AlanBarber.Org
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Toledo Nerd Dinner 3.0 Date/Time/Location
Josh Pollard of glmotorsports.net has set the official time and location for the next Toledo Nerd Dinner. It will be on Thursday, April 7th at 6:00PM at Easystreet Café in downtown Toledo.
The address is 822 Washington Street, Toledo, Ohio.
Thanks to Josh Baltzell of A Short Domain Name for sharing the link to google maps to the place. Hey! When did google maps start working with Opera?
As Josh, Pollad that is, pointed out the parking lot for Easystreet is actually on Michigan which is a one way street. If you’re coming from I75 or the Trail you have to drive past Washington Street and take a side road to get onto Michigan.
For me I come from northbound I75 and get off the Erie Street exit. Turn left onto Erie (north) and go two blocks to Monroe. You’ll cross Washington Street, that’s ok! Turn left (west) onto Monroe and go two blocks again till you reach Michigan. Turn left again (south) and you’re on Michigan. Stay in the far left lane and you’ll see two parking lots near Easystreet. Either one works although try to get into the second lot. Take the smoking entrance in and look for the big crowd of Nerds!
Anyhoo, it’ll be a fun time so stop on by! Order some good food and don’t be afraid to talk. The more people are willing to open up the more fun it is. Don’t be shy!
Oh yeah one more thing, bring a few copies of your resume just in case. Never hurts to be prepared!
on 03/30/2005 at 08:11 PM
Computers & Technology • General • (0) Comments • Permalink
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Happy Easter
Happy Easter!
I hope you all had a nice Easter. Filled up on plenty of eggs and chocolate!
We had a little party at our place with the family. Had some good food and just hung around talking. I always like holidays like this becuase I get to spend time with both my family and the love of my life, my girlfriend. I don’t know what it is but there’s something about it that just makes me very happy.
Well don’t eat all your candy today and get sick. Don’t want to miss work or school becuase of that! HE HE HE!
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Hope you all have a fun and safe St. Pattie’s Day! I’ll be having a few Guinnesses tonight and watching something Irish on tv. No going out tonight since I have to go to work tomorrow.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
I'm all geeked up tonight
Well I’m sick as a dog with a nasty head cold but I’m all geeked up tonight. I just ordered the first few parts of what will be the first of hopefully many computers that I get to build for my girlfriend.
It’s not going to be a barnstormer by any imagination but it should end up being much better than the hunk of junk doorstop she’s using now. I’m not sure on the exact model she has but I believe it’s one of the original iMacs Apple released. It’s been running like trash lately and so outdated it’s just causing her more grief than she should have to deal with.
Well I have 3 socket 370 Intel Celerons running at 700Mhz laying around so I figured why not use one of them. I just went to Newegg.com and bought a motherboard and case.
The motherboard is a PC Chips M791G. It uses the VIA CLE266 chipset and includes onboard video, sound and 10/100 network. It only costs $40 so it’s a pretty good deal.
The case is a Linkworld ATX Mini-Tower Case (model 617-C.88-P4) with 250W power supply. The reason I bought this case was because it’s very small. The dimensions are only 15"x14"x5.25". Compared to my full tower case this thing is pint-size. In fact it only has room for one floppy drive and a single cd-rom turned sideways! Price is only $28.50.
Here’s the parts list:
[X] - Case (ordered)
[X] - Motherboard (ordered)
[ ] - Ram (might have some useable ram coming, if not pick up a stick from crucial.com)
[X] - Hard Drive (I have a 27.2Gigabyte Maxtor I can use)
[ ] - Floppy Drive (have to get)
[ ] - CD-Rom Drive (have to get)
[ ] - Modem (have to get)
[X] - Keyboard (I have an extra)
[X] - Mouse (I have an extra)
[ ] - Speakers (I have some really old computer speakers or I can buy a new set)
[ ] - Monitor (have to get)
[ ] - Windows XP (have to get)
It’ll be perfect for my girlfriend. Small size, easy to use and the best tech support personnel around, ME!
Whoo boy I’m excited!
on 03/15/2005 at 08:05 PM
Computers & Technology • General • (1) Comments • Permalink
Monday, March 14, 2005
Time for another Toledo Nerd Dinner
A little heads up for nerds, geeks and tech heads in the Toledo, Ohio and surrounding areas.
Josh Pollard has made a post on his blog suggesting it’s time we have another Nerd Dinner. It’s been a looong time since the last one so I agree. The first one was pretty good but the last one was a bit on the small side. I’ve suggested a weekend dinner instead of middle of the week like the last ones were.
So, if you’re in the area and would like to meet up then please stop by Josh’s site and give your support
http://josh.glmotorsports.net/blog/archive/2005/03/14/571.aspx
Next gen Nintendo console "Revolution" to have wi-fi
Kinda old news now but I’m just catching up on gaming news. As a self-professed N-head I like to know what they’re up to…
Here’s a couple of links to read about everything:
http://cube.ign.com/articles/594/594935p1.html
http://planetgamecube.com/news.cfm?action=item&id=6094
The cool info is that the Revolution will be backwards compatible with the GameCube. Thank goodness! I hope this sets a trend for the future at the big N. I hope whatever comes after the Revolution will be backwards compatible with both the Revolution and the GameCube. I know it’s far fetched but I think they should support at least 2-3 generations back. We as gamers pay a lot for games and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to trade in the hardware for the next generation and still be able to use the current software we have.
Other bits of info. The graphics chip “Hollywood” will again be made my ATI. I like this fact a lot. ATI is a top level graphics company and if the chipset is based on their current desktop graphics systems it’ll be one heck of a performance champ.
The cpu “Broadway” is being done by IBM. A bit surprised by this one. IBM is also developing the cpu for the next gen Playstation called Cell. Although they aren’t saying that Broadway is anything like Cell I kind of have to wonder if maybe they’re going to be related. What would be cool is if “Broadway” turned out to be a dual core PowerPC chip. IBM makes the PowerPC chips that go into Macs and they’re planning to make a dual core PowerPC G5 cpu for the Macs.
Throw in a dual-core PowerPC cpu and a graphics chip from ATI and you’d have one heck of a system. MMM yummy.
Finally the big news is the Revolution will have built in wi-fi. The Nintendo DS has wi-fi and it looks like Nintendo is pushing forward with this as a standard feature for the future. Very cool! I like the idea of wi-fi built into all gaming systems. I already have wi-fi setup in the house so I’d have instant networking out of the box.
I can’t wait to see more details about the Rev. Looks to be a pretty sweet product.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
We are finally live!
Well after a lot of hard work and some slacking I’m happy to announce that my girlfriends new and improved website is up and running.
I present you with Ninkybink Boutique!
Rebuilt from the ground up this is a full e-commerce website. We are running Zen-Cart for our shop and payments are being managed with Paypal.
Now the shop is shut off right now because I still have to run a test order to make sure everything is configured properly but I wanted to get the word out that the site is up and running because after a month of work I’m excited to show it off.