The ramblings of a techie turned math teacher. Blog

AnthroPC Standoff

No… Really… I *must* have an AnthroPC™

Like I said… I really need an AnthroPC™… Click here to find out why I really dig this comic. It’ll be a sad day when I get caught up on the back-story and don’t have any more “extras” to read… I guess, as usual, that’ll just mean I need to find a new favorite comic… In case it’s not painfully clear, Pintsize is my favorite character. The funniest part here is that...

Selle Anatomica Top

Tales of love and war with the Selle Anatomica Titanico LD

There are things in life you love. There are things in life you hate. There are things in life you really don’t care one way or the other. The most frustrating things, though, are the ones that you love so much, you keep using them even though you hate them. This saddle is one of those things. When I first rode it, I was in love. It was so amazingly comfortable. Roadies...

insideride.com rollers

Ode to a good hot shower

I don’t suppose when Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can’t Go Home Again there’s even the remotest chance he was talking about the shower in my folks’ house. But, as far as showers go… it’s reason enough. To be honest, I can be certain he wasn’t talking about that shower since the house wasn’t constructed for another decade after he wrote the book… And I’m pretty sure it was yet another decade...

The only black people in Sylva?

Vanilla

I suppose it’s inevitable that you see your own back yard far differently than anyone else could possibly see it. I suspect we all have criteria we use to judge the world and our surroundings. I also suspect we either expect or want those around us to use the same criteria we do. And maybe that’s the root of all conflict in the world. One of the biggest laughs I had all...

Koa guitar

Good for the soul

You can learn a lot from books. You can learn a lot from people around you. You can learn a lot from the ever present Internet. But you can only grow your soul — your spirit — on your own. I’ve had a successful run of years. I’m good at what I do for a living. My skill set has grown phenomenally over the years. I’ve also become a competent car mechanic. I’ve...

Monty, Darth McPherson, The Colombienne and The Swiss... We have wine, but if the food doesn't get here soon, it could get rowdy....

Weekend on ice

It’s been ten years since it’s been properly cold in Dallas. That’s what the weatherman said… It’s only stories like this one from Toronto that make me feel like it’s better to be here right now. The forecast has been exaggerated a bit in the past, so I was hoping they were being pessimists again this time. I suppose they just can’t risk not telling us how bad it could have been....

Creating a bootable USB drive (Windows)

Like me, do you only have a really old USB DVD drive to install Windows Server on your servers? Would you rather have a faster way to install Windows 7 on your desktops? Here you go! Create an NTFS formatted Primary partition on your drive at least 4GB in size and assign it a drive letter Mark the partition active Next insert your Windows7/Vista DVD into the optical drive and check the drive letter...

Blue Ridge Mountains

Confessions of a closet southern boy

Bluegrass. Sitting on the porch swing. Hounds. Pickin’ guitar. Barn cats. Pickup trucks. Grandma’s quilt. Mountains. Fall colors. Dogwoods. Clear mountain streams. Peach trees. Starry nights. Just up the holler. The peaceful silence of snow covered pines. It’s amazing the trouble we relocated Southerners have to go through just to find the food — the easy stuff on the first list… “Southern” isn’t a place, it’s a way of life, but...

Picking favorites

Parents, it’s rumored, must be careful not to pick favorites. Nephews, on the other hand, are fully entitled to choosing their favorite uncles and aunts. Well… whether it’s OK or not, I did. I remember as a young kid when we’d load up in the car with my grandparents to go visit my great grandparents for the weekend. That trip frequently felt like a visit to a foreign land. Their house...

I've long known that a falling piece of toast can land only one way... jam side down. And, most likely, on one of the many clumps of Fiona hair that no vacuum cleaner in the world can quite overtake. Last night, I made another incredible discovery. It would have merited further experimentation, but I was going to run out of socks... You see... I discovered that dropping a rolled up pair of socks from any point in my master bathroom results in said pair of socks landing in a water dish. I was, given this discovery, further surprised to learn that their are only three water dishes in the master bathroom and that one of them was on the counter. And it's not a small bathroom by any stretch. Including the closet, you could fit a large portion of my parents' first home into our bathroom. In the end, it all just meant that I had to run a load of laundry to get a clean, dry pair of socks. This phenomenon concerns me, though. You see... I have an amazing ability to encounter localized pockets of enhanced gravity. That's a euphemism for "When I go mountain biking, I tend to encounter the ground with some frequency," or even, I suppose, "Given the opportunity, I'll probably fall down." Fortunately, dirt is soft, and my most serious bicycling injury to date involves a painful bruise on my breast bone. However, given my new knowledge that gravity doesn't always pull straight down — that is, that there might be more prominent nearby gravitational bodies than this Earth we wander around on — I'm concerned that I might encounter something more dangerous in the woods this spring. What if, for example, a localized pocket of enhanced gravity formed in the middle of a tree. Come to think of it, I may have witnessed just such an occurrence a few weeks ago when TT-Bob came flying off his bike near SMU... There must have been a gravity pocket in that light pole overhead! That really does explain a lot. I'd prefer to continue falling down, though.

Falling objects

I’ve long known that a falling piece of toast can land only one way… jam side down. And, most likely, on one of the many clumps of Fiona hair that no vacuum cleaner in the world can quite overtake. Last night, I made another incredible discovery. It would have merited further experimentation, but I was going to run out of socks… You see… I discovered that dropping a rolled up pair of socks from...