at the config file with the “Use existing configuration” option.
– Profit!

The will of the California people seems to differ somewhat from my own. Most of the Propositions I voted for failed and most that I voted against succeeded.

I found casting my semi-libertarian vote pretty easy. I voted for (in order, starting at #73) “warning labels” but not bans, competition in the workplace, informed consent, smaller government, unbiased government, open marketplace, open marketplace, open marketplace.

Continue reading ‘How I voted’ »

I need a new bed.

In most every bed I’ve ever slept in for more than a few months, this divot forms where I sleep on my side. Yes, yes, I know that you’re supposed to rotate your bed every couple months. I do that but it only staves off the divoting for a while. I think it’s that I fall asleep stay in once place; I’ve read how people toss and turn in their sleep all night but I think I toss very little if at all.

I spent like $800 on this snazzy bed a few years ago. 4 years later, the divot became permanent. I’m sleeping on an Ikea mattress right now; for the first 3 months I thought I had found a mattress that didn’t sag beneth me. Nope. I put a good-ol’ divot in my family’s guest bed too. The destruction continues.

I didn’t have this problem with a water bed and Stevie points out that his Select Comfort air mattresses don’t get divots.

I’m thinking about getting a Select Comfort bed. What do you think?

Very funny

And this one is especially for Trav

I was fiddling with my BIOS settings trying to get my Cybex Autoview Commander 4 port KVM to stop messing up my keyboard input. Avocent (who bought Cybex) said that I might want to change the BIOS keyboard input setting from “fast” to “normal”. Well, I couldn’t find that option in my BIOS but….

There is an option for hard drive performance. You can choose: bypass, quiet hard drive, or performance hard drive. It had been set to “bypass”. I switched it to “performance” and Yeeeh Haawww! The drive is now a bit louder, making those traditional hard drive clackity sounds, but some disk operations are now much more responsive. Several tasks have gone from “click, wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… done” to “click-done”.

Cool beans.

I’ve been using FTP Voyager and SmartFTP for a long time. Today I was having some trouble getting them working on a new Windows MCE machine. Michie suggested I use Internet Explorer. “But IE FTP sucks.” “No it doesn’t.” She is right. Somewhere in the last couple years IE (6.0) upgraded their built-in FTP client. It has full drag & drop capabilities and it’s pretty and everything.