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In lieu of any real content at this time, I give you, from the pages of theferrett's blog:

Operation Acoustic Kitty!.

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I am really buffeted out this week!

I think that Posi, Andrea, and I ate at four buffets over the course of the weekend. The weekend, in this case, being extended back toward the end of work on Thursday since I had Friday off. I can't even remember where all we ate. There was Chinese, there was Golden Corral, there was Old Country; *woofs* lots of food!

We hung out with Posi Thursday night and most of Friday. I think he ended up sleeping on our futon both nights too. It's sad, but I really can't remember what all we did. My brain has been mushified by work. I'm quite sure we had a good time though!

Saturday, CJ met Posi and I at my place. He hauled in his Proliant ML570 and, using spart parts from my ML570, determined that the reason it wasn't booting correctly was bad RAM. Or did that happen after the auction? I can't remember that either. The doggy's brain is swiss-cheese at the moment, apparently.

The three of us left for an arcade machine auction at the state fair grounds that started at eight o' clock, so we must have looked at the server after. Oh yeah, I remember now. Posi and I brought the server to my place on Friday and left it there, and I think we looked at it Friday night. Then, on Saturday, we gave it back to CJ who, amazingly enough, was able to fit it into the back seat of his Mustang.

Anyway, the arcade auction was fun. I bumped into my uncle Mike who was selling two of his games. I found out from him on Sunday that he bought two more to replace them. The games were set back to back in great long rows, with an aisle in the middle to gain access to the power plugs. Overhead announcements encouraged patrons to plug in and test machines as they liked, but not to open the backs.

I played a bunch of free games, and that was about the end of my involvement with them. CJ was looking for a machine to convert into a MAME cabinet, but didn't manage to find one that fit the bill. Maybe next time.

I played a few games of pinball; the Elvira machine, the Roller Coaster Tycoon machine, and the Simpsons machine were fun. I'd love to have a pinball table myself; I've been stuck on watching that little silver ball roll through it's paths ever since I was a little boy who spend hours and hours on the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy table that my parents won in some contest back in the day. They're pricey though; the reserve prices were around $1500 and up.

I was really surprised at how little some things went for though. The three of us didn't stay for the auction, but my uncle told me that slot machines were going for fifty bucks or so, and there were other machines in the one to four hundred dollar range. Of course, some were much more too; it depends on the demand and the rarity. I may actually stay and watch the auction next time. When finances are better, I might actually be able to buy something there, if I really want to. I'd love to have Silent Scope; there actually was one there, though I imagine that one ws fairly pricey.

On the way home, the three of us stopped at American Science and Surplus just to look around. I would have bought wooisme more magnetic refrigerator words, but I realized that I'd forgotten my wallet. Oops. Hey, speaking of that; Posi, make me buy you some gas next time we're out; I think I still owe you some!

Then there was Man Day! I sat out the movie; I was overwhelmed by all the activity that weekend and needed a little time away from people. I'm told that my mate had a wonderful time seeing Grindhouse. She says I'd enjoy it too, though I think it might be a little gorier than I like.

I joined the rest of the group for dinner at the Charcoal Grill where, despite admonitions from another diner about the sacrilegious nature of doing so at a steak house, I ordered a hamburger. I'm just not big on big slabs of meat. I'd much rather have something of a nice uniform texture. And well done, please. Pink meat squicks me.

From there, the four of us (my mate and I plus Posi and Tybis) went back to the house for burnination. Even though I'd run out to Menards after dinner just to get wood, our enthusiasm for the fire quickly waned though; it was just too cold out there! We went back in and talked, but I went to bed before too long. I was just tired out. I don't know how late it was when the other two left, but I woke up when Andrea came back to bed just long enough to snuggle up with her and fall back asleep. Happiness is a warm coonie-grrl.

On Sunday, I rode out to my aunt and uncle and grandparents' house with my parents and my brother akreaveter. Since Andrea had elected to stay home (she was feeling a little bit under the whether and wanted to work on a few things at home too), we all fit in one car. I haven't taken a car ride with my family in years I don't think, and that was fun.

I talked to my mom about a couple things I'm writing and about my ideas of submitting them for publication. She suggested getting a copy of The Writer's Market, a publication listing periodicals and other media and what kind of pieces they're looking for. I may just do that. I don't have any illusions about most of what I write here being noteworthy; I'm just jotting down the events of the day as they strike me. But there have been just a few things here or there that I've looked at and though 'you know, that just might be something of publishable quality'. I'd like to look into that.

Time spend with my extended family was nice. My uncle told me about the games he'd bought and we chatted about the car that Andrea and I test drove. The most fun of the day was spending time with my grandfather. I set up the Dell Dimension that I built for him; he seemed excited about the chance to learn Windows and it made me happy that I could make him happy. I showed him the hammer I found in Gary and the grappling hook I'd made. He thought that twisting the three pieces of metal together was a perfectly good way of fastening them; maybe I do have some aptitude at this metal working thing. He also told me that the hammer head was definitely much older than the hammer, but that it was not hand made. He has a book on hammers that, once he finds it, he can look the maker's mark on mine up in and tell me more about it. He showed me the Pentax digital SLR he'd picked up for himself too and let me look at it a bit. I really like spending time with him and and it really made me happy to do more of that.

I played darts with my aunt, uncle, and mother, and ate too much good food. I finally got home about nine o' clock and got to sleep somewhere after ten. I could use another day off, but other than that, the weekend was really wonderful. I'm grateful to all those who helped make it so.

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While I was working on getting my laptop to talk to my mom's computer so I could copy Dragon Naturally Speaking over to her hard drive for her, Andrea came back from buying dog food and said "Hey Chris, there's a monitor on the curb out there!"

"Is it a big one?"

"Pretty big; at least as big as this one." She pointed to my mom's 19" work surplus Dell that I gave her a few months ago.

So I ran out to investigate. It was about a block south, so I jogged ahead to investigate and spare Andrea the time of walking down if it wasn't worth it.

It turned out to be pretty big indeed, and had component video jacks as well as VGA. It also had just a db15 jack instead of an integral VGA cable. This was telling me that this was a fairly high end monitor. So I picked it up and carried it back with me. Oof! It was heavy! I figured that someone with enough bucks to buy a big high end CAD monitor like that probably had enough bucks to replace it with a big flat panel; I estimated a 50/50 chance at this thing working just fine. Turns out I was in luck.

I brought it home after dinner, lugged it upstairs, and looked at the specs. It's a 21" PanaSync Pro P110. Intended as a CAD/CAM monitor, it has a maximum resolution of 1800x1440 at 71Hz and the pre-release review I looked at lists a MSRP of $1200 in 1998. I washed it off, Windexed the screen, and powered it on. There was no loud hum as I'm used to in big CRTs; just a quiet crackle as the screen lit up and then the blue rectangle of a setup menu window. Sweet!

I got it hooked up to my laptop and tried it out; it looks beautiful. I can't find a single thing wrong with it. I'm going to set it up as the secondary monitor on my desktop next to my 17" flatscreen. That should be plenty of room for a few VNC sessions and chat windows.

Thanks sweetie! You rock!