SteveMart.in

My oldest daughter Abby is in 1st grade now. I can’t believe it. She loves riding the bus to school. Jenny carpooled with a friend all through kindergarten so the bus is something new and cool to Abby. She has made friends with one of the boys in our neigborhood and they sit together on the way to and from school. This is a little video of her on her first day of first grade. She is a cutie.

abby 1st grade video

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I have just installed Firefox 3.0 on my computer. I used Firefox back when IE didn’t have tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is an absolute must in a browser. My problem with Firefox back then was its memory hogging issues. It would use a ton of a system’s memory and had to be restarted to free it up. Once Internet Explorer 7 came out and had tabbed browsing, I switched back. IE7 had much the same issue with memory. The two browsers seemed to stockpile memory and just keep adding to the amount they would steal with each new tab you opened. A big part of the problem was that they didn’t give the memory back even if you closed tabs. So, Firefox 3 claims to have made great changes to the way they use memory. I have set Firefox as my default browser and will use it for a while to see if it really has improved. If it has improved, Firefox will be my new browser (for now). I am betting that IE8 will improve its memory consumption as well and by that time I may switch back. Either way, I find it very useful to keep the two browsers installed and use whichever one serves me best.

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I have a Windows Media Center PC that I use as our TV hub for the entire house. Through Xbox 360s we can watch TV that is being recorded through the Media Center PCs. It’s a great little setup and makes it so that I can watch any of our pre-recorded TV shows or live Tivo-like TV from any of the TVs in the house. I also have it setup so that we can see our movie library and we can watch any of those with the push of a button.

Well, about a week or two ago, I was adding another hard drive to allow additional capacity for our movie library as I had already filled 1 TB of space with movies and needed more room. I got another 500GB eSata hard drive and had opened the case in order to install the eSata ports onto the back of the computer. The TV tuner card had an extra little input area that was using one of the slots. I did not need this so I was removing it to allow space for the eSata card. After removing it from the slot, I set it on the tuner card just below it so it would be out of the way while I installed the eSata ports. The metal edge touched a couple of contacts on the tuner card. There was a spark and the smell of melting electronics and the tuner card was toast.

So, we have not watched any TV for a couple of weeks. Saw only a few days of the Olympics. Streaming the movies still works fine but TV is a thing of the past. I have ordered a new card that allows both analog and digital TV to be recorded and can record 2 channels of each (double dual card). It was out of stock at the place where I found the best price. I ordered it thinking they would get it in stock and ship it fairly soon. Well, it is still on backorder and we are starting to get a little worried. Our shows will be starting soon and I’m not sure what we’ll do having to watch the shows when they are actually broadcast instead of recording them and fast forwarding through commercials. I can’t imagine going back to the old ways of watching TV.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the new tuner card will ship soon but let this be a lesson to you that even when a task inside your computer seems pretty simple and shouldn’t require you to shut down the computer, shut if off anyway. If not for the sake of the components, then for your own safety. Who wants their fingers fried in addition to their computer components? If I had followed this advice, we would still be recording and watching our favorite shows and I wouldn’t be out another $120.

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