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Archive for January 3rd, 2009

I knew Donna had a soft spot for small children and old VW’s, but now it seems she’s added dogs with the mange to that list. This sad sack is “Addie”, an Australian Sheppard who has obviously seen better days. She’s lost a significant amount of her fur as well as weight. She kind of has that “prime rib” look going, brown on the outside and pink underneath. She also has quite a few nicks and cuts over her. Perhaps she’s got a bad case of the itchies or maybe she got roughed up.

Did I mention she smells like a barn?

We didn’t have grand New Year’s plans to begin with, but after our dinner out we can home to check on our little girl and do our best to wash the stink out. Our first attempt yielded lots of dirt, but the funk remained. The standard smell of wet dog would be a vast improvement over what we have here.

In our latest attempt we armed ourselves with medicated shampoos and skin conditioners. More dirt came off and I think we broke loose some of the stink. She might end up in the chemical bath a few more before all is said and done, but at least she smells somewhat respectable.

I’m not sure how she got into this sad state of affairs, but despite all this she has a really good personality. She is very friendly, wants to play with our other dogs and has a tendency to climb into your lap and see what you’re doing on the computer. The toilet training is pretty good so far. A few accidents, but considering what we’re dealing with I think that’s OK.

Addie needs to work on her coordination, she’s like a young gazelle that’s all leg with a tendency to run into things and fall down. Her “jump and miss” technique may soon be the stuff of legend. She’s really just a baby at about 5 months so as she gets older she should get steadier.

With a little fur and a little weight I think she’ll be a really good dog. She still has high spirits and plenty of affection. I’m not sure what the whole future plan is, but she’s here for now, so hopefully we can get her sorted out and on the right track again.

So say hello to our New Year’s Baby

The lure of the memory upgrade for my server was too much for me and I had to upgrade my desktop machines as well. The thrill and excitement of having 4GB in each machine was just too much for me to pass up. And strangely I can get 4GB of DDR2 memory for the same price as 2GB of DDR memory. How the hell did that happen?

I bought 2 4GB bundles from TigerDirect. Dell doesn’t give you a whole lot of room to work with inside their cases, but after some slight contortions the memory was in and I was ready to load applications with reckless abandon.

Of course I was immediately hit with the ridiculous 4GB barrier of Windows which, no matter what you do, will ALWAYS show less than 4GB of memory. On my generic machine with no system upgrades I get 3.6GB. On my main machine with dual video cards I get 2.6GB. I have to say I don’t buy the line MS is feeding us all about why this happens. If the system really is holding off memory for peripherals and system devices then the total memory should always be incorrect, but with anything less than 4 it’s perfectly fine. I think this is just a case of some really bad coding and MS never thinking people would ever get that much memory in their machines before they got the next OS out the door.

Stupid technicalities aside, both machines are performing quite a bit better. They have quite a bit more room to work with and they should be able to cache a ton. It’s a darn shame that memory is so damn cheap but that our hardware and operating systems really can’t take advantage of it. This new generation of 64-bit processors will eventually force us all to a new platform, but personally, I don’t see myself upgrading hardware for at least another year. These 32-bit XP systems may be getting a little long in the tooth, but I better see some kick ass features make their way into Windows 7 or else and upgrade will be even longer in coming. I’m not willing to go 64-bit with the likes of Vista or a knock off little brother in the form of Windows 7. Let’s hope Microsoft gets back on track and focuses on actually making an OS rather than building a platform to make pretty widgets.

But anyway, 4GB is cool, I highly recommend it!