We have a 2-3 year old Dell Dimension XP2400 that I’m bringing into my office to use in lieu of the laptop. It’s in good shape overall, but has a ridiculous little 30gB hard drive.

We had a spare 80gB drive in the basement so that worked out perfectly. But the mounting bracket that came with this cramped case only holds one drive, and it has a weird shape. We went scrounging in the server room at my husband’s office looking for other cages and found two, but neither remotely fit.

I did find a few online, but decided to go with the bracket kit from Issue Resolved. Even though it was a bit more expensive than the bracket alone, they were super-speedy (it got here in three days) and included every part I needed - ribbon, screws etc. I’d use them again.

Now we’re formatting the HD after some confusion about how to do this on Windows XP Pro… Seems to be proceeding normally. I can’t wait to plug in the flat panel monitor.

My husband teaches our English springer spaniel how to install a hard drive.

Yeah, but fortunately this one was only about 8 inches. We spent two hours shoveling this time and actually made it out to the middle of the cul-de-sac, so this isn’t as bad.

Still, I’m getting tired of shoveling. I want it to be 70 for a few days. Better yet, I’d like to be in Cozumel right now. But of course I couldn’t get a flight out.

Yes, we did have a lot of snow. Officially it was between 21 and 27 inches here, but we easily had drifts of four feet. Especially in our driveway - it took 2 1/2 hours to clear it out yesterday. And today I found the mailman slogging through the yard knee-deep in snow so I had to clear the sidewalk too.

I won two jobs this week - one doing maintenance and content updating for a medical office, and the other translating a new graphic layout into a functional web template for the local university. I’m really excited about the academic work - I spent a lot of time in upper-level academia and enjoy working with researchers as I have in the past on other projects. Plus, the university has a working style guide and strict ADA requirements. I always make an effort to address accessibility issues on the sites I design, but have never actually had to do it before. I think that will be a good learning experience for me. Read the rest of this entry »

What are ‘hobbies,’ you ask?

Those are things done for fun outside of work, strange as that concept may sound. And I might have a new one; I’m taking a silversmithing class from Fort Collins silversmith Chad Parker. Last night was the first of 5 sessions, and it was quite fun. I made two rings that don’t look terribly bad and started on a pendant for the next class. It was not difficult but the series of tasks and materials involved is sort of complex, and I like complexity. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using my Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop as my main business machine since I started my company. It’s pretty good, pretty fast, but I’m now planning to move one of my other desktops to my office and use it as my primary machine.

It’s a Dell, about 2 years old, but was purchased as a game machine so it’s still much faster than the laptop. However, it’s got an enormous old-style 19″ monitor. Huge. Looks like an old TV. I’ve been dreading carting that thing up the stairs.

Read the rest of this entry »

I use Google Analytics on my retail site and have been since about the end of September. This morning I noticed that the home page was verrrry slow to load (about 5-6 seconds on a cable modem), so I contacted Hostgator.

They checked it out and found that the server was not being flaky, but they noticed that they could see the Javascript call to the Analytics site in the status bar. I couldn’t see that myself, but I went online and found that there are a lot of comments about Analytics slowing down websites. Many of them seem to be because people put the Javascript code in the header rather than at the bottom of the page, but mine was already at the bottom, so that wasn’t it.
Read the rest of this entry »