10 years of UserFriendly

Yay, my 10th anniversary mega uber UserFriendly collection has arrived!
UF Collection
The t-shirt is pretty slick too. And the book is even autographed.
UF Book and t-shirt
I’m going to enjoy reading this.

Dog owner sign #7

Every pocket you reach into has at least one (unused) poop bag

Meaty goodness at Amazon Grill

Today’s meetup at Amazon Grill was nice with 9 people showing up and a few new faces, which is always nice.

Amazon Grill meetupers

Bacon wrapped chicken for Heather

Bacon wrapped chicken

For the record, @mydwynter wants a karaoke meetup one of these days. I’m pretty sure it could be arranged. There’s been talk about a potluck meetup on the twittertubes. Karaoke would probably make a fine addition to that meetup.

Laptop refresh project

The laptop I use for work is getting a little long in the tooth (about 5 years old now), but still pretty functional, aside from having to have Windows on it. It’s time to make it more functional with some much needed and long overdue upgrades. Windows has been behaving pretty dog slow on it for a while now and is way past time for a fresh install to get rid of 5 years of leftover software crap that’s built up.
2GB RAM – $51
I originally asked for a laptop with 1GB RAM, but for some reason it turned into 512MB when the order was placed. How I’ve been limping along running Windows in 512MB of RAM for all these years, I have no idea. The extra memory will definitely be nice though.
6600mAh battery – $72
About a year ago, the original battery went belly up and stopped holding any significant charge. The battery would last about 10 minutes before petering out, so I was restricted to only being able to use the laptop whenever I could plug in. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop. New battery will make me portable again.
120GB hard drive – $60
I’m nowhere near running out of space on the original 60GB hard drive, but a larger hard drive will give me the chance to set up a dual-boot Linux/Windows system, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. The original drive I’ll pop into an enclosure and use it for portable backup.
Considering the fact that I apparently lost one of the DVI outputs on my work computer video card, on top of the earlier computer fail that happened Monday, I may be tempting fate with all of these upgrades. The way things have been going so far, with my luck some other component in the laptop will die and kill the thing shortly after I get all of these upgrades installed.

An auspicious start. Not!

Came in to work today to discover that a video driver update turned my dual monitor setup into a non-dual monitor setup. Upon rebooting to try and fix said video problem, 2 sticks of RAM (512MB worth) decided to go belly up on me.
Not the start of the work year I was looking for.
Luckily I was able to scavenge a couple of 1GB sticks out of one of the old computers, so now my computer has twice the memory it started with.
Still haven’t fixed the dual monitor problem though.