Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been wanting to upgrade my 6 year old Dell Vostro 1400 for a little while now, though it wasn’t urgent since the Vostro works pretty well, especially after reinstalling everything back in February. I bought a ultra portable Transformer T100 which can also be used as a tablet if you remove the keyboard, but it was too small for me. I thought maybe I could get a powerful laptop that I could use to replace my ancient desktop computer and also take it with me when I needed to, but I find myself using the laptop a lot while watching TV, so I’m not sure I would use the laptop as a desktop very often. Plus I wanted to support two monitors, but I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe I could just get one very large monitor to take the place of two separate monitors.
Continue reading “Dell Inspiron 15 3000”

Earlier this year I wrote about considering upgrading my internet and cable to AT&T Uverse from my currently separate packages consisting of AT&T DSL and Dish Network TV. Ultimately, even though I wanted to upgrade my internet speed, I decided that once I included all of AT&T’s add-on fees, the package was just too expensive to justify.

So the other day two salesmen came by the house pushing me to sign up for Uverse. They were able to put together a package that was going to cost about $105 per month, but right now I am paying about $80 a month, and the $105 was just the introductory rate: after 12 month it would go up substantially. The salesmen said the answer to that was to call AT&T and tell them you wanted to keep the old rate and they would leave it alone. I wonder about that. I ended up sending them on their way without agreeing to anything.
Continue reading “Time for Uverse”

When I wrote about my ancestors, the McCords, last year, I mentioned a great website where a guy had assembled information from pretty much any family bible that had information about births, deaths, and marriages of people named McCord. One of the bibles quoted there originally belonged to my great, great, great-grandfather, William J. McCord. William McCord had done a great job of recording everyone in his family before him, going all the way back to Scotland, and then everyone that came after him, which his descendants kept adding to until the 1930’s, including the marriage of Mom’s parents and the birth of her two older brothers. Part of the bible information included the indians killing William’s own great-grandfather in Pennsylvania in 1756.

Anyway, that page was a great resource and there were a couple of other bibles there from other family members as well. When I went back to visit the site recently, it was gone. I found the email address of the site owner and he said that he hadn’t had much interest from people in the site and the web provider had gone up on prices recently, so he just let it expire. I asked him if I could host the site on my own server, which I’m already paying for, so it would cost me nothing. He wasn’t sure he had all of the original files, but he started working it. He is a retired doctor and had kept a lot of records. At one point he thought I could scan all of the printouts of the old web pages and post those to my website, so he wanted me to have hard copies of everything. Luckily for me, he wound up finding the electronic files along with all the physical file folders for the 31 different family bibles he documented and mailed me a box of all of this stuff, which I got this week. There is a lot of neat stuff in there, including transcriptions of letters from one of Mom’s aunts or cousins in Birmingham about the McCord family.
Continue reading “Orphan Website”

In March, I wrote about gold and wound up buying a couple of gold bullion coins and some shares in a silver exchange traded fund. Then in April I wrote about silver and bought a few silver bullion coins. In May I wrote about buying some more and maybe buying more than I should including on auctions on eBay, to the point that it was kind of hard to justify. After that I continued to buy substantially more, though just 2-5 ounces at a time when I would win an eBay auction at a reasonably favorable price. The way I see it, if the spot price of silver is $20 an ounce, then any silver I buy is worth at least the spot price, and the amount over that is the true price I am paying. So at a spot price of $20, 5 one-ounce coins would be worth $100, and if I paid $120, then I am really only paying $20 and the rest is safely invested in the value of the silver. So while the difference between paying $120 and $125 may not seem like much, it is sort of like paying 25% more ($25 is 25% more than $20). My point is that small differences in price can be pretty significant when buying silver.

Continue reading “Silver, Part 3”

When I got Rosa from the shelter they warned that she was very scared of thunder and had actually climbed out of her chain link kennel once during a storm, even though she had never climbed fences before. It didn’t take too long before I found out that she does like to climb up on things during storms (not just with thunder, but rain). Or she will try to get into narrow spaces behind the sofa or under a desk or table. Eric closed himself in his room during a storm so she couldn’t mess up any of his computer stuff and when he came out she was standing on the rolltop desk.

I knew about Thundershirts from Aunt Jane who said that Chris was somehow involved with the company that produces them. It is a tight fitting shirt that goes around their body and chest and seems to help anxiety in some dogs. Austin is scared of thunder, but nothing like Rosa, so I thought maybe I could get Rosa a Thundershirt and see if it would do any good, knowing that they don’t always work. Some reviews at Amazon say they work, some say they don’t work, and some say they seem to help reduce anxiety, but don’t make it go away. They can be used for any kind of anxiety, not just thunder, so some people use them for dogs that don’t like to go in cars or have separation anxiety. Rosa’s weight puts her right in the middle of the large size. I was able to get one from Amazon for about $35.

The Thundershirt arrived Wednesday and I spent a while figuring out how to put it on her. There is an extra flap that didn’t seem to make sense, but looking at the instructions and watching a YouTube video, I figured it out and now can put it on her pretty easily. She doesn’t seem to mind too much when I put it on her, though she doesn’t exactly move a lot either. I left it on her and pet on her and gave her treats so she would like the shirt. They said you need to get them used to it before thunder ever shows up and you want to put it on them before any thunder starts so they don’t associate the shirt with storms. I just left it on her for a little while and then again about an hour or two later.

Then on Thursday, there was a big storm coming through. I put the shirt on her once I heard the littlest bit of thunder, before she got too anxious, but eventually there got to be a lot of thunder and lightning (not much rain). She was still very nervous and still shaking sometimes, but she at least stayed next to me most of the time instead of wandering around and getting onto and under things constantly. So maybe it helped a little. It may also have helped that she was still groggy from going to the vet for a dental exam where they pulled six small teeth and one broken canine tooth, and cleaned all the rest. The next day it looked like there would be another storm, so I put the shirt on her and we even went for a short walk. She did fine and didn’t seem to mind the shirt as much this time, but the storms never really materialized. I think it could help and that even though it didn’t do the trick the first time, maybe she will realize she doesn’t need to be as anxious and will get better over time. The shirt has a 45-day satisfaction guarantee if it doesn’t work, so I could return it.