Sep 25, 2007 General
Posted by
Dusty
Still waiting on my DSL stuff to get here. If it doesn’t show up tomorrow I’m going to call and check on it. Last night I was unable to connect to either of the two access points in the neighborhood. Good thing there was new TV to keep me occupied. I was going to put XP back on the old computer so I could at least get some dial-up action. Luckily I’m able to get a wireless connection tonight.
Sep 20, 2007 Tech/Gadgets
Posted by
Dusty
While perusing the interweb last night I somehow wound up at the U.S. Patent Office. I was playing around with the search feature, but finding a particular patent isn’t straightforward unless you actually know the patent number. So I grabbed the first thing I could think of that I knew would have a patent number stamped on it, a PEZ dispenser. From there I was able to use references to previous patents and the names of inventors to trace back to the earliest PEZ patent. After a while I was able to find the patents for all kinds of stuff like LEGOs, an Atari joystick, and the yo-yo. I was unable to find a patent for the Castle Grayskull playset, but I did find one for the trap door inside of it. If you click on the “Images” link you can see scanned copies of the original documents. If you need a TIFF plug-in for your browser, I recommend AlternaTIFF.
I amassed quite a collection of various patents, from fishing lures to pinball machines. Finding some of this stuff required a little research on my part. A few Google search results led me to eBay auctions where people are selling patent documents that they printed on their home printer. Some aren’t even selling printed copies, just the digital files. If only the buyers knew that they could get these documents for free.
Seeing those auctions did give me the idea to print and frame some of these patents.
Sep 18, 2007 General
Posted by
Dusty
Apparently my phone line was connected today. At least that’s what I see when I look at the order status online. If I had a phone I would plug it in and check for a dial tone. I fished out my old dial up modem but there aren’t any Vista drivers available for it. I’ll take AT&T’s word for it until my cable modem gets here.
Sep 13, 2007 Site News
Posted by
Dusty
I’ve been looking at traffic stats for this site lately. I had a ton of hits related to that last guitar mod. A lot of people have linked to those pictures from forums and MySpace pages. I may replace those pics with some goatse type stuff just for a laugh.
These are just a few of the search engine queries that people have used to find this site:
Looks like I’m not the only one with theories on the Roswell/Colonel Sanders conspiracy.
Sep 12, 2007 General
Posted by
Dusty
The signal strength of my current wireless connection is poor at best. It drops out fairly often, and I’m lucky to reach down speeds of 20KB/s. It’s pretty much useless for anything but web browsing, but it’s better than nothing.
I picked up a new HDTV antenna. I have to fiddle with it to get it pointed in the right direction, but I can pick up several stations that I couldn’t get before. Half of them are religious or Spanish language though.
Sometimes I forget how much time I spend on the internet and watching TV. With a whole lot of neither going on over the weekend I had to find something else to do with my time. If it wasn’t for the rain I would have mowed the yard. I ended up rearranging the furniture in my living room and hanging my guitars on the wall.
The flash on my camera stopped working so now I can only use it outdoors in full sunlight. I had to turn on all the lights in my house just to get this crappy picture.
Sep 7, 2007 Entertainment
Posted by
Dusty
Blockbuster currently has a DVD that contains the first episodes of three of NBC’s new Fall shows. All three of the shows are on my want-to-see list so I checked it out. I had already seen one of them, Chuck. The other two are Journeyman and Life. You may recall that I predicted those two shows would be canceled. I really hope I’m wrong about that. I enjoyed them both, with Life being my favorite. I had heard that Claudia Black was going to be in that one, but it appears she has been replaced with another actress. The disc also contains a 2 minute sneak peak of Bionic Woman.
