Mom’s New Laptop

Mom dropped off her new Dell Inspiron 1545 for me to set up this weekend. Her old laptop was a Frys store brand, but this is a Dell and the price was the same (except that she got an extended warranty on the first one and this one she is just doubling Dell’s one-year warranty with her credit card). Moore’s law says that the number of transistors on a computer processor doubles every two years. It has been five years so everything should be at least 4 times better and maybe 6 times. Let’s see:

The old processor was a 1.3GHz Celeron and this is 2.2GHz Dual Core Pentium. Since there are two cores (processors) now I’m going to say this qualifies, but I have no idea how many transistors are on a Celeron or a Pentium. She had 256MB RAM and now she is getting 3 GB of RAM (1 GB was added to the old laptop later on). So that is 12 times. The old hard drive is 40 GB, the new one is 250 GB (6 times).

There are some notable changes between laptops of yore and today. Most of the ports, including the USB ports, were on the back of the old computer. Now they are on the sides. Her laptop didn’t come with a built-in wireless card (though the computer that replaced it when her hinge cracked did) but it was 802.11g and this one is also 802.11g (I guess that’s more of a notable lack of change). In the meantime they have come out with 802.11n, and most of the higher end laptops support that, but this one does not. There is a SD card reader in the front for transferring pictures from a digital camera. Also, while the old laptop had a microphone, this one has a microphone and a web cam for internet video calls. Also this screen is wider in relation to the height to mimic HDTV’s. That changes the overall shape of the laptop a little, but this one seems about the same size and maybe a pound lighter than the old one (and noticeably lighter than my 2-year old Dell), which was pretty heavy. Lastly, this computer has Windows 7 and the old one had Windows XP, so she skipped right over Vista. I like Windows 7 so far. It seems pretty snappy and hasn’t given me a ton of warning messages.

Many Mini Daffodils

I planted a bag of mixed daffodils several years ago in the little plot in front of my house. It gets a lot of sun and the daffodils come back every year. The regular ones come up first and are followed a week or two later by these little multi-daffodils where several smaller flowers are on a single stalk. So all of the regular flowers have died back and all of these little ones have just bloomed. Time for the macro lens.

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I’m a Flashaholic

No, not just because I have too many flashlights now, or because I have done driver swaps, or gotten lithium-ion batteries. It is official now because at CandlePower Forums if you post over 100 messages your status goes from “Enlightened” (people with less than 20 posts are “Unenlightened”) to “Flashaholic”. The next step as far as I can tell is 500 posts when you just get an asterisk after Flashaholic.

This started last May when I was at Fry’s and bought a LED bulb for my Versapak Snakelight, so not even a year ago. But I know so much more about flashlights now.

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Austin Credit Card

Jenny at work, who adores Austin, has pictures of him that she has printed out on regular paper all around her desk. She has almost as many Austin pictures as she has pictures of Johnny Depp. So for her birthday last week, her friends gave her two framed pictures of Austin, so she would have something a little nicer than paper pinned to her cube. One of them was a picture I had take one day when I was taking pictures of flashlights outside during the daytime to get better light (my camera doesn’t take good pictures indoors). Austin got tired of me doing that and laid down. So I got a picture and it was one that Jenny printed out and then was one of that was framed for her. So that got me thinking that when I got my Capital One card, I could pick any picture and I had been waiting until I got a good picture of the dogs to use. So I went ahead and ordered a credit card with this picture on it:

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Fresh Ground Coffee

I’ve been using my Aeropress coffee maker for a couple of months now, making coffee a few times per week. After researching how to make a good cup of coffee I was looking forward to getting some fresh ground coffee once I worked through my brick of Publix decaf. At some point the Sunday paper came with a coupon for a free bag of Millstone coffee and even included the bag that you would take to the store. I scoped my Publix but all they had was pre-ground Millstone. Kroger had whole beans and a grinder, but the only type of decaf I saw was for Hazelnut flavor. With less than a scoop of the Publix brick left, I went to Kroger at Toco Hills today hoping they would have straight decaf. It turns out they did have it!

I have never ground coffee before. I remember Mom doing it when we were kids and would go to the grocery store with her, but not much more. I had looked at the machine earlier and noticed that you could vary the coarseness of the grind from French Press (big chunks) to Espresso (fine powder). In between that is Automatic Drip Coffee. The Aeropress says something finer than ADC is needed, but reviewers said an Espresso grind is harder to press the water through the filter.

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