We’ve been having trouble with our kitchen faucet ever since we moved in here…  And when I recently got a bonus at work we spent a chunk of that on a new faucet.

The directions indicated that the installation shouldn’t take more than about an hour and a half…but they didn’t count on my lack of skill or the presence of a garbage disposal in our sink.  It wound up taking me almost three hours to get the new faucet installed.

But, we now have a much nicer kitchen faucet that doesn’t leak at all.

From Slashdot:

“It looks like Vonage has no workaround for their recent patent infringements. This means if a permanent stay isn’t granted it is likely that it will be the end of the line for Vonage. What will happen if millions of phone customers suddenly lose their service? Their own filing to the court stated ‘While Vonage has studied methods for designing around the patents, removal of the allegedly infringing technology, if even feasible, could take many months to fully study and implement.’”

Anyone know any good, cheap VOIP providers?  I sure as hell don’t want to go back to using Verizon…

From Slashdot:

“The New York times is running an article about a push by American universities to actively recruit women into Computer Science courses. The story, ‘Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold’, explains that the number of women in CS is shrinking: ‘Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.’ One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor. To attract women students to the CS field, ‘Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.’ Changes at CMU increased women students in the CS program from 8 percent to nearly 40 percent.”

(more…)

A real-life Silent Hill…sort of.

I really need to upgrade my PC. I downloaded the demo of Command and Conquer 3 last night, installed it…and was then disappointed to find that it won’t run. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised…I haven’t upgraded my PC in years… But I guess I figured a strategy game like this would be more likely to run on my machine than a shooter would be.  Judging from the screenshots though, I should have known better.  The graphics look fantastic.  It’s too bad, I used to really like the C&C games.

Alright, so I couldn’t resist.  I wound up installing Independence War 2 yet again.  It’s just such a good game!  And…now that I think about it…I’m not sure if I ever actually finished it before…

(more…)

We’ve got snow again.

It’s been nice and warm for the better part of a week…maybe longer…  Everything was melting.  I could see the grass again.  It was brown and dead from being buried under snow all winter…but I could see it.   I’ve been walking around outside without a coat on.  We’ve been eating dinner with the porch door open so we could hear the stream behind our house.

And now we’ve got snow again.  There isn’t much of it…and it’s already melting…but it’s there.  It’s everywhere.  A good inch or two covering everything…had to brush off my car this morning, trudge through the snow on the way in to work…