Jay McGavren’s Journal

New Halo 2 maps tonight! Yay!

I should be on about 7:30 PM Arizona time (9:30 Central), with Diana joining me shortly thereafter.

Which OStan are you?

You are Windows 2000 Professional Edition. You are the most stable and reliable of all the Windows girls. Of course, since your main comparison is with ME, that’s not saying much. You’re popular with some, but you’re being replaced with XP. You often help take care of your sister ME.

Sigh… Yes, I caved and did a survey…

Yeehaw! This will be a treasure trove for personal data mining: Google has added a search history. When you use Google as often as I do (several times daily), this could generate a very rich map of the topics you’re thinking about. And since Google saves everything to your account and maps it to a calendar, you can actually go back in time and see what you were working on for any given date.

Privacy advocates needn’t fret (much); it’s opt-in, and you can “pause” the search logging at any time.

This is a very cool feature that I didn’t know I needed until now. :)

Diana and her mom are sharing a PC, and they’re starting to have “roommate problems”. (Judy doesn’t like the apps I install for Diana, etc.) Since it’s Judy’s PC anyway, Diana was going to be the one kicked off. Time to do something.

We’re on a tight budget, I set up an eBay automated search to find cheap laptops. To avoid being outbid all the time, I configured it to only report auctions ending in less than an hour.

The problem with that, I have since figured out, is that it leads to impulse purchases. We got a laptop for a measly 80 bucks (shipped), but it’s only a Pentium, so I doubt it can run anything later than Windows 95. Not only that, it has *no Ethernet port*. I have to hunt around and see if anyone still sells adapter cards.

I think I may have just wasted 80 bucks, and the thing hasn’t even arrived yet. Now I have to decide if I’ll waste even more of my time trying to make it work (Linux? Thin clients?), or if I’ll bite the bullet and go buy her a *real* PC. Lenny might be getting a laptop for his birthday.

You are currently reading the blog of my company’s newest SENIOR Programmer Analyst. :) Not bad after one year.

People used to go half a decade without a promotion in this department. I am very lucky to have joined in the year the logjam broke.

I had a dream last night that Diana and I had another child, and we offered up his first name for corporate sponsorship.

“Hi, I’m Jay, this is my wife Diana, and this is little FedEx…”

SNES game music is back in my playlist. I’m revisiting SPC plugins for Winamp, and they’re actually really well-integrated now; you can edit a track’s info and even rate it in the Library. Currently stuck in my head are tracks from Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 2, and SoulBlazer.

I’m also starting to catch the podcasting wave. With so much IT news out there to review, the ability to cram it into my 1.5 hours of otherwise-wasted commute time each day is verrry tempting. There aren’t many quality ‘casts right now, but a notable exception is Slashdot Review. Instead of a stream of uhs, ums, and ers as they try to think up what to talk about next, SR simply takes major Slashdot stories from the day and summarizes them in an audio format. Simple and useful. Now if only there were similar feeds for GizModo, GameSpot, and Yahoo! News…