A day for Memorex

Am’s mom came to visit this week, and after a couple of days of trying to shop with the boys running around, they decided that they needed to bring me to watch them while the girls shopped.

We went up to prescott, and the while the girls shopped for clothes at Ross, me and the boys wandered up and down the stip mall. In target, I saw their ad for 512mb flash drives for $9.99. So I drag the boys to the electronic section, but of course they are all out of the ones that are on sale. They did have a pretty cool bracelet usb drive, but it was only 256 meg. It was like a black rubber arm band, and the clasp part was the usb plug.

Next we went to the Petco, and they were having an adopt a dog sale. It must have been the humane society, but I didn’t see any indication of that. But all of the dogs were kind of “used” looking. The boys went to pet one of them, and they said “oh, don’t let them put their fingers near him, he bites, he doesn’t like kids” Then they invited us to come pet a nicer dog. As we were petting him, I noticed he only had one eye. EZ said “Dad, this dog only gots one eye! That’s Cool!!!” The lady started cracking up and said only a boy would think that.

As we walked by Officemax, I saw a bunch of flyers out front. They didn’t have any great deals, but they did have a 50 pack of dvds or 75 pack of cds for $9.99. I’ve been meaning to make some videos of the boys for relatives, so I decided to pick up a pack of dvds. I also decided to see if they had any flash drives for cheap. They were all in the $50 range though, and that was mostly for 256 or 512mb ones. I found the dvd section, but none were marked $9.99, so I had to compare skus on the flyer to the shelves. Finally I figured out it was the Memorex ones that were on sale. Not bad, I usually get the Great Quality ones at Frys, and let me tell you, that name is a misnomer. Memorex are usually $30, and every disc in the pack works, unlike GQ.

After another hour or two, the girls were finally done with Ross. We went to the mall, and the boys and I played at the play area while the girls shopped for another 2 hours. I’m surprised the mall security guys didn’t think I was some sort of weirdo, watching the little kids play for hours at a time.

After lunch and Costco, we finally get to the last store. Grandma’s favorite, K-Mart. As bad as the name sounds, this store was 100 times worse. We go in and get a shopping cart for the boys to ride in, and every single one is so dirty, I didn’t even want to touch it, let alone put the boys in it. I dig through to get the cleanest one, and we wander the store for an hour or so while the girls look at clothes. We go the the electronics section so EZ can play whatever demo video game they have out. It’s a really dirty, beat up gameboy advance, with mario pinball.

I wander over to the usb drive case, and see a 1gig drive on sale for $14.99. The 128mb one in the same brand is $20, so that’s a pretty good deal. And it’s a Memorex, not some generic junk. So I buy it, and I’m reading the package while we wait for the girls to finish trying on the clothes (more like start trying on the clothes). Under system requirements, it says Windows XP, NT, 98SE as usual. Then a little lower, Mac OS 8.6 and above, and to my surprise Linux 2.4.x. Memorex actually knows what Linux is!!! And they know enough about it to know you need a 2.4.x kernel to use usb.

Reading the package a little more, I see that the drive comes with a couple of applications that are set up to be run off the drive. One of those applications is Mozilla Thunderbird! So not only does Memorex know about Linux, but they’re also helping to spread Thunderbird. Granted, all of the applications are the Win32 versions, but still, every little bit of press helps.

Soon I would like to see them putting a full distro on the drive, so you can just buy it, boot from the usb drive, and test out a new OS. It wouldn’t be that hard, I put PClinuxOS on it this morning, and it only took about 10 minutes including the download. If they put a small distro like Puppy or DSL on there, it wouldn’t even take up much room. And it wouldn’t cost them anything. They could be helping to spread Linux, and at the same time boost the value of their drives over the other companies.

I guess it looks like I’m going to have to start supporting Memorex over the generic stuff I usually buy. I just hope I can find good deals like this every time.

I’ve sold out.

My loyal readers may have noticed a little change on some of my pages. I’ve decided to implement Google AdSense to make the boys some college money. Well, maybe not. But maybe enough for the down payment on a used minivan. Or lunch at McD’s. Actually Google won’t even give me any money until I’ve earned at least $100, so it may be a while before I get anything.

The AdSense rules are kind of funny. I’m not allowed to ask you to click my ads. I can’t have arrows pointing at the ads. I can’t do anything that would draw attention to the ads and cause you to actually click them. So whatever you do, don’t click on the ads. But do click on the firefox button, or go there directly and download it. Help make the web a safer place. I should see if Ubuntu has a referral program too. It’s easy enough to use even AM can do it.

F.U.

Ez’s first emergency room visit!

We knew having two boys we would be visiting the emergency room sometime. Last thursday was the first time for Ez. He and his buddies JJ and Joey were having a playdate at the house. I was at work. My cell phone rings, and it’s Am. Ever since the shaken kitty incident, every time she calls I expect her to call freaking out saying someone’s going to the emergency room. This time it happened. She was actually calmer than I would expect, but still pretty shaken up. She said JJ and Joey had “ripped” Ez’s ear, and Lara was going to take them to the emergency room in cottonwood to get stitched.

I called my boss and told him I had to go, and he said don’t bother closing, just lock the door and go. So driving to cottonwood, the whole time I’m thinking “how could they ‘rip’ his ear? Were the wrestling and pulling on it?”

I get to the emergency room, and there’s no parking. Apparently everyone’s getting hurt tonight. Once i get in, Am leads me into the nurse’s station, where Ez is sitting very calmly. He says “I got some blood on my ear, but the doctor’s gonna make it better” He takes off the washcloth and icecube, and I see it’s not “ripped” along the seam like I expected, it’s “cut” right in the middle through the cartilage. It looks like he was in a knife fight.

From what we could piece together in his story, JJ pushed him over, and he fell and hit his ear against the changing table. He must have hit it just right against the corner, because it was a really smooth clean cut.

After waiting 2 hours in the waiting room, we finally got sent back to the doctor. She was pretty cute, in her mid to late 20’s. Ez really liked her. He said “You gonna make me all better?” “You’re a very nice doctor, I like you” He kept flirting with her the whole time. He didn’t cry once, I couldn’t believe how big he was.

She decided he didn’t need any stitches, they would just use Dermabond, which is fancy doctor-talk for superglue. She used an entire pen/tube of glue on it, I guess she really didn’t want it coming apart.
Ezra\'s ear after being glued together
It’s now a week later, and the glue has come off and his ear is splitting a little. Am wanted to go back to the doctor, but I said why don’t we just put some more glue on there. She said no way, absolutely not. Then when I got home, she said “why don’t we just glue it ourselves?” I reminded her that I had suggested that only a few hours earlier, and she had nearly bit my head off. But now her friend’s sister who used to work in a doctor’s office suggested it, and it was ok. So we’re going to get some glue today, lets see if she actually lets me do it.

Halloween

Ok, so I’m really lazy and didn’t write my halloween post for almost a month. But I’m going to back date it and pretend I wrote it the next morning like I wanted to.

Halloween was a hit. I wasn’t feeling very into it this year, so I decided to re-use the Satyr/Fairy costumes from Ez’s first halloween. I had to make a whole new suit for Ez, and I made improvements all the rest.

First we went to the mall, and every shop wanted to talk to us about where we got the costumes, and Am was always proud to tell them I made them. The mall was really dead this year, there were only like 10 other groups while we were there.

Then we went to uptown. It was much busier than the mall but still not as busy as it usually is. People kept stoppping us to take pictures. Ez really liked all the attention. Every shop owner said we got the prize for best costumes of the night. Some even gave Ez extra candy because of it.

There’s a picture and more story on the halloween page. More pictures if I ever feel up to working on it.

Ubuntu!

Ubuntu: Linux for human beings.

Lately I’ve been very frustrated with M$ wanting me to buy a legal copy of Windows XP. They refuse to let you use Firefox to download windows updates, and if/when you use IE to do it, they scan your computer to see if you have a valid product key. Who knows what else they are scanning for. I’m sure Bush gave them a little extra to help find “terr’ists”. He don’t need no warrent, God gave him the right to do whatever the hell he wants when He made him president.

To get away from old BillG and W, I’ve been thinking about going to linux. BUt my experiences in the past have been so/so. My main concern was a lack of drivers. Every time I’ve installed some flavor of linux, my network card has not worked, and I would have to go online to download drivers (if I could find them) But to get online, I had to have my network card working! So I would boot in Windows, find the drivers, then reboot in linux, try the drivers, find out they didn’t work right, re-reboot into windows, look up why the drivers didn’t work, re-re-reboot into linux, but by that time I would be tired of all the rebooting, and just stick with windows, which pretty much works out of the box.

So somewhere I heard about Ubuntu, Linux for human beings. It was supposed to be really easy to use, and “just work”. I decided to try a “live cd” first, to see if I really like it. There are 2 flavors of Ubuntu, regular Ubuntu, and Kubuntu. The only difference is the Kubuntu uses KDE for the desktop instead of Gnome. I had heard that Gnome was a little bloated and slow, so I tried the Kubuntu version first. (This was going to be for my laptop with limited resources)

I popped the cd in, went through the language choices, and waited (linux boots a little slower than windows. the thought is that you won’t have to boot often, since the system won’t crash) It goes through the “detecting hardware” phase, and says “detecting network hardware” Yeah right, like my el cheapo Fry’s wireless card is going to be detected. I had a hard enough time getting it to work in windows. The next screen says “searching for wireless networks” What?!? It actually found that card AND installed the right driver? At this point it wasn’t able to connect to my network, because I have WEP, and it didn’t ask my for the key, but at least it was trying.

Once everything is up and running, the desktop looks pretty nice, it’s stable, but still no network. I go through and try to put in the WEP key, but it’s still not connecting (I have the same problem with windows some times) Finally I decide to turn off WEP to see if that is the problem. Sure enough, it detects the network and connects automatically.

Now I decide to go through and change some settings to personalize my desktop. The dialog box is so big that the OK button is off screen. How the hell am I supposed to click OK? I search through a bunch of forums and find out that this is a common problem with KDE at 800×600 (which is the best my laptop will do) I like (K)Ubuntu enough to keep it, but I can’t deal with not being able to hit OK. So I decided to try regular flovored Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop. I like it. Gnome doesn’t seem any slower than KDE, and most importently, all of the dialog boxes are the right size.

So now my laptop dual boots XP and Ubuntu, although I don’t think I’ll be using XP very often. I’ve got Wine if I need to run any windows programs. Try Ubuntu, I think you’ll like it.

Edward Scissor Hands 2001

Since Raph won $100 the year before as Edward Scissorhands, he thought he would try again and win the $2000 prize at the casino. Unfortunately the competition was much tougher, and he didn’t even make it to the finals.

Edward Scissor Hands
Edward Scissor Hands

Planet of the Apes

With 1 week to go before Halloween, and with the dragon costume no where near completion, I decided to make a quickie Planet of the Apes costume. I was excited about the new Tim Burton one coming out the next summer. Aparently no one else had even heard about it though, because everyone kept saying “Oh, look, it’s a monkey-man!” and their friends would say “No, I think he’s from that old movie ‘Monkey Planet’ or something like that” Damn uncultured swine!!!

chris-ape-makeup2000Me applying the ape makeup. In retrospect I should have painted more detail. Ant not use slip Latex…. It DOES NOT breath like foam latex would have. By the end of the night the latex adhesive was falling off from all the sweat, and the jaw didn’t want to stick anymore. And, my face was so bright red and rashy, it took weeks to heal.

2000 - Planet of the Apes
2000 – Planet of the Apes