This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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This week we finally got around to putting a new clutch into my Saturn. As some of you may remember, back in October we got word that it could die at any moment. Well, we procrastinated and procrastinaed, and it lasted just fine for almost four months. But we figured at this point it was time to stop pushing our luck. I just didn’t need to bresak down in the middle of a tunnel or bridge or anything. So, we sucked it up and got it fixed. It cost money, but still less money than going ahead and buying a new car. All I can say though is that it better last at least another year now! (And… drat, I wanted a new car! :-) I must say though, the clutch now feels COMPLETELY different. I guess it had been “almost gone” for so many years that I got used to how it felt that way. I am having to completely readjust to the new place where the clutch engages. But I’ll get used to it before long I am sure.
Also today, I got my frivolous purchase of the month. I finally got a Slingbox a year and a half or so after I orginally said I wanted it. The main delay was that they hadn’t released their Mac client until just recently. It’s actually still in Beta, but seems to mostly work fine. What I got wasn’t that original Slingbox from my old post, but rather the Slingbox AV which is the more current version. (I didn’t see any need for the Slingbox Pro at this time… maybe next year.) I struggled with getting the networking and such all set up the way I wanted it between my two routers and all that junk. But I got it all the way I wanted to eventually. As I suspected from earlier tests, I can’t watch from my work network, they block it. But that’s OK, I don’t need that kind of distraction at work anyway. :-) My primary use will actually be watching my downstairs Tivo from my computer upstairs, or from a laptop either elsewhere at home, or while off at a Starbucks or Tullys or whatnot (or other random places with Wifi).
So far it is working great. I am sitting upstairs with a laptop writing this post for my blog while watching an episode of Lost from my Tivo in a window in the corner. Excellent. It is much better than the type of thing I’d done before with a wireless video repeater with an IR extender and an old 4″ black and white TV in the office. And other such solutions. This is much nicer.
They’ll be releasing a Treo version of the SlingPlayer in a few months. Almost makes me not want an iPhone. Almost. :-)
 As I write Amy is missing a sleepover for the Middle School girls at her school. She is very upset about that. But with a fever over 100 degrees for the third straight day (or is it fourth now?), that just wasn’t going to happen. Two nights ago her fever briefly spiked to 104, and based on the advice of her doctor and Brandy’s mom (a nurse) she was about to be stuck in the Emergency Room for the evening if it didn’t come down within the hour or so. It did, so no ER. But we’re still in a “sick” mode. Temperatures are less than they were, but still often over 100. Meds would knock the temperature down a couple degrees, then they would climb up again over the next few hours until it was time to take more meds.
There is a nasty flu sort of thing going around school. According to an email that went out yesterday, about 10% of the students are out sick right now. The email was pleading with parents to please keep their kids home from school (and the sleepover) if they seemed like they were getting sick, so as to try to keep the other kids healthy. Of course, even at her sickest Amy was pleading to please go to school. She really likes school. Which is good. But with those 102 degree fevers and the like… no.
One of the other kids who is very sick is the other girl who was at the mall with Amy last Saturday and who slept over that night. They are thinking she’s gotten a pneumonia type thing out of it as well. Fun. We think Amy caught it from her last weekend but no signs of pneumonia yet in Amy.
Amy’s still sick but getting better. Hopefully her friend is getting better too.
Brandy has been off and on running a fever too but mostly managing to keep functional. I haven’t yet… but I fully expect that within the next few days I’ll be struck down too. Once this kind of thing gets in a house, unless you’re really lucky, everybody ends up getting it at some point.
Urgh. I just coughed. Here it comes! :-/
A few days ago Brandy found my missing lens in the grass. Once all the snow had melted away it was a lot easier to find it seems. It was almost exactly where Amy had hit me in the face with a snowball. Right where I thought it would have been, but I had looked there a number of times while the snow was still there with no luck. But Brandy found it.
So a few minutes ago when the contacts started bothering me I took them out and put the glasses back on. Ahhh!!! Much better! No more contacts for me for awhile. Probably until next time I break my glasses.
I’ll still get new glasses eventually too sometime, but it now drops way down on the priority list again.
On Thursday for the first time I did a locate thing with the phones when all the phones were actually in different places. I had called Brandy a few times and she hadn’t answered, so I checked the locations. She was at home. Amy was at school. I was at work. (Although about to leave for an after work social thingy bop which was fun.)
I like the locator things. I still want to do an auto updated real time map of my own phones location with history going back a few days. That would be cool. Maybe someday.
The first tiny scratch in the finish of my iMac that I bought just under a year ago showed up today. Well, I noticed it today. Thought it was just dust. But it won’t come off. It makes me sad. Now, you have to look closely and pay attention when there is a pure white screen at that spot to really notice. It may have been there for months without me noticing. But now that I *have* noticed, you know I’m going to always notice. I’m just that way.
Oh well. It really isn’t a huge deal, things age as time goes on, and when I’m ready to replace Cronus in early 2009, this will be the least of this machine’s problems.
But I still hate it when the “new thing” isn’t quite new any more.
 This is this year’s school picture of my “little” sister.
Just under 16 months until she is as old as I was when she was born.
Time sure goes by quickly, doesn’t it?
I was a bad brother and missed her birthday this year though. Ended up IMing a happy birthday a few days later. I’ll send a belated present soon, although I haven’t decided what it will be quite yet.
I definitely miss being close enough to visit Cynthia and the rest of my family (both sides of it) on a regular basis. Sometime this year we’ll have to organize a quick trip (or trips) to see my DC family, Brandy’s PA family, and my OH family. The three are so far apart though it is hard to make a quick spontaneous trip for that sort of thing though.
I am glad I have automated daily backups again! My iTunes library got fraked up somehow on Monday. I Moved two files from yesterday’s backup and everything was fine again. Backups are good things. Just gotta get the weekly offsite backup going now too.
OK, so it is a low quality cellphone picture… I don’t make a habit of bringing a “real” camera to the office. But you get the point… Skyscrapers, Puget Sound, Mountains… and a view of my car if I choose to park on the top floor of the garage as I did today.
This is the second office move since I have been in this job. Averaging 6 months between moves, that isn’t too bad. I started out on the 5th floor, then moved to the 1st, now I am on the 3rd and for the first time have a window. Woo! Go windows! (It’s also a little bit bigger than the last one, which was a ittle cramped sometimes.)
Anyway, just moved into the new office this morning. So far I like it.
 So, a little over an hour ago I was playing with Amy in the snow, throwing snowballs at each other. When I came in, I noticed the left lens of my glasses was gone. Somewhere in the snow.
Given that back in January 2005 I lost my main pair of glasses in the ocean and have been on my backup older pair ever since… this means I’ll be wearing contacts for a little while.
I prefer glasses, contacts are such a major pain. I’ll probably go ahead and make an eye doctor appointment and get new glasses in a few weeks. But for now… no glasses for Sam for a little bit.
I’ll try again to look for the lens in the snow tomorrow (it is dark now), but it could basically be anywhere in the back yard. And then yet another look will be in order once the snow melts. If I find it, maybe I’ll wait a bit longer for new glasses, but not too much longer… I should have a backup pair anyway.
This is my 1000th post on this blog. The time between my very first post and this post is 1281.087 days. So I’ve been averaging about 0.781 posts per day, or one post every 1.281 days. Otherwise expressed as one post every 30 hours, 44 minutes and 46 seconds. Or so. I love extra meaningless digits.
For those looking quickly and wondering why my 1000th post has the id “1004” instead of 1000, it is because there were several posts which were accidentally double posted over the years. The second copy was immediately “closed” so it isn’t actually visible, although I have them in the database cause they did sort of happen, but not really. So this is the 1000th real post. Well, strictly speaking the very first post was a default first post by the software, but I left it live, so it counts. :-) But those invisible duplicates don’t. I know I could have decided they did, but they don’t darn it! :-)
Anyway, I roughly try for one post a day, so I’m a little behind that, but not too much behind. So I’m doing OK.
Now, what I post isn’t often the most interesting stuff in the world. Lately even more so than at other times since I started it is just little personal notes that for the most part nobody but me and my immediate circle of friends and family would ever be interested in (and often not them). So there are not really any regular readers that I do not know personally. But that is quite OK. I’ve tried at times writing little bits of commentary on news or tech or whatever, or posting links to fun things I see online… but both take a decent amount of time to do well that I do not have… not to mention there are many hundreds of better places to get that sort of thing. So… I do more the diary sort of thing with the occasional bits about what is going on with my life, things I’m doing, movies I watch, whatever… just random stuff that strikes me and I want to say. And that is fine with me.
And there are now 1000 of such blurbs. Woo. Go me.
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