05/18/06: At the other end of the floor in the office I work, there is a soda machine that has Cherry Coke, or Coca-Cola Cherry as it's now called. I don't drink a lot of pop at work, even though all the machines in the building give you a 12 oz. can for a quarter, but every once in a while I get a taste for a Cherry Coke, and the machine on my end of the building doesn't have it as a selection.
There's another reason why I sometimes make the trek down there. There's something wrong with the machine, in that it occasionally dispenses two cans for one quarter! To be fair, it sometimes doesn't give you anything for your quarter, so I figure that I'm probably about even over the time I've worked here.
So today, I had one quarter in my pocket, so I thought I'd take a chance. I put it in, pressed the button, and got nothing. Now, I'm not a gambling man, but I really had a taste for a Cherry Coke, so I pulled a dollar out of my wallet, fed it into the machine and pressed the button. This time, something dropped in the slot. I was disappointed when I saw that it was a plain old Coke Classic. But then I went for my change and found a dollar and a half in the tray! I guess I'm a winner this week.
05/08/06: I apologize in advance to the non-techies out there, but I got a new gadget last week, and so far, I'm thrilled with it so I had to share. If you're not interested, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs.
I ordered a
Hauppage MediaMVP device from
Amazon.com after reading many positive reviews. It's basically a tiny diskless computer, like those
thin-client devices that were all over the computer press a number of years ago. You plug it into your TV and network, and it will pull music, video and pictures off your computer and play them through the TV. I hoped it would let me watch video files from my computer on my TV without converting the files and burning to a DVD.
The thing that impresses me the most is that it took all of five minutes to install and it worked the first time. After I opened the box, I installed the software on my main system, plugged the device into the TV and the network cable that is used by the
MP3 Jukebox, and turned it on. It immediately found the PC running the software, and after I went back and told the software where to find the movies and music files, I was playing a movie file from my PC in the office on my TV in the front room. And it looked just fine. I could fast-forward, pause, rewind, everything! I had one problem where I was skipping around a show too much and the audio went out of sync, but other than that, it just works! Amazing! It's a little early for a whole-hearted recommendation, but at under $100, it's practically an impulse-buy!
Stephie is hard at work getting ready for her one-woman show at the
LaGrange Art League in June. While she's working hard to finish up a couple more pieces before it starts, she's also planning for the reception for the exhibit. We should have dates and times shortly.
And
Kisu's dog trainer,
Dave Wieczorek, has a big event coming up in September, and he's asked me to work up a web site, since I've been helping him out with his site. It's pretty basic now, but he should be passing along more information fo me to add any day now.
Check it out if you're interested!
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