The Latest News 10/22/05

Hello from Texas!

I am typing this from our car as we drive between Oklahoma City and the Northern Texas border. There are a few things that I mentioned in previous posts that I would like to take this time to post about. The first thing I was going to post about is the beautiful laptop that I am temporarily in possession of. I found it for sale on www.Craigslist.org for such an extremely low price that I couldn't help but buy it. Now of course I am wanting to sell it (that's the whole reason I bought it), so if anyone wants a really nice laptop at a fairly decent price let me know.

It is a Dell Latitude D810, and the specs are:

Intel Pentium M CPU at 1.73GHz,
128MB ATI Radeon X600 video card,
512 MB DDR Ram,
CD-RW/DVD Combo drive,
40GB 7200 RPM HDD,
Beautiful 15.4" Widescreen SXGA Display,
Windows XP Pro. SP-2
I have been getting about three to three and a half hours of standard use off of each battery charge.

It also comes with the original box, and all the original software etc...

When I got the laptop, I was told that it was brand new, and had only been turned on once. Well, I'm pretty sure that this is true because the power supply, and power cord was still in it's original sealed packaging. Here's a picture so you can see it for yourself.



So anyway, if you're interested let me know and I'll give you a price. You can email me at my email address in "My Profile".

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Now on to my new camera. There are many good sides to this story, and a few bad sides, so I'll start with the bad so that the good will be last.

Starting with the bad... The reason that I had to get a new camera is because my Olympus c4040z was stolen by the banquet wait staff at the Radisson Hotel in Valley Forge while we were on the Faith and Freedom Tour with Vision Forum. More bad news is that they stole it with a 128MB SmartMedia card, and my best set of AA Rechargeable batteries. These are quite minor inconveniences compared to loosing the camera, but none the less they are an inconvenience.

Now for the good news, my searching for a new camera brought me to the Konica Minolta Z10. An awesome camera at the price I paid for it. It is a 3MP camera with an 8x optical zoom. On top of that it has a start-up time of .5 seconds, a flash range of 16' (which is very good for a built in flash on a point and shoot camera), a nice lens, and an incredible battery life. So after deciding that this was the camera that I wanted, I headed to eBay to try the one for me. To my great surprise I found a refurbished one for only $99! I also bought a service plan that includes a three year warranty with a "free" annual cleaning. Even after adding this plus shipping, my total still came out to only $150! I really didn't like that my camera was stolen, but now I must admit that I'm glad that I have a new camera. Here are a few pictures of the camera. I must say that I don't care for the looks of it, but it doesn't look nearly as bad in real life.






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Lately much of my time has been spent with Jeremy on an edition that he is putting on a house. It is a one room edition on the back of the house, so it has been nice not to need to work with plumbing. The people that we are doing the edition for are very nice warm hearted Italians. They have been wonderful to work with, and consequently the edition has been a breeze, and has gone up very fast. Oops, I take that back. Although the people have been great to work with, we have the greatly feared, overpowering, tyrannical, and socialist CITY OF LINDENHURST. Yes the city is about as scary as the name sounds. From the start they have been difficult to work with. They didn't even approve the building plans for a long time, thus delaying the start of the edition three long months (by which time, I might ad, the edition should have been complete).

Just a couple days ago we had the structural and mechanical inspection. Which we didn't pass for a couple reasons. One reason was that they said that we had to have OSB patches between the studs at every seam in the sheeting. We're still not sure why this is (the inspector didn't even know) but those had to be in place. And, for every reason that I can see, that is actually detrimental to the whole edition. Next they said that there needed to be caulking between the base plate on the walls, and the sub flooring! This was said to be needed to stop air flow from entering through the crack. Well, I'm not going to get into how stupid this is, just because. But anybody who is in construction will tell you that air doesn't flow there if it is caulked or not. Well, I could go on with the craziness that the city has sent us through, but I think I'll stop because I don't want this to ruin my day, and I can tell already that my temperature is rising.

Here is a picture of the edition as it was a couple weeks back. From the outside, the main difference now is that the edition is sided, and there is lateral bracing that goes across the rear posts to stabilize the addition.



It is now 1:37pm, and we have finally reached the Texas border. So I am now going to sign off, and settle in for a one hour episode of Roy Rogers. Happy Trails!