My sister said, "I couldn't have imagined a dog that would make our dog look big." Well it exists, and we're giving him to my grandmother for her birthday. Our 15-pound silky terrier dwarfs this miniscule 1.35 pound yorkie puppy. Prepare to be blinded by cuteness:
This is a small article I found near the back of the December 1998 issue of WIRED Magazine. The highlights are mine. Interesting how far Mozilla and XML have come.
I have been in computer purgatory for the last three weeks. Sure I had my laptop, but my desktop's motherboard died. Purely by coincidence, the computer broke on the exact day I got a beautiful new 17-inch flat panel monitor. My goal was (and is) to run dual monitors with it and my old 15-inch flat panel. I'll post a picture when I get that part working.
It took a week for the repair shop guy to tell me that the motherboard had failed thanks to a bad batch of capacitors. Now it's hanging on my wall. I took the crash as a Message From God to upgrade, so I bought a new, higher performance motherboard and processor. Not surprisingly, the lobodomized computer didn't work when I started it up for the first time, so I spent another week trying to figure out how to save my data. I had a backup, but it was a few months old. Installing the hard drive as a secondary disk on one of Dad's computers didn't work (thanks, I think, to the dual-boot partition I had set up). Eric had the grand idea to use a Knoppix disk to recover my data. I loaded it up, and it mounted all the hard drive partitions and recognized my burner perfectly. I burned off three DVDs worth of files easier than I could have ever expected.
I wish my Windows reinstall had gone that easily. The video card kept crashing the system five minutes after bootup, preventing me from completing the setup. I ended up having to install Windows, wait for the crash, reboot, quickly install the video driver, and do a repair install with a new setup. The computer has worked beautifully since then, and I've spent the last few days reinstalling programs. It's nice to have a clean, fast computer with a new monitor and all my data still intact.
Last weekend was Independence Day weekend, and it was easily as enjoyable as last year's. Eric's neighbor Doug was kind enough to take us out on the lake again for the fireworks show. Unlike last year when the organizers shot the mortars off of the dam at the end of the lake, this year they shot them off of a small barge, no bigger than my room, nestled in a small inlet. Apparently, Homeland Security decided that it was too dangerous to have fireworks on the dam. I think that's a load of bull, but oh well. It didn't effect our enjoyment of the show.
We headed out two hours early, eight of us on the boat, and quickly put down anchor. As the sun set, we played BS to pass the time. We played with two decks, which added a whole new dimension to the game. One deck had red backs and the other blue, so we had to constantly watch what colors were being laid down. Was it possible, we had to ask ourselves, to have, say, five aces, all blue?
The show began around 9 and continued for maybe 20 minutes. Watching fireworks on the water is better than on land because there is no obstructions and the blasts echo across the surface. Fortunately no fireworks debris hit us this year.
After the show, as we headed back toward Doug's dock, we passed a pontoon boat whose occupants were calling for help. Their engine wouldn't start, so we agreed to tow them back to the marina. We tied the front of their boat to Doug's boat's water skiing rope connector and slowly made our way across the lake. Honestly, I'm amazed it worked. Somehow we made it through the traffic of other boats, managed to avoid hitting the dock, and got the pontoon home safely. After that we floated back to Doug's.
None of us bought fireworks of our own this year, so after watching the Boston fireworks show on TV, we called it a night. Again, thanks to Eric for inviting me, Doug for driving the boat, and the five other people for making the evening so enjoyable.
