Mikes Blog

Steep and cheap.  This is another good daily deal site.  I bought a pair of Oakley whiskers for 69 dollers yestarday.  Should have bought the max of three and ebayed them.  Oh well next time I see a Oakley deal I will. 

Okay I have never laughed so hard in my life.  Here

Okay possibly the COOLEST iPhone app EVER!  We had so much fun with this app just sitting at the bar.  So what this app does is you take a picture and send it off.  It send off to some random Photoswap user and they send a picture back to you.  You then can initiate a conversation using pictures.  Now if you get a couple of people with a bit of an imagination you can get some pretty neat conversations going.  You do of course have the typical sexual things going.  But it is fun non-the-less.

So if you looking for a fun App to waste time on.  This one will definatly do it for you.  Out of four people sitting at the table three of us had iphones and we had three differing conversations going on.

So school is going well.  As I suspected I do have a bit of trouble getting back into the habit of studying.  But so far I am doing okay.  I could probably study a bit more.  But I think almost everybody could.  On the flip side.  I am actually learning a lot of stuff.  I am taking two classes this quarter I guess you can say.  The year is divided into four eight week periods.  Anyhow English and American History 1877-present.  So far, I have learned a lot just in the first two weeks.

I do have to say that in I have a great English teacher.  I have learned more in the last two weeks then I had ever learned in Highschool.  Her way of explaining things I just jive with.  Or maybe its because I am actually interested and want to learn this time around.

The only thing that scares the hell out of me right now.  Is finances, but I know its going to be worth it.  Its just having to survive the next 4-5 years.  I am glad that we took a two year break inbetween Mary and I going to school.  It did provide a bit of a repreave from complete poverty.  However we have to learn to rebudget ourselves back down to a workable level.

I am not completely unemployed.  I am doing some contract work which finally seems to be picking up.  So hopefully now that shopping season is coming I will be a bit busier and able to bring in a bit more money.  Also I am attempting to become a ebay seller.  So far its been okay.  But I need to find better suppliers.  So I am back on a search for some suppliers.  It looks like I am going to have to actually form another LLC to do it.  However with us trying to market Mary a bit more now, it may be a good idea anyways.

So this weekend I have a lot of homework.  I have to study for a test in history and start a five page paper.  Then I have 2 chapters in English to read, and write an Essay.  So it looks like I will have quite a bit to do.  I was planning on washing and staining the fence this weekend, but it looks like it will raining off and on so I guess I got nothing but homework to do.

Well as some of you have noticed.  I few changes have been taking place.  First the biggest change.  We went ahead and registered a domain name for Mary and her art.  Since we have our own domain.  We started a blog for Mary here.  Then moved my blog from blogger to where you are now.

Bare with me.  I am still learning Wordpress and how to work with it.  It is not as easy to work with as blogger, however you have MUCH more control over the blog.  So that is nice.  Blogger just made it really easy for somebody to come in and hit a few buttons and type a post.  Wordpress when you actually have it set up is that easy.  The hard part is actually getting it set up.  For somebody that has NEVER tried to code or do a webpage of his own before it was almost impossible.    I do have to say that the hosting service does try to make it as easy as possible.  However you still need to know what a few things are.  Such as PHP, FTP, and SQL.  Which being on the net and being a techie.  But not a coder by any means.  I had a very remedial sense of the acronyms and what they were.  But not near enough to understand what the hell was going on.  But I persevered and after almost 6 hours of cussing, I finally got it ironed out sort of.

I will be working on this blog here and there.  So check back often.  I have a lot to install and get back.  Such as all my links.  And I need to categorize all my posts.  AND SUCH AND SUCH and such.  So it will undergo a lot of changes over the coming weeks.  As well as Mary’s.  Even though the basic blog is there.  I have a lot to put up and change.  And since Mary doesn’t like writing I will do most of the writing.  But still dependant on her to tell me what she wants.  So hers can be a bit slow going.  But hopefully when it is completely up and running.  I can get her comfortable enough with logging in and posting her own rants and raves every so often.

So many of you know that Natasha Wescoat is our favorite artist. Mary discovered her with the help of a coworker when he showed Mary a tattoo that his sister had on her back. Most of you know me. I know absolutely nothing about art. Aside for what Mary tells me. I can tell you what I like and don’t like however. And I have to say. Out of all the modern day artists I have been able to peep on. IE Mary shows me. I like Natasha the most, second to Mary of course. But I am a bit biased on that. Maybe its because we have the same birthday. I dont know. But I really do like looking at her work. The pieces we have I am very proud of, and really like to just look at sometimes. My favorite so far is the first one we got over Christmas. After the dabacle of getting it framed. (You dont know wanna know, all I know; as I was watching the person work with our Wescoat, I litterally feared for his life. Because I was afraid I was going to have to hurt him if he hurt our painting) It really looks good where it is, and seems like it belongs there.

So why the sudden post on Natasha. No I dont have a crush on her. She is very cute, but she still doesn’t compare to my Mary. You will just have to click HERE and go see why. If you dont want to click there, you can go to the link over on the left and get to her site from there. Yeah that one there, it says Natasha Wescoat. Ooops a third link to her. Oh my. We have gone Natasha crazy. Oh gosh a fouth. Well now you have four differant ways to get to her. Oh shit five! You have five ways. Oh fuck it wherever you see Natasha, Natasha Wescoat, Wescoat, or her as in reffering to Natasha. There will be a link. So you have many many choices to get to her site. Just flipping pick one!

So today I went to power on the HTPC. So as to listen to some music as I cleaned the house a bit and did my chores. Since I have been home a lot I have been trying to take some of the chores away from Mary. Like cleaning, dishes, and other things.

But to my suprise this is what I saw…GRRR if I only had a mac. I really should have used the money I used on this to buy a nice G5 desktop. But nooooo I wanted to build a computer again. I hadn’t built a computer in almost 10 years and I was feeling the itch. The real shitty part of it. Is this computer really doesn’t get used that much. All it does is puke music through the stereo and watch Youtube once in a while.

And if your wondering why the canvas is placed in front of the speakers. And why the one on the right has its cover removed. Its because Mia the kitten that wasn’t supposed to be has decided to use my B&W’s as scratching posts. And I have been informed that I cannot kill her, or take her to have her paws cut off yet; because she is not yet 6 mos of age.

update:

Well after playing around and cracking open my case I found that my RAM was getting extremely hot. So I took two of my sticks out to put it back down to 2gb. Let it cool back down and started listening to some Stevie Wonder. So far so good. I am going to swap the sticks around to make sure I don’t have a bad stick of ram. Then see if it will boot using channel 2 of the Ram only. Some will some wont. But if it does fine through all that. Then I pretty much know it was just a overheating problem. Then I just have to figure out how to get more air to it. Or start looking at Water cooling options.

Well I finally broke down and ordered Leopard. I was able to find it for $160 for which I could tell was the cheapest I could find the family version. I did it for a couple of reasons. One my laptop for some reason I have had to reboot at least twice a day. And Mary’s is actually starting to slow down a bit. So first thing throw some fresh software at it and see what happens.

You know I got to thinking about the age of these computers. And they really old. The Macbook has been out for almost three years now. And her 17″ G4 is the 1.5 which was a couple of years older than that. So that puts her computer right at or under 5 years old. Which puts mine a year older at almost 6 years old. It doesn’t seem right. But I guess it is. She got hers shortly after moving into the Gladstone house. I wanna say her sophomore year in school. When she actually started the design program in school. It was brand new then. The 1.5 had just been released a couple of days before we got it. It took almost a month to get I do remember. It originally came with Panther. About six months to a year after Tiger was released. However we waited until we got my laptop to get Tiger.

Wow can you name me a Windows based laptop that can last for even four years with out needing to be completely replaced? And the thing is. I bet our two G4’s still have a good couple of years left in them. You know when I got my 15″ I still sold my TI for $500. I only had to put up another $500 to get my laptop. As it was used.

So you may spend twice as much for a Mac. But they last twice as long. The jury is still out on the new Intel Macbooks and Macbook Pro’s on whether they will have the staying power the PowerPC had. But I think they will do just fine. I believe the Intel units are closing in on 3 years. And they are still going strong. I was hoping to upgrade Mary’s this year, but it doesn’t look like its going to happen. So hopefully next year. I would really like to get her another 17″. Which means I would get her current one. And I gotta tell you. I like my 15″. The 17″ is just so BIG physically.

I would really like to see a redesign on the Aluminum chassis however. Something to…connect with the Iphone 3G would be really cool. But even though the basic design is a little over 6 years old. You gotta admit its still a damn sexy laptop. Nobody has STILL come close to being able to make a better looking and timeless design on their laptop.

Well since I have officially left my position with Fujitsu, and have started school full time, I thought that maybe I would work on an Art Blog for Mary to post some of her work on for her to just ramble when she needs to. She has been meaning to set one up for a while. But just has never gotten to it. So I will do it for her that way all she has to do is post and go.

And Sorry for the lack of pictures lately. I know I haven’t really gotten to many on here. I have just been lazy with actually finding them. But here are a few of Mary’s paintings to hopefully make up for it. These are my favorites. I don’t know their actual names. I just call them the “Sad Woman” series.