In a week I will embark on a new adventure in my life: I'm going to fly out to California for six months to work at a startup. That's right, I'm going to leave my family to live across the country and work at an entirely different company until February or April. I'm not quitting …
LED Paradise
Every so many years we have upgraded the lighting in our house. The first time was soon after we moved in. We swapped all of our incandescent lamp bulbs for CFLs because the prices had finally come down enough to justify them. They used less than a third of the power of the equivalent incandescent …
My SLI Saga
I bought a customized Gaming PC so that I could expand it in the future. Most importantly, I wanted to swap out the graphics card for a newer model in a few years when mine started to struggle. I also wanted the option to combine multiple graphics cards together. This is called SLI (or Crossfire …
Far Cry 4
Since I published my first impressions of several of the games that I played over holiday vacation I started playing another that needs to be added to the list: Far Cry 4. Far Cry 4 is the newest game that I own, having been released in November. I didn't get it from Steam; instead it …
Game Impressions
I've purchased a bunch of games recently to play on my new PC. I took a breadth over depth approach over Christmas vacation so that I could get a general impression of most of what I bought. Here are my thoughts. The games are listed based on the time I've spent playing, starting with those …
Gaming PC Initial Impressions
I've had my gaming PC for a few weeks now. Here are my initial impressions. Build & Shipping Speed When I originally ordered the machine on Black Friday, it had a ship date of 12/18 and would take 5 - 7 days to ship after that. I wanted it before Christmas so I paid extra …
Steam Games
If you play games on a PC, you know what Steam is. If you don't, then you aren't paying attention. I'm old enough to have been around when Steam came out so I can tell you how amazing it is. It used to be that you'd install two, four, or even six CD's worth of …
Star Wars
The boys have been really into Star Wars for the past few months. It started earlier this year when I allowed them to play with my collection of Star Wars action figures from my teenage years. I had kept them around, not for collecting per se, but because I couldn't bear to part with them. …
Nerd Excitement
Everyone knows I'm an Apple person. My household is full of Macs, my family has iPhones and iPad, I've got an Apple TV, I've even got a Mac Museum. If Apple makes it, I will likely shell out the money to buy it. Apple products are often associated with simplicity – they are "easy to …
Michael Jackson Favorites
Michael Jackson is one of my favorite artists, so it's not surprising that the boys like him too. We listen to him in the car and watch his videos at home. They reference Michael by name quite often; Zach was even Michael Jackson for Halloween this year. As with anyone, the boys have favorite songs. …
Relatively Ambitious 