Sunday, April 10, 2011

You know you're a nerd when...

...you order your SECOND DSL line for your house.  Yep.  It is true.  Last week I ordered a second DSL line for my house.  Why?  Well, I work from home and I like to duplicate customer issues with my resources.  So, in the spirit of wanting to be able to duplicate issues without messing up my own Internet access, I decided that getting a second instance of DSL for troubleshooting purposes would be in order.

I also want to put together a VMWare ESXi server.  I found some cool stuff (this list will really show off my geekiness)

  • ASUS KGPE-D16 Dual Socket G34 AMD SR5690 SSI EEB 3.61 Dual 8/12 Core AMD Opteron 6000 series Server Motherboard
  • AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz 8 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 8-Core Server Processor
  • Lots of RAM
  • Lots of hard drive space

Out of curiosity, I priced the above components (and a few other things) and I could put together this VMWare ESXi server for about $1,500.  For a very brief moment I seriously entertained the idea.  I like building stuff (putting together a new computer system) and this would be a fun project.  Then reality set in and I remembered the promise that I made to my wife (no more new debt).  With the price of gasoline, food and other things going up, my "project" would have to be funded by American Express, VISA, Mastercard or Discover and I opted for none of the above.  We have lots of expenses coming in the next several months, so building a new work "toy" would not be advantageous.  Yes, it would be cool.  And yes, it would be very nice to have with my line of work, but I'm tired of subsidizing my work environment through my own wallet.  Years ago I used to do that.  I don't any more.

Spring, Spring!

My oldest son last year had to write some poetry for his High School English class.  (Note:  I never really quite understand why English teachers wish to inflict poetry torture on themselves, the kids they teach, and the kids' parents who will be asked to help them write the "poetry".  To the English teacher, why subject yourself to the torture of actually reading what your students write?  It will never be Shakespeare or anything like unto it.  So why???)  He came home and he wasn't quite sure what to write about, when I came up with the following "gem"...  (Please note that Spring 2010 was a particularly cold, wet, and snowy spring.)

Spring, spring,
Spring in the air.

Spring, spring,
Spring is everywhere

Spring, spring,
Spring is what I want to see

Spring, spring,
.....Dang it!  Its snowing again!


That sums up this year's spring as well.  Cold, wet, and snowy.  May you enjoy the last bits of winter before the heat comes and melts it all away.


You know your children are hungry when.....

.....  they eat a "raw" Rhodes cinnamon roll and they actually like it!!  Yep.  That's what happened to one of my kids today.  A few days ago I bought some Rhodes cinnamon rolls.  Rhodes cinnamon rolls need to be set out and warmed up before baking.  We had our cinnamon rolls out and warming up.  My youngest son was over by the cinnamon rolls and apparently he ate one of the raw/uncooked cinnamon rolls.  How do we know he did it?  His older sibling came up and asked if he could have a cinnamon roll too.  Sure enough we were missing a cinnamon roll.

Anyway, it was just funny to think about this.