March 23, 2003


It has been a very quiet weekend, the boys are both with my parents. Extremely quiet. We could actually hear a pin drop, literally.

Had a good day my self, my afternoon was used helping a friend of my brother-in-law to set up a new computer. He had bought a new Dell notebook (a Inspiron 5100) to replace his old desktop unit bought about 4 years ago. Nice little notebook, fast, pretty screen just not supplied with a lot ports on the machine, just ethernet, modem, 2 usb, video, svideo out and firewire. He did pick up a port replicator made by Targus that supplied ps/2 for mouse and k/b, parallel and serial, ethernet and 2 usb. The little devil plugged into a USB port. Only two drawbacks, it is only USB 1.1 and it did NOT work right out of the box. First time we set it up the ethernet did not work. After a reboot it was gone, unplugging and plugging back into the computer brought it back on line (w/o ethernet again), then after another reboot it was just gone completely. I was called later told that it did start to work but I only wonder for how long, just too flakey for my comfort. Like the notebook, not impressed with the replicator.

Here is a picture I had meant to put up earlier, I made cobbler earlier this month and put a little too much in the pot it turns out, made for an impressive mess as you can see here:
Cobbler Pot
An impressive sight, thankfully I put a pan under it so the oven was not too messy and it also cleaned up easily after being soaked for a while.