Well, after a week-long vacation Mike and Erika are heading back to Chicago. I dropped them off in San Juan earlier today and right now they are in the air, east of the Bahamas. I think we all had a lot of fun…lots of running around, seeing stuff, eating, drinking, etc. Here’s what we were up to:

Thursday: Picked them up in San Juan.
Friday: The Camuy Caves in the AM, the Telescope in the PM.
Saturday: Relaxing around the house. Went to Manati in the evening.
Sunday: The beach in the AM, then TJ Ranch in the PM.
Monday: Taino Ceremonial Park, museums in Jayuya, Toro Negro Forest, Panoramic Route.
Tuesday: Mayaguez, including the USDA experimental station (plants).
Wednesday: Guajataca Forest (hiking and caving), El Tunel at Guajataca beach
Thursday: Drive to San Juan and the flight home.

They took a ton of pictures (packed 2 CDs), which they’ll be showing the folks up north. I’ll go through and resize/post some up in this site, too.

Heck, after all that, *I* need a vacation. Anyhow, things should settle down a bit and I’ll start posting more often again. It was really a lot of fun to see them and I hope that they come back soon. After all, I’ve still got 30 pounds of chicken in the freezer!

Besides being slowed down by a dead laptop, I’ve been otherwise pretty busy this week. My brother and his wife came down for vacation on Thursday, so I’ve been busy taking them around the island.

Thursday was the long drive to/from San Juan (about 1.5 hours to get there, about 2.5 to get back [traffic]). Friday was the caves in the morning and telescope in the afternoon (with some interesting behind-the-scenes pics–coming soon). Saturday was pretty much a lazy around-the-house day, though we went out to check out the ocean in the evening. Today (Sunday) will be a beach day, and then we’ll head over to TJ Ranch (it’s Tina’s birthday today).

Unfortunately, all this running around, plus cooking 3 meals for 4 people, has got me beat. I’ve been too tired to write up much, but I’ll try to find some energy.

Well, after three (yes, three) failed hard drives, cronic overheating, and general fussiness, I’m retiring my old Dell Inspiron 8200. It was a good machine (when it worked), and served us well, but enough is enough.

I’ve upgraded to an even bigger beast of a laptop (which is amazing, since that Inspiron was huge and heavy). You see, small lightweight laptops are cool and handy, but this is my primary machine, so I need something with some real horsepower (as they call them: desktop replacements).

So, now I’m running an HP NX9600. It’s got a huge 17″ widescreen display (1680×1050), P4 3.2 Ghz, DVD Burner, 2 GB RAM, tons of USB (4), firewire, wireless, etc. The downside is that it’s fricken huge. It’s so big that the keyboard has a full numeric keypad–just like on a desktop keyboard! It won’t be something that I’ll be carrying around much (heck, even the power supply is the size of a brick–and weighs as much).

But the size is okay, since I really need a day-to-day-workhorse type laptop. Something that has every goodie you could want, and can run server applcations (I run SQL Server 2005 on it, for example). As an added bonus, HP seems to understand something about cooling–it has three huge fans on the bottom to cool everything down.

Oh, one more thing: One of the reasons I wasn’t in a complete panic with my dead Dell was because I had recently bought a new (but boring) gadget: A Western Digital external USB hard drive. They were on sale at Office Max a while back and I picked up a 120 GB one.

At the time, I mainly wanted it because we had so many pictures (and the laptop was full). Well, it also includes some “single touch” backup software, which basically backs up everything from the laptop/pc drive to the external drive in one step. Boy, I’m glad I did that! The drive just paid for itself in full, that’s for sure.

After having my old laptop take a flying leap off a cliff, I’ve been spending the last couple days just trying to recover everything and get stuff “back to normal”.

One of the things I did was download the new Google Toolbar Beta. I usually don’t try out Beta (test) products, but I wanted to check out their Bookmarks feature. Basically, the toolbar can store all your Internet bookmarks on the Google servers (assume you have a gmail account).

What does this mean for you? Well, if your laptop dies, like mine did, you don’t have to worry about all your lost bookmarks. Plus, you can go to any computer (assume they have the toolbar installed–most do) and pull up your bookmarks. Very handy.

On the downside, your bookmarks will be stored on Google’s servers, so don’t put anything up there you wouldn’t want others to see.

Last Saturday I came home to find that my laptop was no longer “seeing” the hard drive. So, I’ve been computer-less since then. This is the THIRD hard drive that’s gone bad on my Dell Inspiron 8200. I think that series is prone to overheating. I’ll write more once I have my rebuilt machine up and running again. (Right now I’m trying to get my recent data [ex. Quicken, Taxes, etc] back.)

Many of you will remember my old consulting story (one of many) about the woman with the fur shirt. You see, I used to get the most horrible allergies at one client site. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why–bad building air?–did someone have a jar of nuts at their desk?–etc. Well, I finally found out why. The woman sitting next to me used to knit clothing out of dog hair! I know that a lot of people didn’t believe this, but look what I found on the Make Blog:

Learn About Spinning Dog Hair Into Yarn

See! I wasn’t making it up.

For some reason there has been a renewed interest in ASCII Art recently. For those too young to know (you know who you are!), ASCII Art are pics made up of keyboard characters. You see, back in the “good old days”, there weren’t things like GUIs or monitors with 1600×1200 resolution. You were lucky to get 40×24…characters, that is.

Anyhow, there’s some software out there that lets you make ASCII Art out of your own pics. Some of it is Shareware, but I really don’t want to plunk down $30 for a one-trick-pony. I did come across this tiny Open Source program that works pretty well: ASCII Generator Dot Net

Note: You do need to have the .NET Framework 1.1 installed on your PC for this to work. (Sorry *nix fans.) If you are running Windows XP, you will likely have the framework already. There are some other programs that run in Linux, don’t require .NET, etc, but I was too lazy to dig deeper. That’s what Google’s for, after all.

Update: For some old school fun, check out ASCII art, circa 1948: ASCII Art on a Typewriter.

While poking around for Ham Radio gear I came across a pretty cool looking gadget (from the people who make the Miracle Whip portable antennas). It’s called the AerFlight Virtual Radar. It’s a digital receiver/antenna system that plugs into your PC and captures the transponder signals from aitcraft in your area. It then displays the info in a simulated radar display. Now you can see if that “Orange Alert” is real or not. The drawback? It’s pretty darn expensive (nearly $1000).

I can’t wait to see when they finish their site (it’s pretty limited right now) so that I can check out the real-time display. Now I want to poke around and see if there is something similar already on the web (ex. real-time radar displays).

Update: I found another site that has more pics and technical info. Pretty cool: Red1Radar

You know, I used to hate those damn power bricks (you know, the kind that charge up laptops), but now I’ve gotten quite fond of them.

Has Ron fallen off his rocker? Nope.

It’s because of all the brownouts down here. We have one at least once a week–where the lights *barely* work, fans and TVs die, etc. However, there’s enough voltage for those little black bricks to still work. You see, since they are designed for world-wide use they accept a really wide range of input.

So, when nothing else works and we’ve only got 70 volts coming in, I can still use the laptop and the Internet (thanks to my wireless service). Horray for the power brick!

Google has maps of Mars and the Moon on-line. They use the web-based Google Maps interface, so you don’t need to be running Google Earth. (If you haven’t yet played with Google Earth, take a look. It’s really very cool, though you do need a pretty fast Internet connection.)