Ordered the extender board for my C-One, the FPGA based C64 computer, that effectively expands the amount of 'space' you have for creating new circuits within the FPGA. This allows me to run all sorts of new stuff that I couldn't before, such as a Colecovision, ZX Spectrum, and an Amiga. Of course, the Amiga is what I was aiming for and surprisingly enough, this works well. It creates a ECS based Amiga with 2MB of CHIP, 8MB of Fast and 1MB of 'other' in the FPGA, mounts ADF images on a CF card, and will use a real HD. I had it up and going within an hour, though I'm having issues with the hard drive. Both that I have used 'lock up' when I try to do disk access through the CLI. I'm not sure if it's due to multiple partitions on the drive, if it's because I'm hooking it into my 4000T to bring files or ? (It will only use ADF images so moving WHDLOAD images onto it will be slooowwww). I'm going to keep messing with it.

Got vacation all planned - we're off to Washington DC! We're taking the train out that direction - this time we're getting our own room which includes our own toilet and sink. We're traveling civilized this time! Soon it'll be running water ;) The Union Station is only a few blocks from the hotel, which is a few blocks from the National Mall. We're going to the Smithsonian, the Air and Space Museum and I'm sure lots of other stuff. Of course, this is dependant on how happy Emmy is. We're only there for a few days but we can always go back if we like it.

It's been a pretty uneventful week. I've been on call for the last 6 days which pretty much keeps me home. Then again, the kiddo would keep me home right now anyway. Not because we can't go out, but it's been too cold to bring her out into it.

She spent the last day not feeling too swift, though I got to see firsthand what 'projectile vomiting' is. Wow, that's some distance! The pediatrician says she has a stomach bug and after a couple of days she's pretty much over it. Of course, while she was there we learned she was about to start teething at any time so we'll get to start the crying thing all over again. </me>

In the wild world of video games I got 53 CD32 games in the mail the other day for a price we won't talk about. It's still cheaper than getting them from England one by one but ... ouch. I've spent the week playing some classic gaming goodness. Speedball 2! Pirates Gold! W00! I also managed to grab a C64GS as well which I'm waiting to show up.

Lastly, I've been working on the website (www.particles.org) and a new website as well that will show up eventually. One thing on my website is that I host a bunch of magazines in PDF format. The bad thing is, they're graphical scans so they're not searchable - until now. I found out the new Adobe Acrobat will batch scan them and run an OCR through them and it will build a text database into the PDF. From there, I'm working on a search engine that will run under PHP and scan the text in PDF files. The issue I'm having (at least with sphider, an open source search engine) is that my webhoster won't allocate me enough RAM on my server to run it properly. So, I'm going to look at running on my OS X box at home against my website. Gotta love having Apache and MySQL built into the OS.

Yesterday, Emmy turned 4 months old which is a big step I think. Maybe it doesn't sound like much since we all turn 4 months old every 4 months ;), but in the last week she's finally...

- Learned how to turn over *and* hold in her lunch at the same time (an important step really! When you're not used to laying on your stomach the contents have a of trouble staying in there.

- Figured out that everything belongs in her mouth. Toys... pacifiers.. cats, small Toyotas and anything she can get a hold of. That also brings her to...

- She's holding things! She can now take her pacifier out of her mouth and put it back in.. usually. Most of the time she just drops it and finds something else to drool on.

- She found her toes.. and man are they interesting. Why bother with toys when you have toes?

She went for her four month doctor's appointment which included more immunization shots that made her cranky. She's at 15lbs, 4 oz and over 25 inches long which puts her at the far upperend of her height-class. In other words, there's a good chance she has dad's height. Hopefully that's a good thing.

In video game related stuff, I've been spending more time playing the Neo Geo CD my wife got me for Christmas. Cyberlip is a lot of fun and not unlike Metal Slug in the least. Also, been spending way too much time working on Amiga CD32 stuff - I'm aiming for a complete collection. It doesn't help that 90% of the games weren't released in the US.

Merry Xmas and all that! It's been a busy month which is probably why I haven't been posting much. Someone told me before that I wouldn't know what free time was or what I did with my time after I had a kid and they're right (I think that was you Rob actually...). It's no biggy, it's fun watching her grow up. To you kidless people - yeah, you don't understand until you have kids. Really, I'm the most anti-kid person I know and I've sorta been taken by it now...

The family has been sitting around sick with all sorts of fun stuff. Emmy, now at the daycare, has been bringing home all sorts of neatness. I'm sure this isn't going to get any better as she gets older either. Ginger and her have been sitting at home hacking their lungs out. I seem to have a mild case of it but nothing big.

Speaking of Emmy, she made out like a bandit for Xmas which is saying a lot since she's all of 3.5 months old. Everything from playmats to clothes to dolls (thanks to the family and Andy/Karen). She's been having fun drooling on all the neatness.

I can't say my Xmas was too bad either - for video game related stuff (yeah, I still do that!), the wife got me 2 Wii-white Gamecube controllers from Japan. Nintendo decided to put out special white GC controllers to match the Wii since so many games will take advantage of them and almost all first party titles.

I also got the cheesily (yeah that's a word) bad box set of the Super Mario Brothers cartoon. It was bad back in the early 90s and I'm sure it's aged about that well.

The big surprise was a Neo Geo CD w/12 games and 2 controllers! I've been wanting one forever and just couldn't bring myself to buy it. I didn't think it would make it here for Christmas but the postguy dropped it off today of all days ... "I was in the neighborhood!". Very, very cool. I sat around play KOF 98 for awhile today and Cyberlip. I don't quite get the naming of the latter one but there are some definite Metal Slug elements in there. Contrary to what people, so far anyway, the load times aren't *that* bad. Not great, but not bad. It does seem to slow down the progress of the game.

Besides that, I finished up Fable 2 and just like Fable 1, I was like.. wtf, I already won? I was just starting to get good stats and stuff and now it's over. I won the first one in about 17 hours and the second one was about that much too. Wayyyy too short. Great game but they could have easily added more locations and side missions.

So what am I playing now? Animal Crossing for the Wii. Sure, it's not a very hardcore game but it's something the wife and I always enjoy playing. I managed to travel to a few Atari Ager's towns to pick up the remaining fruit I needed. If you have it and aren't on my friends list, let me know and I'll add you in.

Fun with the elderly.

My friend Andy, Jared and myself took off for Dallas the other weekend to do geeky things. Basically, a bunch of us get together at someone's house to play video games, talk computers, and go geek-shopping. Dallas was the destination this time so we all piled into the Fit and headed south.

Nothing too out of the ordinary happened until the trip back. When I'm in Dallas, I *have* to pick up two things at a Tom Thumb supermarket. One is a few cases of Dr. Pepper with Imperial Sugar in em. If you've never heard of Dublin Dr. Pepper, do a Google on it. It's one of the few bottlers in the US to still put sugar into their DP which makes it taste infinitely better than the normal corn syrup one. You know those stupid commercials right?

"You know what they say about Corn Syrup?" and the guy gets all confused. Here, let me remind you... it tastes like crap, is too sweet, and makes everything all syrupy. They only put it in soda now because it's cheaper. If you can get the real thing, go for it.

Anyways, the other thing is Safeway Fruit Punch. What, a generic soda? Sure. Ginger lived on the stuff when we lived in California, and out here, Tom Thumb *is* Safeway but the closest one is in Dallas. I have to load up the car with 2 litres before I head back.

After finding the nearest one via the iPhone, the three of us headed there and loaded up a shopping cart full of sugary goodness. It was 9 in the morning on a Sunday, so nothing exciting could happen, right?

Wrong.

While standing in line, an elderly man about 70-something was waiting in front of me. Another gentleman, about 50 and possibly Iranian or from that region was finishing his checkout.

"Get out of the way, you're holding up the line", the old man yelled at him.

"Excuse me?"

"You're holding up the damn line, get out of the way."

Andy, Jared and I do the deer-in-headlights "WTF?" and step back a few steps.

"I said move it!" exclaims the old man and takes another step towards him.

"I'm just trying to check out!"

"What?!" The old man goes toe to toe with the younger man. "You want to start something?"

It's coincidental that the conversation of bum-fights had come up earlier in the weekend.

The guy finishes checking out and leaves saying "Man, I don't know what's wrong with you" and walks off. I'm thinking that the old man had some general issues with where the guy was born or at least that's how it seemed. He turned around and tried to make friendly conversation with us after the incident but we just sort of did the nervous "heh" and gave him the 'please just get out of here' look.

It's amazing that people have gotten to the point of waiting in line for 5 minutes can cause an outbreak. I wish I had a camera with me. That would be great Best of You Tube footage.

It's been awhile since I posted anything about Emmy, or heck anything for that matter. Emmy is about to hit her three month birthday! It's hard to believe we're already to that point. It's amazing what she's learning and doing compared to just a few months ago. Things that she's learned:

- Sid is fuzzy and likes to protect her and is concerned when she cries.
- That her fingers are *good things* and she no longer needs to claw her face with them.
- That laughing at her parents is fun.
- Baths are good as long as the water is warm.

She's now past the crying constantly stage, thank gawd. The pediatrician put her on another type of acid reducer and we added cereal to her formula. She's sleeping through the night, but mostly it's still while sitting on mom. Laying her down makes her toss and turn but it's no big deal now. She'll eventually graduate to her bedroom... hopefully. Oh, and she's about to clear 13lbs. She's the size of a small bowling ball.

Her personality is starting to come through. She spends a good portion of her day (when not asleep) smiling and laughing and... watching TV. Sure we don't need to get her hooked on that, but she only likes a few shows....

- Rachel Ray
- Spongebob
- Crossing over with John Edwards.

I think it's because John Edwards has an odd shaped head.

She'll stare intently at Rachel Ray and scream at the TV when a commercial comes on.

Emmy did start daycare last week which she's taking quite well. We're dropping her off in the later part of the morning and picking her up earlier so she doesn't have to stay there all day. She even brought home her first cold. Thanks!

BTW, if you're looking for the more geeky blog, it'll be posted soon ;)

Emmy has hit her 8 week birthday! It doesn't sound like much, but it's hard to believe that almost 2 months has passed. It's gotten much better too - either I've gotten into a good routine or she's getting better or both. She also hit a few milestones in her life. First off, her first Halloween:



She's a cat! Nothing really fits too much when you're a baby. She was weighed the other day, and hit the 11lbs, 4oz mark so she's becoming, as the wife would say, a 'chunky-monkey'. She's getting all sorts of baby-rolls.

Her other major milestone was that she finally slept through the night on both Friday and Saturday. That in itself is huge - we're getting close to normality.

BTW, other pictures can be found in the pics area and such.

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=79119737&albumId=2293598

About a year ago, my old iBook G3/900Mhz gave up the ghost. The video went out... not the monitor itself, but the video just quit coming up on the screen. The laptop itself still worked, but without video, it obviously hinders the usage of a normal laptop. Still, being the person I am, I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. "I'll get it fixed someday" I said as I put it away in the corner of a closet.

About a year later, we have Emmy, and Ginger wanted a laptop to use while holding her. My MacBook Pro 15" (the replacement for the iBook) is a bit unwieldy for her to move around while she has the kid. The metal case seems that it might knock the poor baby out if she bumped her head on it. My mind went back to the old iBook in the closet... should I finally get it fixed?

I did some searching on the net and came across iResq.com. $49 to have it picked up and shipped back, plus the price of repair. Hey, that's a good deal! I mean, it's an old laptop, it shouldn't cost too much to get it fixed... should it? I figure since I could buy one 'refurbished' online for about $250 that was an average figure for repairs. Since it's a laptop, I *knew* what I did to it over its life so I wasn't buying someone else's problems. I put in an order and off it went.

When the box arrived, I had to fill out a big question sheet. Where can we call you? What is your password? I filled it all in and put the box in the mailbox and waited. A few days later they called me. At home. I'm not home during the day since.. well I work. I put my daytime phone number on the paper you told me to fill out. Thanks for not looking at it. Time I got the message, they were closed. Okay, we'll call em the next day.

So I called the next day. 'If you're receiving this message, we're having an unusual call volume. Please leave your name/number, and we'll call you back shortly!'. 6 hours later I called them back.

"Yeah, we got your laptop - it'll cost $500 to fix. The logic board is out".

$500? The laptop is 5 years old. I'm sure you have piles of these lying around. I didn't say that, but it came out some like.. 'are you serious?'

"Yeah, these parts are hard to get"

Guess they didn't check Ebay. I told them no, please send it back.

"So you want us to ship it back?"

Here's where I think they get free stuff to fix other machines. You call them, they quote some high price, you tell them to just keep it... since it's broke = profit! Even if I parted it out, I could make about 200 bucks. So they sent it back... and I went to work on surfing the net looking for the fix.

Turns out that this machine was a pretty unreliable machine. Apple did a recall on them some years back but I didn't know it. What's wrong? Well the same thing that caused the Red Ring of Death on the Xbox 360. After some time, the video chip looses its connection with the motherboard - mostly due to a cold solder and some other factors. So really, it's not broke, it's just not connected. Common fixes include 'clamping' the chip back on with a big ol' C-Clamp and letting it run warm for a bit to warp it back into place. Others include putting pressure with an object on the top of the chip to have it make contact that way. Other ways are more fun - the pyro way is to light a fire on top of it to have the heat of the fire 'resolder' the chip to the board.

I did a combination of these methods.

First off, I opened up the laptop, scraped off the heat epoxy on the GPU and put a half dollar on it.



Notice the half dollar is a perfect size? My line of thinking is that half dollar will transfer the heat to the chip from the fire above it. Also, it keeps the fire from sitting right on other parts.



I took an old candleholder, put rubbing alcohol and lit it. It burned for about 10 minutes, but I wasn't sure if that was enough. So... I whipped out the cat's food dish which was tin.



... and did the same thing. It worried me a bit because the tin was almost resting on other chips.

I let it cool, reapplied the epoxy, and placed the half dollar right on it. I then added a piece of packing tape above it (double sided). Why? The laptop has a piece of tin that covers the entire circuit board and screws down. Once the half dollar was stuck to the epoxy, and the tape was stuck to the half dollar and the tin, and the whole thing was screwed down, it put pressure on the GPU. This should prevent it from lifting away from the board again.



So... did it work?

I put the whole thing together, and I'm currently posting this from the laptop. Total price? 50 cents obviously.

Ginger's sister passed away yesterday which was a huge surprise to the family. She was 41 and left behind a husband and 3, luckily grown, kids. There's been a bit of chaos going on around here but I thank everyone who has helped out (food, money, watching Emmy, just being there). My nephew, who is in the Marines, was given a plane ticket by the Red Cross and is out here while other family are driving out here from the west coast.

I've posted some new pictures of Emmy here:

Emmy Pics

It's been a month! Emmy officially turns a month today. And what a month it's been... we've watched her go from a pretty incoherent, totally dependent on us pile of human to an awake baby who is looking around, checking things out and still totally dependent on us pile of human.

Within the last few days, she's been sleeping a bit better, allowing us to put her down for short periods of time. But she's also now wide awake and checking things out. When Rachel Ray comes on (blame the wife), she becomes very interested. She turns her head to watch people and things as I'm holding her. Last night, she even only woke up once (or so I was told, I was upstairs in the guest room hiding). Tomorrow she is being introduced to Ginger's church officially so she'll be in a little pink dress.

In other news...

My latest obsession is playing with 2 new-to-me computers, a Timex Sinclair 2068 and an Atari TT030. I scored the Atari off of someone on Atariage for a good price but with good reasons. It has issues with the floppy drive controller and didn't have any screws holding the case together but overall it's in reasonable shape for the price. I have a new FDC chip on order and have already put in new screws. I've replaced the 100MB drive in there with a newer 4.5GB SCSI drive.

If you hadn't heard of the TT it's not surprising. It's the Atari ST's bigger brother. ST (Sixteen/Thirty Two), TT (Thirty Two/Thirty Two) = a 32 bit chip on a 16 bit bus, and a 32 bit chip on a 32 bit bus. It's an 68030 which is a powerhouse for the time, has an unheard of 4 serial ports, VME bus, full SCSI and can take gobs of RAM (for the time). The bad thing is Atari bundled it with a single-tasking OS which means that you can run one very big thing at a time. When my RAM expansion comes in, I'll be installing EasyMint on it. I've currently got it hooked to my OS X box through a nullmodem into a shell-session, and I've installed a *nix based Zmodem protocol on my OS X box so I can pretend that it's 1993 again and send files via Zmodem to the Atari. It works pretty dang well.

I'm going to mess with the Timex Sinclair more a bit today. Back in the early 80s, Timex brought over the incredibly popular ZX81 to the US and rebadged it as the Timex Sinclair 1000 and 1500. They later brought over the Sinclair Spectrum to the US and rebadged it as the TS2068, but did something unexplicable - they completely remapped memory so it was almost completely incompatible with the Spectrum. Needless to say, it bombed here but you can find an 'emulator' cartridge or swap out the TS2068 ROM with a Spectrum ROM so you can run Spectrum stuff in full NTSC goodness. I'm attempting to load software off my iPod to it since it originally ran off of tape. Here's to a modern solution to an old problem!

It's been a long 3 weeks so far since Emmy was born. I've gone from elation, to frustration, to exhaustion, to a combination of the three in no particular order. You always hear that it's going to be a lot of work but I don't think anyone can really convey *how* much work it is. But it is rewarding, and it's been very cool watching her go through all the stages. First, she couldn't really open her eyes long. Then it went to ... oh.. what's that noise? To ... oh now I can focus on people and pay attention. She's smiling some times.. I'm told it's gas but it could be that she's just like her dad. I smile when I pass gas too....

She entered a phase at about 1.5 weeks that was literally about to drive us insane. She'd pick a time, usually around 7PM and then just cry. For 3, 4, 5 or more hours. Nothing would console her. We couldn't put her down or she'd cry worse. The doctor said it was too early to be colicky, but to keep an eye on it. She went in for her 3 week checkup (she's 21.5 inches and 9 lbs now) and she just wouldn't stop crying - and it was crying like she was just downright uncomfortable. The doctor asked if she 'spit up' at all.. we said no but found out that she should. Reason? GERD or Gastrointestinal Esoph... oh I can't spell it all. Basically, she's got her dad's intolerance for dairy and acid reflux. He prescribed a tiny dose of a reliever for her.. and now she's a happy baby again. She's sleeping quietly in her swing next to me, we managed to drive around town with no issues. She looks, much, much happier too. If what we went through for two weeks was anything like colic, man, I feel for anyone who has to deal with that for 6 weeks or more.

I've got a week and some left before I head back to work - we're thinking of taking an overnight trip to Hot Springs, AR. Supposedly there's a huge classic gaming store there of all places I need to check out. Normally I'd do it in 1 day but with a baby it'll take a bit longer ;).

It's been 2 weeks since Emmy was born, and I'm now starting to feel more normal/get the hang of the whole thing. Here's what I've learned over two weeks...

* When you bring home the baby for the first time, you *will* wake up after every sound that she makes to make sure she's okay. You will not sleep for days.

* Yes, it's okay that the baby pukes. Alot.

* Breastfeeding is close to impossible (well impossible for me) for the first few days and will drive you mad.

* Babies will sleep like... well a baby during the day and then cry for no reason for a few hours right when you're trying to get some sleep.

* Babies are kinda like cats - they really don't have their eyes open much for the first few days.

* It's okay that your baby doesn't take a crap for 4 days. But man, when she does....

* Babies crap a lot... and it looks like gravy.

* The vision that you had about your baby sleeping in the bassinet inbetween feedings? Hah. Good one.

* Babies only sleep on mom.

* The more awake the baby is (babies are born under sedation and it wears off over the course of their first week), the more she dislikes dad. Mom is the food source - where's mom?

* You can turn the phone off. I personally got so tired of answering the phone/door that I ignored everyone.

* Babies like cars and strollers. She's already roadtripping on small trips and is perfectly happy by it.

* It could be that it has wheels - but she sleeps fine while shopping at Wal-Mart and whenever.

* Emmy finds it a bit too cool at Gamestop. Turn up the AC!

* All the worries about the cats? Bah. Most of the cats could care less though Mocha and Sid spend a lot of time being by her.

* Emmy is like her dad and likes snoozing in the sun.


Also, for the people who don't tend to checkout MySpace, pics are here http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=79119737&albumId=2293598

My two blogs are outta sync so if you didn't read it on MySpace, Emmy was born yesterday at 7:34PM, 8lbs 15oz and of course, still a girl.







She'll be home tomorrow most likely. Ginger had a C-Section (after 13 hours in labor) and luckily, no complications. Emmy didn't have anything major except an upset stomach all day. All fingers and toes accounted for!

So... the baby doctor says that Ginger is 3cm dilated and followed that up with 'pack your bags and get ready'.

Bag packed? Yep.
Car seat? Sure. Not properly hooked up, but it's there.
Cameras? Absolutely?
Ready to pass out?

Yeah I think I'm there.

Looks like the baby is 'ready and in position'. If she doesn't head out on her own she'll be induced within the next two weeks or less.

I'm supposed to take a pic right before the big moment for the baby book.. so here it is...



Oh she'll love that one.

In other news, the game room 'redo' is about 75% complete. What's a redo? Well, as many of you collectors know, there gets to a point where almost all of your consoles become unhooked, unplugged, incomplete, etc over the course of time. Maybe it's because you took something to a show and never hooked it back up. After awhile, just one or two consoles are hooked up properly. Since most of us have miles of wires behind their TVs, it takes hours, if not days, to get everything back to normal. I'm almost done - even the CDI is hooked up. I hadn't hooked that up since I bought at the OVGE in 2006.

Speaking of hooking stuff up, the website I believe is finally *fixed*. If you have been there recently, you'll know that it crawled. My webhoster finally figured out the issue. My website one in one building. My SQL database was in some other town. Yeah that took awhile to run queries. It's been moved over and now it's fixed (check it at Retroputing )

If you take the classic Coldplay song 'Yellow' and turn it into 'Pink' instead, you'd get a basic idea of what the old computer room has turned into. It's pink. The crib, pink. Stuff on the walls? Pink. Pink mobiles, pink clothes, pink toys ... pretty much anything you can possibly think of has turned pink. We are down to 5 weeks, and Ginger is in the 'nesting' phase - everything is put together.. car seats, strollers, you name it. We have diapers... and wipes, and toys for the tub. We're just waiting on the guest of honor.











Ginger is on full blown insulin now, but it's only for a few more weeks. She gets to stick herself with a needle twice a day but overall she said it's painless. We're down to weekly visits to ensure the baby doesn't get too big - diabetic babies can have larger shoulders than normal so they don't come out right. Too big = induce. She's fine with that, she wants it over with. I think we're both ready.


Where's the critters part? Well... this part may gross you out a bit, and especially if you live near me you'll be pretty nauseated.

Ginger, her sister and I went to grab some food yesterday while we were out and about (buying pink stuff no doubt.. hey that rhymes). We went to our favorite Japanese steak house, Shogun's for some grilled stuff. We've been there countless times over the last 5 years or so without ever a problem. We ate our salads, the drinks were brought out, and we were getting ready to have our plates filled with fried rice from the cook when I noticed something tiny on my plate.

Ants.

Dead ones at that. Ugh. I grabbed a plate from a seat next to me that wasn't be used. Dead ants. This time, 20 or 30 of them. Trying not to make a scene just yet, I found a plate that was fine. Rice was cooked, started eating, went to take a swig of water and.. yep, you guessed it. Dead ants in the water. I was done at this point. I told the chef, he got the manager. While waiting, I noticed though it was hard to see because the table was a very dark brown, that there were dead ants on the table. Ginger almost hurled. The manager showed up and I pointed out my water, plates of dead ants, and dead ants on the counter. The brilliant guy told me my food was free. Umm... you're not getting it. I wouldn't EAT this, free or not. He asked if I wanted my food prepared in the kitchen instead, completely oblivious that, hey, it's bad that you have an infested restaurant and where did the plates come from? Oh yeah, the kitchen. I told him, I am not eating this stuff he said I didn't have to pay and we left. No apologies or anything. If you've ever been to a Japanese steak house, you'll know that you sit at the grill with a bunch of other people. I should have made a bigger scene to scare them off but they seemed to know something was going on.

Nasty.

I've been a fan of shortwave radio since I was about 12 years old when I went to my first 'Ham-Fest' and picked up an old Hallicrafters S-38E tube radio. Never heard of shortwave? It's not that surprising - in this part of the world it has been slowly replaced by streaming internet streams. Shortwave is more or less defined as the frequency on your radio dial from around 3Mhz and going to up about 21Mhz. The radio frequencies in this range skip or bounce across the ionosphere and can land many thousands of miles from where they started. Especially during the evening hours, you can pick up Radio Moscow for a listen to Russian politics in English, Radio Nederlands for a brief history lesson and then off to smaller nations such as Cuba to hear what is going on in that part of the world. More and more of the 'western' and industrialized world and moving their programs to the internet though there are still thousands of stations still being broadcast by most countries.

I'm still using an old Realistic DX-440 and DX-390 for most of my shortwave listening, though I thought about upgrading to the new Eton E1. With stations moving to the internet now, I thought it would be great if someone created a real internet appliance that looked and acted like a radio that I could use independently from my computer. I mean, listening to tunes on the computer is great, but I don't want to fiddle around with a laptop while I'm lying in bed reading. Then I found...

Grace Internet Radio

Yeah I know I'm sounding a bit like an infomercial so look at this more like a review since it is. Unlike a bunch of internet radios that they make, they still require you to have a computer to add streams to and from your radio so it becomes something that is a lot harder to manage. The Grace uses the Reciva service (www.reciva.com) which is a free service that keeps track of about 11,000 stations, catagorized by genre or country. When you fire up the radio, it connects to your Wifi network and pulls down a list of stations. On the radio itself you can pick the genre you want to here, tune to it, and bookmark it if you like it. You can also search by country. I've got stuff like Iceland bookmarked and some little island in the South Pacific. Ginger and I usually listen to an Old Time Radio hour station at bedtime. You can also bookmark your stations online if you want, and the radio will download it automatically. It also can stream stuff from the pandora project (www.pandora.com) so you can make a radio station to your taste. Basically, this thing is a more or less a modern shortwave-type radio.

The only bad thing? Stickers! No really.. you open the box and pull it out and there's a big ol' sticker that says "Internet Radio!" over the speaker. Yeah.. no kidding, I gathered that's what it was on the box. But the sticker doesn't come off right. So... I need to pick up a jug-o-Goo-gone to get rid of it. Thanks. Still, this is the first 'internet appliance' that has made sense to me so far. A refrigerator that has internet access and can tell me that I need milk? No thanks.

BTW, there's going to be more baby-type blogs in the future. It's been very, very busy around the household. A couple of baby showers later and I think we have most of it down. A huge thanks to everyone because it really helps. We went in for an ultrasound last Monday and Emmy is sitting at about 4lbs 10oz which is on the high side of normal. Still, she's normal. And when I asked the doctor if she really still was a girl, she zoomed in and showed me some unmistakeable girly-parts. That's good since the place is entirely in pink now.

Somedays, I wish there was such thing as a minivan for kitties. Today was one of those days - it was time for the kitty klan to head to the vet for their annual checkups, shots and whatnots. Of course, they didn't all go at once - if that had happened the chaos in the car would have ended the car up in a ditch somewhere. Still, the kids got a bunch of good and one mediocre diagnosis. Since you care so much about the lives of the cats, here's a quick rundown.

Jake (16) - back to almost 7.5 lbs so the thyroid medicine is doing well for her. She's was also unhappily 'deknotted' - we had her belly shaved due to all the knots she got when she couldn't take care of herself. She's not particularly happy about that.

Sid (4) - went in for his first teeth cleaning and if you don't know how all that works, the put the cat under to do it. He's been wandering around in a groggy state since arriving home.

Merf (15) - perfectly fine if not a bit cranky. He's getting a bit of arthritis and will now get a low dose aspirin a few times a week to help with him. His thyroid medicine is regulating him without any problems.

Mocha (12) - her kidney levels aren't doing great, but not particularly awful. She's in the 55 range of cretons (or whatever it's called) where she should be 30-40 max. She might see more water treatment in the future. Her kidney failure is due to old age.

and now the big one, Stripe who turns 3 in a few weeks, is now a perfectly fine, if not fat, cat. He's off the water treatment that they said he would be on for the rest of his life. Turns out the aggressive water treatment flushed the melamine out of his kidneys and he's able to maintain himself. He goes in for one more checkup in a month, but the cat with a freakin' million lives is fine. For those who don't want to bother searching through the back blogs, he was hit by the wonderful Iams/Menu Foods catfood recall and more or less sentenced to death. They gave him 3 years max. Then again, if you search even further back, you would have seen that he originally had a rare disease where less than 0.1% survive and beat that one too. Lucky cat.

Speaking of Menu Foods, it appears they're wanting to settle the class action lawsuit - up to 250,000 per pet owner. I know I'll never see that, but I'll be happy if they pay for the shitload of specialized food and treatments he's had to go through for over a year.

Emmy update - some not so good news for the wife is on Monday she was told she has gestational diabetes - i.e., diabetes caused by pregnancy. What this can cause in a baby is possible birth defects, but more than likely a big ass baby. 10lbs+, not coming out the normal way, baby. She's now on a strict diet, has the blood meter and we'll see if this is all she has to do. If not, it's insulin time but her sugar hasn't been out of control really - around 110-130 where they consider a normal 90. She should go back to normal when the new family member arrives.

Right around Christmas this year, I got an email from a friend of mine that I have known since the very early 90s. We hadn't kept in touch due to a falling out that's long past, but he wanted to let me know that he found out that he had terminal colon cancer. That sort of took me aback a bit because I wouldn't think anyone my age would fall into the cancer category - it's too young. I'm a ripe ol' 34 and cancer is something you get when you're much older. A few days ago I received an email from his mom stating that Stew Young died on May 31st at the age of 36.

I met Stew at a BBS party in 1990 along with another person, Jake (whom my oldest cat is named after). They were the most normal of the bunch there, and if you've ever been to some sort of geek festival, you know what I mean. Stew was a sysop of The Whitehall BBS and had a ton to say on all topics though he liked to lean towards the political side when there were a bunch of us younger geeks around. There was much time spent on minor road trips around the Northern California area and getting completely lost. One time we went to go grab something from the store and ended up on a road going to seemingly nowhere. No turn offs, no houses and then we realized we were almost out of gas in my 1973 Datsun 610. We hit a 1 pump gas station and asked the clerk... wtf were we? Stonyford, CA... population of maybe 100 and were a good hour and a half from anything (except for Fruto - population 8). I still make that drive when I can when I go out to California.

I think Stew spent a lot of his life trying to figure out what he wanted to do.. from computer guy to chef to author. He was married once, moved to Washington for no reason at all and spent a perpetual amount of time in school. So anyways Stew, I hope you found what you were looking for during your time here. I'll fire up a 300 baud modem in your memory.

In other news, we went to the chick and baby doctor and Emmy is doing fine. Ginger is at over 6 months so we're finally on the homestretch. Her back hurts and she's doing the 'pregnant waddle'. Using the miracles of modern science, I can say that Emmy is currently 2 lbs and 2 oz, and 9.5" long. We're still on track for a early September birth though I think Ginger is wanting it much, much, sooner.

Here's a current pic... (face is on the right). If you tilt your head and look cross-eyed you can kinda see a picture - like one of those magic photo things.



We finally bought the stuff for the crib.. like a mattress, and a mobile and some other stuff that will show up via guys in brown and will drop them off at my front porch for me to assemble. Whee!

Stripe was taken against his will to the vet for a blood test. His levels are perfect and recent developments from other cats who suffered through the whole Menu Foods thing lead us to believe he *might* be able to be taken off the IV bag. It seems the melamine that crystalized in his kidneys might be able to be washed out over time. It's been a year so he's on a 3 week hiatus to see if he can finally lose the fluid treatments. He'll get another blood test on our anniversary to see where he's at.



About a month or so ago, the BBS went back up on a real Commodore C64 after about 10 months of downtime - a little rearranging of the game room and some extra time allowed me to get it back up and going. Go grab CGTERM (www.paradroid.net/cgterm) and point it towards particlesbbs.dyndns.org port 6400.

I'm getting ready for the OVGE in August (www.ovge.com) and have a unique item on order - for the US anyway. I've ordered a Commodore C116 from Austria. Never heard of it? It was an offspring of the Commodore Plus/4 and C16 but was released in very, very small numbers. Mine's a PAL model but that's okay - there's 1 known NTSC model in the world. I'm sure I'll have pictures later but for now, here's someone else's picture:

Day two in Albuquerque started off pretty uneventful. I woke up around 5:45AM MDT (an hour off of what I'm used to), Ginger finally peeled herself out of bed at around 7:45. We wandered down to the local watering hole, commonly known as Starbucks, and grabbed some pastries and liquified caffeine. The people running the place were in a bit of a panic as it seems that their hoses for their machines had sprung a leak and it was draining on the valet parking below. The only thing that was available was pretty much coffee and hot chocolate which worked out for both of us. We sat in there for a bit trying to kill time before Enterprise opened so we could get our 'used sub-compact so our possie could be laughed at' and meet up with Ubik at the Natural Science Museum. The mapping feature on my iPhone has been great so I had it map out where Enterprise is from me - one block, great! We headed off and wandered around a few city blocks trying to find out exactly where it was. Is it that building? Nope. How about this one? Nope. A guard walked by and said it was in what looked to be a closed up office building. He let us in and we found out.. well we were in the lobby of the hotel. The place was in the hotel, but it had a different street address. That makes you feel lame.

After waiting around for 45 minutes, we finally got our car and met up with Ubik a bit late. Inside the museum was a cool feature called 'The Startup Museum' which was funded or whatever from Paul Allen of Microsoft. It seems Microsoft started here and moved to Redmond later. The museum gives you a pretty cool history of very early computers (not really moving much past 1984) and it had, of course, Ubik's favorite machine - the Altair 8800. Pantechnicon met up with us with his kids but had a prior engagement so he took off fairly early. We also ended up taking the customary pictures of the dinosaurs and whatnot. Ginger spent a lot of the time hanging out on a bench - she's just shy of 6 months and has the stamina of a 25 year old house cat.

On Paul's (Pantechnicon) recommendation, we headed across a park to the 'old town' area and sat down for some real Mexican food. One thing that we realized pretty quick is that everything goes with chile. Pizza? You need some green chiles. Tacos? Yep, chiles. The lunch I just had came with green chile rolls. I'm not much of an adventurer when it comes to food, but after eating food with green chiles, I see I have a new favorite food. Tacos with green chiles and onions are just freakin' tasty.

The last main stop of the day was going to... a tall mountain. I can't remember the name. It's at about 10,000 feet, and the gutless-wondermobile that I was driving (Nissan Versa) absolutely hated the climb up there. The view was pretty awesome, you could see for many, many miles from there besides being able to see the entire Albuquerque area. There were also a lot of bicyclists flying back down the mountain (14 miles). I'm totally envious.

Today we're not doing much of anything besides hanging out at the hotel, chillin' out. We had plans to drive around and see things, but you know, I just don't have any motivation at all to pull myself out of this chair. I guess that's what vacation is all about, relaxing which I don't do often enough. Tomorrow we're off to grab our train back to Funkytown.

Check out the pics either on Myspace or here Clickyity Click