Life is good in DaHo...

This weekend had a lot of good stuff happen. A lot of little ankle-biters got resolved - and resolved in a good way...

Storm and family came over on Saturday. While he was here, I got him to help me fix the newly installed Radon crawlspace fan noise problem. I was never able to find the breaker that controlled the electrical circuit for the fan and didn't want to go down there, under the house, and play with hot wires without having someone else there in case that some bad thing happened. Anyway, we went down there and I installed a new X-10 remote switch on it, so now I can turn it off and on from inside the house at will. I am going to set it up in the Active Home X-1o software so it will automatically turn on during the days and off at night so we can sleep without having the hear the noise. In the process of installing the switch, I tripped the breaker and Storm tracked it down, so I now know the breaker also, which will make any further messing with it a lot easier.

The sound 'glitch' on the main living room PC/TV computer has been driving me crazy. Every few minutes, it will cut off all sound for a second or two. At any type of loud listening levels, that is quite irritating. I have spend many hours trying to replace and reload drivers and track the problem down, and since the motherboard in that PC is older, upgrading it would have been very expensive as it would have entailed changing the memory, CPU and lots of other stuff. So, I happened to see this little 'gizmo' called the Audio Advantage Micro, by Turtle Beach. It looks like a little USB thumb drive, but you can either plug in headphones or an optical digital adapter and use it to feed a Dolby Surround Receiver, which is what I wanted to do. And, it was only $25. I got it and got it going, and so far, it is working wonderfully - there are no sound problems at all - Hooray, Hooray!! And, since it is a USB device, I still have the only available PCI slot left to put in a gigabit Network card so I can upgrade the network to the much faster gigabit speeds that we need to move all the recorded TV shows to and from the Home Server storage. If this all holds up, all the technical 'issues' will be resolved this week and all is good with the new Media Center Extender and Commercial Skip additions - which are both wonderful. It is soooo nice to watch TV and have all the commercials go away...

I went fishing again and again didn't get any bites. But, it is still early, read cold, and they will come around. I did get one of my lines caught in the rocks and ended up breaking off a large part of it. In the past, I would have had to replace all the line on the reel spool as it needs to be pretty full to be able to cast properly. With this new hollow fishing line I am now using. I can splice a new section onto the end of the existing line and its as good as new again. There are no knots or glue involved and you can hardly see, or feel, the splice in the line and it 100% as strong as before. These fishing lines are expensive and this will save a lot of money over time. Enough line to fill up one reel spool can cost $50 and you only usually use the top 1/3 of it at all, but need it all in case you need it with a large fish...

Pam and I are both checking out the Oprah "A New Earth" book/class. Its quite interesting and so far is good stuff, incorporating a lot of the Eastern and most other thought concepts into it. I read it while fishing and all is good...

My pool game is still marginally OK. I need to practice more and think about it less - but that has always been the case. Its just like those folks that are afflicted with the disease of golf...

The weather is getting warmer and warmer. Its been in the high 40s and even mid 50ies the last few days. It will be time to take the studded snow tires off of the Lincoln real soon now here in DaHo...