The Buhner.com Blog

Yes, I’m back.  Again.

It’s funny how blogs can die and come back again, in that it’s not just me.  I know it isn’t - countless others have posted these type of “I’ve neglected you before, but I’m going to start posting again!” posts in their blogs, only to pump out material for a few weeks (at best) then fall off the wagon again.

My reasoning is a bit different.

See, in my house we have three computers available to us.  The first - “Lisa” - is the newest baby in the bunch.  It’s a higher-end Dell Dimension E521 with 2 gigs of RAM, 256 meg video card, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Dual-Core Processor, and a nice wide screen 20 inch flat-panel monitor.  It’s my wife’s machine, and has the bells and whistles because she does design for web and print (www.babysunshine.net) and needs the added boost to be running stuff like Photoshop without bogging down the whole machine.  It replaced “Marge” - a Dimension 4550 with a 2.4 Gig P4 that we eventually maxed out with a gig of RAM.  Still a quality machine (especially considering the fact that it’s nearly 5 years old), but not really good enough for what she needed to use it for.

Marge sits as a server of sorts for us now, housing the 120 gig extra hard drive we put in it years earlier (carried over from “Flanders”, my original PIII 500Mhz Dell that I got for college back in ‘99 that still sits in my garage that was meant to be a hand-me-down to my aunt) and nothing else.  It still has programs installed on it until the wife gets whatever she needs off of it so I can wipe the original hard drive clean and reinstall Windows on it.  There’s nothing really wrong with it and would work fine on its own for Internet and email stuff, but it’s got too much on it right now to really be used for anything but a server, and using it would just tax the processor that’s trying to handle being a server anyway.  So it sits alongside of Lisa, complete with its own monitor, mouse, and keyboard, looking longingly at the machine that took its place.

I used to have my own tower - “Homer” - a lower end Dimension 2400 desktop with a 2.4 Gig Celeron that did what I needed it to do, since I wasn’t really in much need of processing power.  Homer retired Flanders, which was needed.  Homer was picked up in the beginning of January 2004, when we had the business in full swing and could write it off.  While the cheeky little Celeron wasn’t that big of a deal, especially considering it wasn’t as powerful as Marge despite being nearly two years older, it was a major step up from a PIII.  Homer was put in my closet in Bridgehampton where I would occasionally spend time, making that closet my “office”.  But this move would only be temporary, because we got another new addition named “Cole”.

Cole, which was acquired in May of 2004, isn’t a computer - he’s a human being.  My firstborn son, being a firstborn son, required a great deal of time, and he was none too fond of being in that closet that doubled as my computer room.  So there was a minimal amount of time that I spent using Homer until a solution could be had.  Enter “Maggie”.

Maggie is pretty much my lifeline, a Dell Inspiron 1150 that was originally acquired to be “our” laptop, but pretty much became mine.  See, Tara’s work (with the plotter, etc) kind of needs to be at a desk, whereas I’m usually just getting email or checking on our servers.  So Maggie became mine, with me tucking it under my arm and using our wireless network to do whatever I needed to do in whatever room Cole happened to be in.  Maggie took her share of abuse, from Cole ripping off keys to it being pushed off the couch a few hundred times.  In the almost three years that I’ve had Maggie, I’ve replaced a motherboard, three keyboards, a power supply, strapped two cooling devices to her (since Dell’s fans arecrap in the 1150 and will cause the machine to overheat and shut down), and broken her monitor enough so that the screen barely stays open during normal use.

Which brings me to the original reason I started this post.  While the laptop allows for computer use quickly and wherever I happen to be, a (now) three year old and added one year old do not allow for any extended time at the machine.  It could be 3 minutes here, 10 minutes there, but never really any extended time as some yell comes from another room, usually a toy being taken from someone or a one year old backing into the wall or something.  Writing, especially for me, needs to be done all at one time, or else I get completely out of the rhythm and the post can end up going all over the place, or if enough time passes the post becomes outdated or just uninteresting to me because I want to write about this new fresh thing in my mind.

Case in point - as I go to post this now, there are 10 unfinished posts sitting in my drafts (not including the placeholder I made for this one.)  I don’t have the heart to get rid of any of them - they took work and time - but I doubt I’ll finish any of them.  I’ll probably dedicate a section of my blog to the “post graveyard”, but that’s it for them.

That being said, it would be futile to attempt to post in my blog during this recent period when I was out of work.  I was with the kids almost the entire time, and when they eventually went to sleep, it was the hour or two I used to catch up with my wife and have calm time.  By the time that was over, I was either being guilted to come to bed (understandibly so) or it was pushing midnight, and by then I’ve got an hour or so to do whatever I need/want to do, and sorry to the handful of folks who might of read this thing, but the blog isn’t that high on that list.

But I’m working again, a good job, and all seems to be well.  Hell, they put my name on my cube already - a nice confidence boost.  And as long as things stay relatively calm here, I’ll be able to write again.

Which is good, because I still have a lot to talk about.