Another Word for Nerd

Thanks to a surplus-equipment auction at the office, I now have two Dell P991 19″ Trinitron monitors, with absolutely perfect pictures (good brightness, contrast, etc – they look brand new) for the grand total of $5 each (we didn’t have a minimum bid amount..)

Anyone care to buy a six-month-old Dell M992 19″ flat-screen CRT monitor? I’ll sell it for half what I paid for it (I paid $250, so I’ll sell it for $125) to anyone in the Austin area who can pick it up. Works great, I just prefer the Trinitron tubes.

in his observation of our current President.

Apple finally killed off HyperCard this week.
I spent a LOT of time developing things with it about twelve years ago.

Big Dead Place is nifty, interesting stories from people who live/lived and worked at the McMurdo research station in Antarctica.

After a string of cheap low-end, sub-$200 guitars, Amy surprised me on Monday with this.

I’m still in shock. I never thought I’d own an actual Gibson (not Epiphone, which is owned by Gibson but made in Korea) Les Paul guitar.

The pretty red Epiphone LP Special II is being sold to a friend.

(from March 11th)

In 2001, someone ran into my backyard fence.

In 2002, someone ran into my backyard fence.

Last Saturday, someone ran into my backyard fence, in the exact same section that had been fixed in 2002.

The apartment complex said they’d fix it. They did, if you want to call the shoddy work they did a “repair”.

I’m debating between taking the issue up with the parent company that owns the complex (instead of just the complex manager), or spending $50 and fixing it myself.

(from Saturday, March 13th)

Got up around 1 today. My direct-deposit paycheck (along with a decent-sized performance bonus) hit the bank, so the first thing we did was make the house payment, truck payment, and then completely paid off four credit cards.

Then, equipped with about $200 each of “toy money”, we went out. Our first stop was Heart of Texas Music, where we picked up Amy’s new Sennheiser HD600 headphones. I was going to look around, but a guy was (badly) trying to imitate Santana on a Strat in the corner, so we went down the road to MusicMakers, where I picked up a handfull of Dunlop Tortex picks (.88mm in green and gold/black, 1mm in blue, and .73mm yellow). I’ve used the green .88s since high school, but I think I’ll switch to the “black gold” version now.

While I was there, I also impulse-purchased a purple Smokey Amp for just fiddling around and practicing in front of the computer (when the Marshall amp is impractical).

We headed to my office for a short bit, where I met up with a coworker and we rebooted the NetApp filer and Amy listened to music on her new headphones.

Then it was to Luby’s for lunch, Lowe’s for plants for Amy, and then I went to Discount Electronics to pick up a 288-CD storage binder in order to consolidate four 48-disc folders that are almost full of system software, backups, MP3s, and movies.

I’m not sure if its a prank or gimmick, but LiveJournals like this make my brain hurt and fear for future generations.

Its like someone ran a L33tsp33k/gurl filter on their entries.

Heart of Texas Music called me on Wednesday. My Les Paul Special II, in Wine Red with all-black hardware, had arrived! I was surprised considering that they’d told me it would take two months when I ordered it last week. They gave it to their guitar tech for a proper setup job, and I picked it up that afternoon.

You can find pictures here.

I was amazed when I saw the guitar in person. From the factory promo shots, I’d thought it would come with a solid “candy apple red” finish. Instead, its a deep dark true “wine red” color, semi-translucent so you can see the woodgrain of the mahogany beneath it. The finish is so pretty I want to proverbially “rub it down with a diaper”.

Once I bought it home, I realized that I only have one guitar stand, and that the Les Paul Junior wouldn’t get played much. So, it now has a new home at Casa de Prentiss, whom I finally met in person tonight.