First off, I am proud to announce that my daughter Bruce has just been inducted into the philosophy department at the University of Walamaloo.





On another note, I just finished my minor Best Buy Fueled updates to the computer. Ask yourself if it was worth it.



updates from previous setup:

Memory upgrade from 1 to 2 gig. Dang that's amazing. I remember how cool it was in college to upgrade my development box to 4 meg so that I could run OS/2 Presentation Manager. Now I've got 500x as much memory.

Second Dell 2001FP. Actually, BB doesn't sell these, but we had one on a rarely-used machine. I bought a Westinghouse-branded monitor from BB so I could move the unused Dell monitor over here. You get used to 3200x1200 resolution fast.

Microsoft 4000 Natural Keyboard and 6000 Laser Mouse. These were both a bit gratuitous, but they're luxurious and feel great and match the rest of the computer, so I treated myself. One thing about the Laser Mouse is that it doesn't have the retina-searing red light that's common among mice. Apparently someone figured out that you can do the whole optical-mouse camera thing with infrared and it works just fine. At first I thought the mouse wasn't working because I was so used to the bright red light when you plug your mouse into USB. It works just as well as the red-light mice, so I assume this'll eventually become the norm (as it might be for non-Microsoft optical mice for all I know).

Anyway, this is The Code Zone's development setup, or the CivilGrrl Accounting Setup, depending on what's necessary for the moment. Bask in its glory.


Also, I thought I'd revisit the Coffee Altar a year later. Bask in its newly-refined glory.



The Nespresso machine is no more. Biggest problem is that the proprietary coffee-capsules run about 45-55 cents each. While that's cheaper than Starbucks, it's still pricey for a shot of the Water Of Life. I got a nice Mr. Coffee grinder and Espresso machine that'll make a quality shot out of fresh beans for less than 10 cents. The Mr. Coffee grinder is nice because it's automatic. I've got it set to make a fine (but not too fine) grind, so it'll dump 2 shots worth into its little cup just by pressing the "start" button.

I didn't need the old Nespresso capsule-rack, so I ebayed that. Being a lazy bastard, rather than patch over its old mounting holes, I found a cute light fixture at Ikea (motto: "Our layout is more labyrinthine than a Las Vegas casino") with various plastic slides with things like "no smoking" etc. One of 'em was a coffee cup. Shelly likes to turn on the light when coffee is available.

We expanded our syrup selection to nine flavors, ranging from hazelnut to cinnamon red-hot to peppermint patty. We can now make pretty-much anything Starbucks can, save for those green tea smoothies. . .which I ain't in a hurry to duplicate.