/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I know, I’ve been neglecting my blog of late, but that’s what happens when you get busy with other things. There isn’t a whole lot to report on, but I have been doing a little bit of geeking out. Last weekend I gave Bethany my XPS 600 desktop. Her old destop just wasn’t up to the tasks she was asking of it anymore, so I decided to set her up. I reformatted and put a fresh install of XP on it, transferred her old documents and now she’s happily plugging away. For the time being, I’ve got my laptop set up as a desktop, which is working out pretty well. But, for Father’s Day, I’ve got a new toy coming:

Dell Inspiron 530
Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600 (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB)
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Radeon ATI HD 2600 XT 256MB
16X DVD+/-RW Drive

The only downside is the Radeon card, but I think I can manage as the Linux drivers from ATi/AMD are getting better with every release. The big thing I’m curious about is the quad core. I can’t wait to see how it performs under Linux. Part of me wants to install Gentoo just to see what it would do. Of course, people are going to ask why I went with Dell rather than building one of my own. It seems like it would cost just about the same to go either way. I’m not ashamed, so go ahead and dock me geek points :P

I’ve hit a dry spell of late as far as content to post goes. My day to day life is going just fine, and there’s not really anything new to write about. Married life is just fine, and unlike most have told me, being married does not change anything, really. We’re still the same two people who love each other, we just happen to have a legal piece of paper now. Emma is still doing well, and hopefully she’ll either be crawling or walking soon. Time will tell, though. As far as work goes, it’s been a year now since I’ve moved down here, and the job is still great. Sure, it has stressful times like any job, but it seems to be fewer than when I was up in PA. Some things people have been saying to me have been bothering me of late. I really shouldn’t let those things bug me, but some of the things are just so asinine it’s hard to let them go. I won’t go into them here, but for the most part it’s based on things these people know about me, yet they don’t take the time to get the whole story straight, and that really, really drives me nuts.

I haven’t really done anything geeky of note lately, other than change my photo gallery software from Gallery to Zenphoto. I did this because Zenphoto is lighter weight and easier to manage. Most nights, though, you’ll find me either reading tech sites or playing Team Fortress 2. There are some geeky things I want to do, such as:

- Finishing the media center (either PC or modded Xbox)
- Finish syncing my laptop and desktop
- Try coding a few things

In addition to trying to motivate my geeky side, I find myself wanting to try a new hobby, but the question remains: What do I try? My interests lie mostly in computers, and some other things I thought about in the past just really aren’t feasible anymore. I’m sure I’ll find something new with time, though. For now, I’ll just keep playing TF2, reading tech news and just hanging out at home with the family, which makes me happy. Before I go, I wanted to share with you a picture of us, on our wedding day.

Click for full picture

Please note, this is one of the few (very, very, very) few sightings of me in a tuxedo.