After five years I bid qcom adieu to take on a new challenge in the startup world. This meant cleaning the cobwebs out of the study and setting up a proper work environment.


(Not shown: working).

Not one to ordinarily subject myself to Black Friday, I ventured out and found a couple 27" LG displays. Fry's wasn't a total zoo, but with some effort I managed to still have a bad time. In addition to the monitors I picked up a mis-stocked dvi-hdmi cable that I realized, upon exit, went for $23. I could not let that one go, on principle, and unfortunately the return area was mysteriously unstaffed for a solid 20-30 minutes. I think my sitting down in the line might have precipitated action.

I want to say I did a decent job of offsetting the purchase to be Black Friday-negative - the very same day I got rid of cable. Why?

• My man cave is now better set up for streaming (see above).
• My cable (+ internet) bill slowly rose from $120/month at Morelos to $180. Yowsa.
• The dvr boxes are complete garbage. Bad ui, terrible latency, corrupted recordings.
• Standalone HBO in 2015. C'mon other channels, particularly NBC sports.
• TWC service- actually, strike that. Granted I have had very limited contact with them in eight years, other than some long lines at the Miramar branch it hasn't been too bad. Cancelling was fairly painless.

Another item I needed to retrofit the study was a new sound card; tunes are necessary and I already had the amp and speaker hardware. A Soundblaster Z was featured on an Amazon holiday deal so I had that delivered. Unfortunately, I then learned Creative only supplied drivers for win7+.

Yeah, that's right, I was still on xp. Don't judge me. It was stable. And getting at system settings wasn't a total pain.

After manually installing the driver inf didn't work, I decided to upgrade OS (for a sound card, I know, right?). A short experience with win8 convinced my to stick with 7, so I had my dear brother send me a spare install cd and key.

Ted never figured me for a luddite, so he sent me the 64 bit install cd. Oh well, finding the 32 bit iso wasn't so hard and the key is isa-agnostic. Of course this meant I needed to get a usb dvd burner since my new work laptop was, like my desktop, dvd free. Oh well, they're cheap now and never bad to have around.

Installing win7 was fairly painless and everything was going smoothly except for driverless nonfunctional wifi card. No big deal, I just used my work laptop to find the drivers... except there were none.

Poor website design? User error? I gave live tech support chat a try. It wasn't too bad, except that it turns out Linksys put GPL code in their drivers and can no longer provide them.

Bah. I have a sound card that doesn't have xp drivers and a wifi card that doesn't have win7 drivers. Sound card wins. Linksys loses, if you can't be responsible enough to keep your code clean, at least rewrite it. I'm on good old fashioned ethernet for now, maybe I'll go with Belkin in the future.


I hit up the fam for Christmas week. Auntie Kathy had a sweet cabin out at a blustery Dillon Beach, Dave and Marcia hosted Christmukkah, Amber pulled me an espresso and introduced me to Handsome Jack, there was volleyball, my grandma poured me a Michelob Ultra, Jon and I prevailed at Axis and Allies (Anniversary Edition), and the Starks (Jon) and Lannisters (Mark) ganged up on the Greyjoys (me).



Back in SD, the 4000'+ regions got a bit of snow recently. Since things are supposed to warm up soon I took the dog out east to tromp through the icy goodness.


While I had to have been the only person without a hangover this morning, I wasn't the only one with that idea. By noon 8-east was randomly slow in places, and particularly near the Julian-bound exits.

Expecting 79 to be horrible, made for Sunrise Highway where northbound traffic was at a dead standstill by turn 2. So I came back and made for the Corral Canyon area. Kaf and I got a good hike in before heading back to see the eastbound traffic getting worse and worse. Joke's on all of us, we all should have just gone to Connie's place.

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