Then, for some reason earlier this week I wanted to start messing with it. I knew I would need some more junk.

Some searching on the internet led me to believe that what I wanted were the things that fell out of boxes at the factory, were found under big machines and returned by other people. I figured that if I bought in bulk, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about buying the right thing. It turns out that someone sells just what I needed (actually, a lot of people like messing with this stuff, so it’s pretty easy to buy).

Anyway, a little explanation: the Arduino is that blue thing in the top picture with the USB cable coming out of it. It’s a microcontroler, a little computer that is good at interacting with the rest of the world. You hook it up to stuff and it either does things, or sends data to something else. I know that’s not a great explanation. Here are some examples: a touchpad, a display board, a laser controlled wireless automatic cat food dispenser.

I’ve got an idea that I want to try with this, but I’m not ready to share it yet.

The last thing for me to do on the homepage is the main menu, and I’d like to get your opinion on it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take these 15 common tasks that someone might do on a school website, and choose the menu option that you think would give you the right information to do them. It will probably take 2-5 minutes depending on how much thought you want to put into it.

I’m using free services to do this, and they only support a limited number of surveys. So you might find that the first link won’t let you take the survey. If that happens, please try the second link instead. But if the first one works, please don’t do the second one. If you accidentally click on the second link first, go ahead and do the second survey, but don’t go back and also complete the first one. If neither of them work, then please complain loudly to the management that you would like to receive your money back.

survey site 1 (done fulled up)
survey site 2

Bonus info for the number adverse: most commented on posts:

• Simple Simon (71)
• Tag. You’re it. (40)
• I Need a Middle School Movie. (35)
• Bad Friday (34)
• Old Heat (33)

There were 3 tied at 30 each.

Finally, in a weird turn of events, three people told me yesterday that they were getting error messages when they tried to view the site. I have spoken to the site, and it has agreed to not give any more errors. However, it will also no longer give foot massages either. You win some. You lose some.

For a grand total of 6435 comments (if you add to these comments the comments by people who only made one comment). Here’s a bonus chart for those of you who don’t like numbers:

I actually just changed the resolution on the monitor to something a mere mortal might use, and the movie was fine, but she did say I could get a new computer.

The next day I spent about, no kidding, six hours figuring out what parts to buy. I’m pretty computer geeky, so you might think that I would be up on all that stuff, but the tightwad in me knows that if I start looking at new computer things, I’ll realize how slow mine is and want to buy something new. So I don’t ever look at computer parts unless I’m ready to buy something.

Here’s what I came up with:

• Motherboard: ASUS M4A78T-E $114 (nice enough)
• Processor: AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz $104 (overclocked to 3.4GHz)
• Video Card: HIS Radeon HD 4850 1GB $114 (4 times faster than my old one)
• Case: Antec Three Hundred $28 ($54 discount on this & power supply)
• hec Raptor500 $17 (cables are almost too short)
• Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 250GB $53 (I don’t need this much space)
• Memory: Crucial 4GB $58 (about what I was using before)
• DVD Writer: SAMSUNG SH-S223L $28 (I needed a black one)

Total cost was $517 after shipping (which was only $10) and rebates. If you’re interested in this sort of thing you can read all of the details on the various parts. Most of the parts arrived in a few days, but I had to wait on the stupid DVD burner. I didn’t wait, I started putting it together right away.

The old computer would get incredibly dirty inside (this happens with all computers that sit on the floor unless your house looks like Annette’s house). We decided to raise it up a few inches to keep that from happening so quickly. Lauren thought a basket would look good. I was really pulling for turtles to support it. Since it was about 4 inches higher, the cooling system had to be re-engineered as well.

When I’d check in on him every fifteen minutes to make sure he was breathing, he’s say, “Look at these. Which one looks better to you?”

Me: “That one. It’s red.”

Lloyd: “No. The picture on the screen.”

Me: “The pictures look identical. Get the red one.”

Lloyd: “What do you think about the dot pitch resolution?”

Me: “Ooo! Is that a toaster?”

We took a lunch break at the Burger King inside NFM, and I just have to say that it is genius for large furniture stores to take care of all your physical needs so you never have to leave. We could eat, pee and shower there. Genius.

Anyway, after lunch Lloyd asked, “Is there a clearance section here?” By that time I had already visited it three times, so I took him back there where we found a GIANT monitor that Lloyd had never added to his Original Six lineup because of it’s prohibitive price. It was marked down 65%, so he chose that one. Good thing he stared at those others for so long, right?

Y’know, looking back on the day, I don’t think that I was supposed to shower there.

The latest version of WordPress (the software that makes this website toe the line) added tagging. So we’ve been tagging new posts since, more or less, the start of March. You might have seen the little tags at the bottom of posts, or the Tag Cloud over there in the sidebar (Jeffrey Zeldman said that Tag Clouds are the new mullets).

While adding them as we go has taken care of about 20 posts, there seem to be around 800 more that don’t have tags. There are programs that are suppose to read through posts and “auto-tag” them, but they say that they aren’t very good.

I thought maybe we could do a little tagging experiment. The little box in the bottom right of the post will let you enter any tag you want for that post. Just type it in and hit enter. The link below will take you to a random post. Why not hit a random post or 50 and see what you think about tagging?

Tag them in whichever way you think is best; don’t feel like you can only use the ones in the Tag Cloud, those are only the most popular. There are something like 140 different tags in use now. Oh, three requests:

• all lowercase
• singular
• one word tags

As a sort of incentive, I will send the person who does the best job tagging something of Laurens that she will not notice is gone for a few weeks. May the best man win…

Get me a random post… now!

Oh, and I should point out that all of this is made possible by the folksonomy plugin written by Scott Sherrill-Mix.

Mark has a job which ‘requires’ him to have endless super-cool gadgets: a GPS thing for his travels, an adorable tiny laptop (that I covet), a video iPod with awesome headphones and a case that will protect it from being run over by a truck , a Palm Pilot, a super-duper camera with an eight-pound lens, and a midget.  (The white headphones in the photo aren’t Mark’s good ones, they’re our hurty ones.)  We had fun playing with all these things during their visit, but we gave him a pretty hard time about his wallet.  Nobody in the world could have as many cards as he does – credit, i.d., membership, gift – it’s crazy!

Here’s a close-up of the wallet, complete with reference quarter.