Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool.” It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking (Wikipedia).

If anyone wants an invite to Google Wave, I have 5 available to give out. Just leave a comment saying you want an invite and leave your email address in the appropriate field and I will send one to the first five people who requests.

DO NOT leave your email address in your actual comment or I will delete the comment and not honor your request. Only place the email address in the email field. Your email address will not be displayed to anyone but me. Please note that it may take a couple days after I invite you to receive your invite. I will email you back personally telling you if I invited you.

I was actually using the computer when all of a sudden I heard this loud pop and saw a flash of light in the corner of my eye. My PC case has a see-through side allowing me to see a flash from the explosion.

I have already replaced the exploded PSU with a new one. Luckily it didn’t damage any parts inside the computer.

What I believe happened was on of the capacitors inside the PSU exploded. However, I opened up the PSU and saw no evidence of anything burnt. Although there was a spark plug thing that appeared to have blown. There was also this hard brown substance along the bottom of one of the capacitors.

Anyways, I knew the fan in the PSU was bad for a long time and was putting off replacing it. I guess it finally overheated and exploded. I also knew there was something wrong with the PSU beforehand because I would always have trouble getting the computer started, although once on it was fine.

Lesson to be learned: When a PSU is going bad, replace it before it explodes

Anyways, I instantly went to best buy and bought a $75 new PSU. Its working much better and is much quieter than my old one.

Click here to see the PSU I bought. (Note this is the newegg page for it not the best buy where I bought it)

He was a devoted Christian and a huge influence in my life. Here is a picture of him taken about 11 months ago when his first great-grandchild, my nephew, Kaleb was born. He will be deeply missed by many.

For my birthday my family and I all went bowling which was fun.

On another note, two days ago my site also had a birthday. On October 6th my site turned 4 years old. Yep, I have been blogging on this site now for over 4 years and I am approaching 250 posts now. My site draws about 600 different (actual) people every month for a total of around 12000 hits per month. My site attracts about 30 different Google searches every month as well. Overall, I think these are really good numbers for a personal blog.

If this global freezing doesn’t come to an end we might enter the second ice age before long. I think I will go out and run my car for a couple hours.

Anyways, I have a bad feeling this might be a really bad winter this year.

FYI: He is 8 months and 1 day old in this video.

Enjoy.

First I found an old USB cable then cut the cord on it around the middle. I then carefully used a pocket knife to cut down the sides of the connector. I then expanded the metal connector casing on it and removed the old USB connector. I then took apart my flash drive to be sacrificed for this project. Here is a picture of the flash drive I used:

I simply opened it up and removed the small flash drive from it. I then put this inside the connector on the USB cable I cut and opened up earlier. I securely attached it via super glue. I then put the sides back together with super glue also.

After that I cut the cut cable down a little bit to be around 4 inches long. I stripped the cable exposing the inner wires and I was done. Here is a picture of the finished product:

And here is an image of it in action plugged into my computer:

As you can see it looks like a useless cut USB cable plugged into my computer. Actually its a 4GB stealth flash drive. I wonder how many weird looks I will get using this in public .

I drove about 370 miles of the trip. That is by far the most I have ever driven in a day. In fact, it probably even beats the most miles I have ever driven in a single week.

He is doing very well developmental wise. In fact, I sometimes think he may be advanced for his age, but I’m not fully sure of the developmental stages of babies either. Kaleb is really the first baby I have watched grow up, and even spent time and played with. So we are learning this whole growing up/developmental thing together.

Unfortunately since my sister and her husband Keith moved out we only get to really see Kaleb on the weekends, but we really enjoy the time we do get. The one cool thing about really only seeing him every weekend is to notice the changes he makes in just a week.

He literally has a new “trick” for us every week. The past couple of weeks he has discovered his voice (big time). He loves to scream, and make any noise he finds himself capable of. In fact, the other day he started to make a choking type noise that scared me half to death when I was watching him. Turns out, that is just one of his new “voices”.

He can now pretty much hold his own bottle and has even started eating solid baby food occasionally. He also loves to take sips of water out of my dad’s (his Grandpa) water cup.

I also think he is really close to learning to be mobile. He is capable of rolling over and has even pulled himself short distances across the floor for us a few times. Of course, by short distances I’m only talking like a foot, but that’s good enough for me! I am really looking forward to when he can crawl around. Hopefully that will be within the next few months.

He has also grown a huge interest in his surroundings. He actually watches our dogs move around now and reaches out for them sometimes. He watches TV, and absolutely loves to watch cars, especially semis, go down the road in front of our house.

His eye-hand coordination is excellent. He plays with toys, reaches for and grabs them himself, and has a good ole time entertaining himself with his toys. Of course, his best skill in this area is getting those things that his hands find into his mouth.

Laughing is the other big improvement over the last few weeks. He now will laugh at almost any silly thing we do. My mom (Grandma) loves to make faces and noises at him and Kaleb will just laugh away. Its very cute to watch.

I’ll wrap this up with a couple new pictures of Kaleb. These both were taken by my sister-in-law Kelly (Aunt Kelly to Kaleb) while he was at their house. They are lucky enough to have him almost daily for baby-sitting duties.

As for graduation, I guess that isn’t until June 12th. So I guess I have three weeks between my final class and my graduation date. Not as bad as my high school one though, which was like 6-months between my last class and the graduation due to me finishing high school early.

For the past few months my mouse has not been registering left clicks correctly. This made it very hard to use my computer. I really love my mouse though and didn’t really have the money to replace it. Well, today I decided to open her up to see if I could find the problem myself.

I actually was able to discover the problem. The plastic on the bottom of the button that presses the internal button to register the click, was partially warn down. There was basically a small gap in the plastic from where too much pressing had worn the plastic that normally pressed the button away.

To fix it I determined I had to fill in this gap with something. My first thought was super glue, but ours was all dried up. I searched the house for anything that might work. After looking through my mom’s desk, I discovered finger nail polish and thought that might work.

I applied a small dab of polish to the small gap on the mouse’s button and waited for it to dry (with the help of blowing some compress air on it).

To my surprise, at least to this point, my mouse now works perfect!!! I have given it a good 2-3 hours of use so far and it is still holding up. I kind of expect it wear away after a while, in which I might have to reapply some more polish to fix it again. Of course, eventually I will probably just invest in a new mouse.

Who would have thought finger nail polish would serve useful for fixing computer hardware?

There might still be a few bugs throughout the site I have to work out, if there is, I’ll be fixing them quickly.

I have this move setup in such a way though that most viewers will never see any downtime at all.  My hope is that no one even notices any changes, besides the faster loading speeds of my site.

I will post again once this process is complete.

This pastebin is open to all to post to, however if anyone submits anything that is vulgar, rude, any way offensive, or spamming, I will delete it.

In the mean time, here is an excellent song that I think suits all Cubs fan extremely well. Go Cubbies!!!

Waiting for a Miracle

“Waiting For a Miracle” by Mark Erelli; Written by Bruce Cockburn.

I watched the new movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas last night.  This was a very emotional movie with an almost unbelievable ending.  If you are unaware of the ending of this movie, it will be one that you would have never expected.  Unfortunately it shows the reality of the holocaust.

I encourage everyone to take time to watch this movie.  This is probably one of the best movies that could be shown in school on the issue also.  Unlike other movies, this movie has the ability to personalize it to you, make you feel guilty (even though you aren’t), and bring the reality of the issue into your life.

How could humanity be so cruel?  That is what I was asking myself.

In the end of the movie I was left with many mixed emotions.  I had a feeling of of sadness, guilt, a little joy for a little bit of revenge, but sadness for that revenge at the same time, and most of all I felt sickened.  Sickened by the fact that most of what the movie showed actually took place.  Although the main plot may have not been real, it easily could have happened (and we really have no way of knowing it didn’t).  It shows us that our bad deeds can come back to haunt us, and even affect us in ways we never could imagine.

Again, I urge you to watch the movie.  After watching it, you should also encourage others to do so also.

Here is an updated picture of him.  This is, in my opinion, the cutest one we have thus far.  It is also, I think, the first one that shows him smiling.

Click here to see more pictures

This will not however affect the way people can contact me by email. This is a completely transparent switch that just works better for me.

Anyone else interested in having their email through Gmail with their own domain can check out http://gmail.com/a/

Apparently Kaleb has a respiratory infection that is sometimes making it hard for him to breathe. He is getting better, but probably wont be allowed to go home until tomorrow or Saturday at the earliest.

We suspect, although can’t confirm, that we got sick from food poisoning from eating Papa John’s pizza. One thing for sure, we probably wont be eating there again. Or at least not anytime soon.

Just kind of odd for us all to fall sick like that so quickly. Luckily, it didn’t seem to affect any of us for much more than a day. I have only been sick for about 12 hours now and already am starting to feel better. I threw up three times, which is probably more than I have thrown up in the last 5 years. I tend to get sick easily, but I almost never actually get to the point that I throw up.

The good news is, so far, Kaleb (my sisters new baby) has not got sick. Of course, he didn’t eat the Pizza either.

The mobile version also does not contain any graphical enhancements like the normal version. This means my site will now load faster on mobile devices which typically do not have very fast transfer speeds.

If you are viewing my site on a regular desktop or laptop you will not notice any changes to my site.

Windows 7 is the new Microsoft Operating System that will succeed Windows Vista. Currently Microsoft has released a beta version of Windows 7 for people to try and give them feedback on. Today I will give my review of Windows 7. Keep in mind that I have not given Windows 7 a whole lot of time so I am mostly just going on first thoughts.

Overall Windows 7 is a very good, attractive, and apparently stable operating system. They have introduced a new task bar that may take some getting use to for some people. For me, I love the new taskbar. Overall the desktop (including the taskbar) looks very much like the KDE desktop in Linux. Microsoft also packed in some very attractive desktop backgrounds that I believe many people will love.

Another good thing is they removed all those annoying security warnings that annoyed anyone who ever used Vista. No more having to give yourself permission to do whatever it is you want to do on your computer. Yes there is still some warnings that will popup now and then, but so far its pretty even with what you would expect from Windows XP.

One very bad thing about Vista was how slow it ran. This was mostly because it had so many graphical enhancements that you were using all that valuable CPU time and RAM to make your computer “pretty”. Windows 7 has returned that computing power to where it belongs, your applications. Windows 7 runs much faster that Vista and you will notice it right away if you upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 when it is released.

Microsoft also claims they improved the boot time for the operating system. This means when you turn on your computer, it should be ready for use quicker than in the past. From my testing, on a fresh install, this seems to be the case.

Microsoft has also introduced a new type of networking into Windows 7. They call it HomeGroups. This is sort of like a workgroup, except with added security. This should allow inexperienced computer users to share their pictures, music, and other files with other computers on their network in a secure environment. This is a great feature for those who do not understand networking, but for those who do it is probably not needed.

Overall Windows 7 appears very stable. An Intel employee actually thinks the beta is so stable that he has it running on his desktop and said he would install it on desktops throughout Intel if company policy did not have a rule against using beta software. This is a very high praise for Microsoft. I expect Windows 7 to be the most stable operating system ever released by Microsoft.

One thing is for sure, Microsoft seems to have picked it back up after the utter failure that was Vista. Vista was actually so much of a disaster that the future of Microsoft operating systems was unclear. Microsoft even had to “rename” Vista to just get people to try it “again”. Windows Vista was basically a repeat of Windows ME.

Now that Windows 7 is on the doorstep, Vista will die a quick and silent death in the computing world. Windows XP will probably also now start to slowly fade away and be replaced by Windows 7. Keep in mind that Windows 7 will eventually get a name and won’t be called “Windows 7”. My suggestion: “Windows Savior”.

I found out today that I actually have one more class to take at ITT-Tech before I can graduate.  Its call Capstone.  I’m not fully sure what the class is about.  Turns out I didn’t have it this quarter because they were not offering it.  I was originally scheduled to graduate in March but I guess I now wont.

Since I have to go to school for another 3 months for that 1 single class I will not graduate until June.  I am kind of disappointed but oh well.  Nothing I can do about it.