The "N" key on my Macbook keyboard cracked.

The "N" key on my 3.75 year old Macbook cracked a few days ago. Today I ordered a replacement key from an ebay seller.

Today I am volunteering in computer refurbishing.

I am helping with getting a computer refurbishing non profit off the ground. We have been going for a little more than a year now. We have a workshop now and a number of committed and knowledgeable volunteers. We install Edubuntu on older computers we receive as donations and then in turn donate these computers to community groups.

The next Dell puchase is a Green 22 inch monitor.

I could not fit my LG 19 inch wide screen monitor on the dual arm monitor mount because the mounting holes on the LG are 35 mm X 75 mm. So I bought a new monitor from Dell on credit. Credit seems to be easy with Dell and I have probably now over extended myself with Dell Financing. At first they would not approve credit on a new monitor. I was trying to buy two so they would both be on the dual mount arm and by buying two the purchase total price would be high enough for a loan rather than revolving credit and that would mean a more favorable interest rate on the credit. I seem to have been denied that more favorable rate now and am about 3,000 dollars in debit to Dell Financing on these 19% loans. Instead, in the end, they approved a single monitor purchase at 30% interest. So far, as of today before the monitor has been charged I have fully paid off this 30% interest account. I have fully paid for an e-book I got because it was easy credit and a Linux based OS. Then I got with this second laptop tray for the dual arm mount and have now fully paid that off too. Now I must pay off this new monitor soon. The new M11X laptop is on a 6 months no interest loan plan at 19% interest and I have a plan in place to save up the money to fully pay it off in four months. Then if both of these repayment plans work and nothing new is purchased I will owe less than 2000$ at the 19% interest rate. I will save close to 500$ by paying the loan off for the laptop. The new monitor is here http://accessories.dell.com/sna/products/Displays/productdetail.aspx?c=ca&l=en&s=dhs&cs=cadhs1&sku=320-7958

I have the new laptop working now with lots of software.

I installed Office XP, Office 2007 student version for productivity suites and have used these already for school related work. For games I installed Eve Online, Eve Monitor, and Second Life and updated World of WarCraft which I do not actually play yet. For Internet software I installed Firefox 3. For statistical work I installed SAS, SAS Enterprise Guide, and JMP.

I have now fully prepared the laptop and my friend has it and is happy with it.

I took me about 12 hours to fully reinstall the Vista operating system and delete the windows.old folder. Much of this time was taken up installing drivers too.

I am installing drivers for the Dell Inspiron after installing Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit.

It is taking a while to install all these drivers. I have taken a break now to make sure I delete the windows.old folder. I had software licenses on this Inspiron I can not share so must make sure everything is gone. I could have wiped the whole drive but decided not to do that. So now I have many drivers and the Dell system software installed. Before I continue to install more Dell drivers and software I am deleting about 25 GB of data in the windows.old folder.

I have left Yahoo domains for almost all my domains now.

I have one domain left with Yahoo and that is because the hosting for that site is with Yahoo. They raised their prices and closed Geocities and I know they have to make money but both of those moves have cost me time and money. I moved to a Canadian domain name register now. It is an expensive time of year for me as many domains become due now for renewal. I also have no web mastering income this past year nor any planned for 2010.

I have backed up all the user files on the Inspiron and am now restoring windows.

I am now reinstalling Windows Vista on the Dell 1545 Inspiron, a friend is buying it from me and I am setting it up for him. I have a new Alienware M11X for a windows laptop.

I am typing this on my Macbook while it is suspended above the coffee table on a dual monitor mount.

This seems to work well for typing and allowing me to actually see the keyboard as I type. The laptop is being suspended on a laptop tray while I type this. The screen is now eye level although my hands are having to reach up a little bit. I will try this for awhile. I am using a Ergotron dual mount arm to do this.

The one thing is my LG W1952TQ monitor will not mount on the vesa mount. So I may have to find another monitor for this mount arm. I may try to trade this monitor with someone for a compatible monitor.

Back ups and the back up cycle ad hoc deletion of back up folders for the Mac computers.

I have been deleting old Macintosh documents, mail and desktop folders from the network drive. This deletion is ad hoc merely deleting folders with dates between the earliest back ups and the oldest back ups. This is being applied to both the Macbook 1 and eMac 2 back up folders. I am backing up both of these computers about once a month to the network drive. I also use two USB external drives and one external firewire drive to make the same back ups at times, in case the network drive fails. Nothing is off site yet, so I am really not backed up.

Updating Fink and Fink Commander on my Macbook.

I have to use the Otter/Mace9 automated theorem prover for some school work in knowledge representation. I have it running on my Ubuntu Dell Mini 9 netbook already. Since I am typing up my school work in LaTeX on my Macbook, I want to run Otter/Mace9 on my Macbook. I usually install GNU software like Otter/Mace9 with Fink. So I am having to update Fink and Fink Commander.

Now after writing this, I searched Fink and could not find Otter in Fink. I will try to install it in a Macintosh package from the Otter/Mace9 web site. For now I have Prover on the Macbook which is a newer version of Otter/Mace9. I would like to use the old version still.

May be the newer version Prover will help me get started with Otter because so far I have not had success with the resolution function in Otter on the netbook. And the resolution function and then refutation is the point of this Otter software

I am anticipating the M11X gaming laptop now.

The shipping date for the M11X is set for March 12th. I am anticipating that I may receive it some time this coming week.

I have a buyer for the Inspiron 1545 now and the Alienware M11X has been ordered.

I have found a buyer for the Inspiron 1545 just before I signed the agreement to borrow the money from Dell Financial Services to pay for the Alienware M11X. The M11X does not have the new Intel i processors and weights more than a comparable Asus laptop with a different graphic card. The M11X weights less than 4.5 pounds. This is related to consumer satisfaction and depression. So I will realize this relation and carry on loving and liking this new laptop. I hope to pay off the loan with my tax return.

The sales preparation process for selling the Dell Inspiron 1545 used to a new owner.

The first step I figured was to find all the disks that came with this Dell Inspiron 1545 15 inch wide screen laptop.

I did find those. I need to have the restore disk so I can reinstall the OS so the new onwer can have a clean OS and start fresh. I may also look into some way of securely erasing the drive without crapping up the format so the restore disk will still work. So step one is good to go.

The step two is to back up all my user files on both the Windows side and the Debian side.

This may be difficult to make sure I have all the data in all the folders such as software user data folders. If I am going to get a new Windows 7 computer there may be some data and application transfer techniques these days to simply transfer the data from the Vista 64 bit on the Inspiron to the Windows 7 Home Premium on the new Alienware M11X. For now I am backing up files to a small external USB drive with 91 GB free space. This is one of the few USB drives I have that can be seen by Windows and Linux and Macs. I will also back up to my Linksys network drivebay. So step two is in progress.

Considering buying a Dell Alienware gaming laptop and selling the Dell Inspiron laptop.

Last winter my Internet provider offered me a discount on a netbook from Dell. Therein I discovered Dell computers and the Dell finance easy credit. I also discovered that the netbooks were available with Linux. I bought a netbook with Ubuntu 8 and that has since been upgraded by myself to Ubuntu 9 netbook remix and I have also installed now the Transmission OS from the Trinity Audio Group also known as Indamixx OS. This is a specialized Linux based music OS.

I then ordered an Inspiron 15 inch wide screen laptop from Dell. Then later in the summer I ordered a Dell Mini projector. I am now considering selling the mini projector and a screen I had bought on ebay. I am also now considering selling the Inspiron laptop and getting an 11 inch Alienware M11X gaming laptop.

It looks like I will be able to sell these 160 GB hard drives and only have a small loss.

It looks like I can get my money back for these two 160 GB hard drives I bought and get most of my money back from the sale. I will find out in about 10 hours if this is possible. I placed an add on a local web classifieds to do this sale.

I was still unsuccessful at installing harddrives in the Rackable Systems server.

I tried with two used IDE 160 GB drives and was still unsuccessful at installing hard drives in this server. I will stop buying things now for his project. I will perhaps sell off the harddrives.

I am fixing up the Rackable Systems server and then going to sell it, if someone will buy it.

I have learned some of the BIOS settings for the Rackable Systems server now. The hard drives I have tried to use in it are former systems drives, so I can not get the BIOS to see them. I need to reformat them but have so far not found a way to do that. I might try with a Mac computer to do it. I have not been able to do the formatting with a Windows or a Linux PC. I did buy two used 160GB hard drives on eBay. I will put these drives in and then test an install but not install then try to sell this server for the cost I paid about 300$ now.

I have Google Wave as of today.

I have Google Wave as of today. Google Wave is another word of mouth distributed Google service. In other words, one user invites other users they know. Google Wave profiles imitate Facebook. The profiles are public to all of Google Wave. I am not sure I will fill in my profile. I often set rules in technology for myself and then later break them though.

I have been playing Eve Online for almost two years now.

I have been playing Eve Online for almost two years now. It occupies a lot of my time at home on the weekends and weeknights and over night. I play this game almost well enough now to play for free. I opened a second account after a little more than 1 year. I have kept a fan fiction blog of my main avatar's adventures. I have learned that, yes, other players cooperate in playing this game. I have also been learning to use Excel during this time period and this game has given me exercises to practice my spreadsheet work. Also I have developed an "in game" business plan that has worked. All in all, I have had some social time chatting with other players from the USA, Australia and Europe. I have even chatted in French a little.

I did try to buy an account on World of Warcraft but this did not work out and I did not yet try that game. I also considered buying a game console. I did not consider myself a computer gamer in the 1990's. In the 1980's almost all my computing was gaming computing because the Commadore computers I had seemed limited to that given my finances. I did complete some school exercises in GIS programming and Fortran 77 programming in the 1980's and these were not gaming. In the 1970's I also played some games. In the 1970's I worked in programming with Fortran IV and data entry on punched cards and even played with the cards making little hang gliders from the cards. I also did some other non-work exploring and gaming and mostly school programming on BASIC in mini computers with terminal access. I was able to design computer games and computer graphics in the 1970's and 1980's. So my connection with gaming now continues.