Last weekend marked the fifth annual meeting of the International Retro Computer Expo (formerly BoatFest) in Hurricane, West Virginia. For the fifth summer in a row I drove 1,000 miles from Oklahoma City to Hurricane to attend the event.
Officially the event took place July 10-11, although the organizers got access to the building on Thursday which allowed people to… read entire post
My First Trip to the Dentist in 25 Years Went Better than Expected
I haven’t had much luck with dentists in my life. I didn’t visit the dentist often as a kid and had a couple o relatively unpleasant experiences as a young adult that I just decided to quit going. The last time I went to an actual dentist was, as we jokingly say, “in the 1900s.” This led to one of… read entire post
OKC Thunder Beat by Spurs, Wemby, and Themselves
After going 8-0 and sweeping the Phoenix Suns and the Los Angeles Lakers in the first two rounds of the playoffs, the Oklahoma City Thunder hit a wall in the Western Conference Finals; specifically, a 7’5″ wall named Victor “Wemby” Wembanyama.
Despite barely edging out the Spurs for the top seed in the Western Conference, the Thunder had a 1-4… read entire post
We Lost Internet for 48 Hours and Barely Lived
After roughly three years, we had our first AT&T internet outage. For what it’s worth, I had problems with Cox Cable about once a week — sometimes they were outages but more commonly it was just long periods (hours or days) of degraded service. It seems like multiple times a week I was contacting Cox’s technical support only to be… read entire post
When Troubleshooting Fails… Then What?
Many years ago, back when I worked on a helpdesk at work, I used to sit in on interviews. Management wanted me there to gauge the technical and troubleshooting skills of each candidate, which I did by presenting the following scenario: “a user calls the helpdesk and says they can’t print to one of our network printers. How would you… read entire post
One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Trip to the Doctor
Since people rarely read my entire blog posts I’ll start this one with a one sentence summary: while stealing a broken music keyboard from my neighbor’s trash pile I wrecked our eBike so badly I ended up at the doctor’s office and getting referred to leg wound care.
The longer version is slightly funnier.
Our story begins last weekend —… read entire post
One Great Burger in One Weird Restaurant
I’m not too good to eat at a greasy spoon diner. I’ve had some great meals at places with wobbly tables and sticky salt and pepper shakers. Last week I had a fantastic burger at a hole in the wall restaurant so weird that I doubt we’ll be going back to anytime soon.
Last weekend Susan and I were on… read entire post
A Windfall at Winstar? Visiting the World’s Largest Casino
Last week, Susan and I took a mini-vacation to Winstar Casino, located on the Oklahoma/Texas border. Winstar’s claim to fame is that it is the world’s largest casino. I don’t know if it has the most machines or the most table games, but at 400,000 square feet of floor space, I can attest that the casino is very, very large.… read entire post
It’s Fun to Sweat at the YMCA
Susan and I are both a little sore, but in a good way and for good reason as we’ve spent an hour every other night over the past two weeks working out at the YMCA.
We’ve been members of the YMCA for a long time, since the kids played basketball there I think. We bought a family plan and go… read entire post
The Snow Damage Piled Up
Over the past week, I’ve fallen on the ice twice (I’m okay), Susan threw her back out (she’s okay), and our pool has suffered a catastrophic failure (it’s not okay).
Last weekend, the winter storm that swept across the country made a stop at our home. I don’t know how much snow we actually got — some news reports said… read entire post