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where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

Nerd

Sundays with Samith

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Samith brings Brighton into Seward on Sunday evenings to play basketball at Concordia’s youth basketball program (there’s some other name for the program, but, yeah). While Brighton is basketballing it up, Samith has been coming over to our house for what we have affectionately been calling, Sundays with Samith™.

We mostly just sit around, eat dinner and talk about things. But this time Samith came bearing gifts. Sometime ago, Samith was lucky enough to purchase a Bag of Crap™. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to purchase a Bag of Crap at the end of a Woot Off™, but I’ve never been quick enough.

One of the items in the Bag of Crap was a TruGuard (presumably also™) screen protector for an iPhone5. Samith knows that I like to live dangerously and don’t keep a cover on my phone, but this is just 0.3mm thick. He thought I could maybe live with that.

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The instructions were so brief that we did a lot of assuming about how we were to do things, but it all turned out okay. Their selling point is protection, but the most amazing thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any fingerprint smudges on the screen anymore. That’s really pretty neat.

Thanks Samith, and thanks Bag of Crap.

Yesterday’s April Fools’s Joke

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I should have posted this yesterday, so you could enjoy it, but I actually forgot about it until about 6:00 yesterday morning.  Jonathon Swärdén wrote the JavaScript that replaces all of the images on a webpage with pictures of Nicholas Cage, Bill Murray, Vanilla Ice, Steven Sigal and kittens.

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Our Executive Director texted me this morning:

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We were talking about various Practical Jokes on the Nebraska Technology Coordinator’s email list yesterday and I posted the link to our website along with what our Executive Director said and got this reply back:

“Lloyd, what was on the webpage. We did not see it!!”

I went with:

“Hint: Nicholas Cage, Bill Murray, Steven Seagal, and Ice Tea haven’t gone to Lincoln Lutheran for years.”

 

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New Computer (first try)

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Happy Birthday, Brad!

Last week my hard drive died. I think it happened the first day I was sick. Lauren came up and told me that my computer was making a clicking sound. That’s the sound of a dead hard drive. Everything was backed up, so I didn’t worry about it, but I started thinking about maybe putting together a new computer.

I looked back at my account history and the last time I’d built a new computer was in 2009. So my current computer was 6 years old. That’s pretty good service from a computer. I had upgraded the RAM since then, but I think that was it.

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I spent most of a day figuring our what parts to buy. I don’t really keep up on that stuff. It changes every few months, and I only build a new computer every few years, so it’s better to figure it out every few years than to just know stuff.

Last time I put together a computer I spent more than I normally do on the case and the power supply, so I’m going to use those again. That’s actually about $100 worth of parts. DVD drives haven’t changed any since 2009, so I’m using that over again too. Everything else will be new.

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It turns out that new everything else costs $525 dollars. I found some websites with good advice, good reviews, good comparisons and good deals. I think I’m getting a $665 computer for my $525.

I put all of the pieces together today, but when I tried to install Windows 7 it told me that my product key was wrong. I don’t know what it means. I read the product key off the box. Oh well. I’ve got another one at school that I can use. But I can’t do that until Monday. So for now I’ve got a $785 dollar paper weight. If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details, you can read about the new computer here.

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Better Butter… wait, I already used that title.

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A couple of weeks ago, the ‘lid’ to my ‘new’ butter system slipped out of my hand and chipped. Surprise, surprise. What did I expect from buttery glass?

I spent a good long time thinking about how to replace it. At various stores, I looked at containers for holding pencils, toothbrushes, sewing goods, fishing tackle – nothing was right. But then ShopKo had this Snapware thing in the lunchbox section.

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Perfect. It’s unbreakable, secures my butter with four, count ’em – four locks, and the best part? When I’m running low on butter, there’s room for another stick to get cozy and start a-softening for next time.

I think I might spend too much time thinking about butter.

Bookstores (part 2)

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I (this is Lloyd) went to high school at Saint Paul’s College High in Concordia Missouri. One oddity of a boarding high school was that the school had a “bank”. Parents would deposit money into an account and specify how much money you could withdraw each week.

It would be hard to describe how inordinately proud 14 year old me was when my parents thought about it and decided not to put any limit on what I could take out. I knew that there was enough in there for me to get $5.00 a week for a semester. I don’t remember if that was money from my own bank account at the Farmers Bank of Lohman* or if it was my parent’s money. Money in our family was pretty fungible.

$5.00 happens to be enough money to walk to Casey’s every evening after Study Hours and buy an orange popsicle and still have enough money left over to walk downtown and buy a paperback book on Saturday.

Living at Concordia put me approximately 5,000 times closer to a bookstore than I had been at Honey Creek.  It didn’t really matter that they didn’t have a lot of books to choose from. We only ever looked at the science fiction / fantasy section. Really, section is probably too strong a word. It was maybe 4-5 shelves that were maybe 3 feet wide.

Looking back on it, I can’t imagine that we went there every Saturday, but it must have been close. Just looking at the number of books in my basement attests to that.

Since I found one, here’s what the inside of the Farmers Bank of Lohman looked like:

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*I once kissed the daughter of the bank president.

Google’s menu is adaptive

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Did you know that if you search for the word “puppies” on Google the second item on the menu is “Images”?* But if you search for “walmart” then the second item on the menu is “Maps”.  If you search for “pie crasts” the second item on the menu is “Shopping”.

There are at least five other things that could show up in the second position: Videos, News, Books, Flights and Apps; but I don’t know what to search for to get them to appear in the coveted second position.

*I am using Logical Punctuation. English teachers are invited to “bite me”.