Category: Thoughts on Life

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The iMac is dead, long live the mini

The hard drive on my iMac died, it would have cost $300 to fix. So instead I went on eBay and got a G4 Mac mini for $500 including shipping. I could have gotten a new Intel Mac mini for a little more money, about $100 more. I thought about it for a while but the mini is just a replacement for what I had before, not really what I want. So cheaper is better. I really want one of new MacBook Pro laptops, but that’s more money than I want to spend.

Another reason I went with the G4 mini instead of Intel is that I know all my current stuff will work. Until all the software I use runs natively on Intel I’ll stick with the G4.

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Daytona 500

There’s a Daytona 500 Preview video available for free at the iTunes Store. Mostly interviews but hey, it’s free. 🙂

In other news Tony Stewart will start 15th in the 500 Sunday.

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You really should get that looked at…

Last Tuesday I started having really bad stomach pain at about 4 in the morning. By the end of the day I had a fever and I was vomiting. I just thought I had the stomach flu. Wednesday I was feeling a little better. But by Thursday I was feeling rough again. Stephanie got me to call my mom Thursday night and then I called the after hours student health nurse. She told me to go to the ER, and that I might have appendicitis.

Several hours later, after drinking lots of contrast dye and getting a CAT scan and an ultrasound it was determined that my gall bladder needed to come out ASAP. So I got admitted to the hospital and on Friday afternoon my gall bladder was removed. Apparently it was very infected and very nasty, the surgery took twice as long as expected.

Stephanie’s mom came up from Arkansas Friday to keep Stephanie company. I stayed in the hospital until about 8 pm Saturday. Since then I’ve been sleeping a lot. Stephanie’s mom left yesterday, thanks for helping out, Dee.

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Thoughts on an LIS Ph.D and bit of history

This posting about Ph.Ds for academic librarians at ACRLog made me think about my long, strange road to the Ph.D program here and where I’m going afterwards. I’ll talk about that, at length, in a bit. Basically I’m getting a Ph.D not so much to be be better qualified for a management job now, but to be ready for one when the opportunity arises. My thinking about a Ph.D was that if I kept going immediately after my Masters I would still be in grad student mode and things would be easier. I also got assistantships for both my first attempt at a Ph.D at UT and again here at Missouri. So I’m not investing a lot of money, just time.

This post is long, and is pretty much a personal narrative beyond this point. … Continue reading “Thoughts on an LIS Ph.D and bit of history”

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Defending England… with iPods

For 605 million pounds, what would you expect a modern Royal Navy warship to have? Modern weapons systems, and all the latest technology certainly. The HMS Daring has the best crew quarters ever on a British warship. The individual cabins have CD player, internet access, five channel audio and yes iPod charging stations. The new ship with enter service in 2009. Hopefully the iPod connectors will still be the same in three years….

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Toyota and NASCAR

And now for something completely different. 🙂 Toyota has been racing in the Craftsman Truck Series since 2004. Now they will be racing in the Nextel Cup Series, starting in 2007. There hasn’t been a foreign nameplate in NASCAR since Jaguar in the 1950s.

Update: The offical announcement

Not there are any “American” or “foreign” cars anymore. GM and Ford have plants overseas, Dodge and Chrysler are really a German company. The Japanese have plants here. A car is car now I guess. But don’t bring a WV to Columbia, Missouri. There’s no VW dealer for 100 miles so no warranty work.

NASCAR is also planning on switching to unleaded fuel in 2008 and is working on new car technology for 2007.

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New semester and problems solved

Well, my first class seems like it will be ok. It’s Quantitative Research II, Analysis of Variance. The texts are good, much clearer than last semester’s regression analysis class. The instructor seems good, he actually took time to explain things until everyone understood, and has a very different teaching style than last semester’s professor.

There are no tests or papers to write, just exercises and problems to do every week. Sounds fine to me. I’m also taking this class with a group of people from SISLT, so hopefully things will be easier than last semester when I was a bit lost. One interesting thing about the class is we are using SAS from the Unix command line, no GUIs here.

I figured out the problems with Stephanie’s blog and now WordPress and Gallery are playing together nicely. Unfortunately, I’m having to rebuild Stephanie’s gallery from scratch. In my attempts to make things work I choose to delete instead of reassign pictures to a new user. That was a painful, click-happy error. In an effort to not put all my photo galley eggs in one basket, Lisa now has her own site.

In other news I decided not to go with Bluehost. I couldn’t get any partial refunds on my current hosting contracts and I found out I had some free (with ads) hosting with GoDaddy. So hobbitandmonk.com is living on GoDaddy for a while. I’ll revisit hosting options once my current contracts are closer to expiring.

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