Category Archives: Random

On Tuesday we took the kids to the zoo in Indianapolis. The zoo itself was nice, and the kids had a good time, but along the way I had several random thoughts. We missed almost every stoplight in Speedway, IN just by a second or two. My theory: the stoplights are timed for 10mph over […]

If my research is correct, the island in the map below is called “Treasure Island.” View Larger Map Treasure Island is an island in Mindemoya Lake. Mindemoya Lake lies on Manitoulin Island. Manitoulin Island is in Lake Huron (one of the Great Lakes). Therefore, Treasure Island is an island in a lake on an island […]

Since my contract was up, I replaced my cellphone with a SMT5800 smartphone, which runs Windows Mobile 6.0. I’ve spent the last few days getting it all configured and syncing with my calendar, tasks, email and contacts. Frankly, I’m surprised how difficult this has been. Here are few of the frustrations I’ve encountered along the […]

In a previous post, I discussed the virtues of having an automated backup process. I gave the advice of having an external drive or file server as well as some offsite backups. I’ve since changed my mind. I had some troubles configuring my file server to properly go to sleep and wake up when needed, […]

I’ve got a new building project, and I needed some graph paper to do my design work. You can always go buy a pad of special graph paper, but I found that you can download PDFs of graph paper and print them at home. There are a lot of choices, but one I like is […]

While I’m at it, I thought I’d post my recommendation that everyone gets the appropriate number of carbon monoxide detectors for your home. Both my brother and sister have passed out from separate carbon monoxide poisoning incidents (don’t worry, they were OK). If you need a story to convince you, read this old post from […]

As you might have guessed from the previous post’s title, I have more than one piece of wisdom to impart. I have a question for you: “Are you backing up your data?” To cut the the chase, I recently had my 400GB Western Digital My Book external hard drive fail. I don’t know exactly what […]

On Thursday, we had an unfortunate malfunction. The water level switch in our washing machine failed to trip. The switch is the device in a washer that detects when enough water has entered the tub. As you can probably imagine, that switch failing means that the washer will continue to “fill” well past the point […]

I still love my Toyota Tundra, but I think they’ve made a marketing mistake in one of their latest commercials. In the commercial I saw recently, a construction worker pulls up in a new Tundra on a job site. A coworker says to him, “A Toyota?”, to which the driver simply replies, “Get in.” In […]