Ode to Jiffy

Any of you out there like Jiffy corn meal stuff? Man, it's bad for me, but it tastes awesome. My kids like it too. I had mentioned wanting some during Thanksgiving, and my Mom-in-law saw me swoon so hard she bought me a multi-pack box and put it in my Christmas stocking. After my kids rejected leftovers last night, I pulled out a box and made some "pancakes". Then I got some of this frikkin' molases stuff from Alabama that my brother-in-law brought. I had to heat it up to get it out of the bottle. Good thing I'm not generous with the syrup... I could have gone comatose...

So, obviously, to make up for these my misdoings last night, I had to hit the gym extra hard this morning. 1.5 miles... 18 minutes... no walking. Amy Peters' tip about "shagging" or whatever seems to have done me good. That, or I just didn't want to look weak infront of the two ladies on either side of me. My legs really hurt, but I think I could have gone longer. I'll wait for a weight skipping day to try and do a 30-minute run, or maybe a Saturday.

Our sitter is terrified of mice, and she came in through the garage this morning... I'm proud of her. I didn't see our friend this morning, but I took a tip from our sitter, who heard it from someone, that you should actually tie the bait to the trap, so the mouse can't just take the food without getting killed. I wonder how that little beastie didn't freeze to death. It has warmed up though, so I definitely need to get him killed and gone. Maybe I can just leave a box of Jiffy out for him, and he'll carry that out and leave... The traps I used with peanut butter didn't work too well, I think I set them too tight, afraid to snap my fingers. This morning, I didn't find any string, but I twistie-tied some bologna to the traps and set them hopefully, I come home to a dead mouse, or whatever that thing is. Yuck.

I did manage to wake up early and get a Windows Home Server set up. I had a 2.30 GHz Celeron Pentium 4 chip with 512 MB of RAM and 80 and 20 GB hard drives. I named it "SERVER". That installation took "hours". I didn't really believe it would, but it said it might. Good thing I had something else to work on... my workstation is dead. It's been flakey for the past few months, but it won't boot-up now. I need to confirm that most of the parts are working, but I think the motherboard is dead. I suppose it could be one of the chips, or both of them, but there's no real way to tell except doing the "remove and shuffle" game, and I didn't have time for that, so I made a "new" machine with the P4 2.8 GHz HT chip and installed the Windows 7 Beta, which prompted me for Activation, almost made me curse Microsoft and whip out a Linux CD. But, I've committed to trying WHS, might as well have some machine running Windows so that I can use the Connector software...

I had the machine "built" already, but I hadn't put in a video card. I used the onboard-video, and put in two tuner cards that I had pulled from the "Media Center" box. I had a bit of trouble, and had one of those "I wish i had just stuck with using Macs" moments. The tuner cards were detected, but couldn't be installed, according to the device manager. Windows Media Center didn't like the onboard graphics that I was unwilling to allocate 64 MB of video for, and the Xbox 360 wasn't doing a good job as a WMC "frontend". Jeez, all this stuff worked before when I tested it briefly in a different configuration, of course.

I got everything up and running. In this case, it meant putting the two tuner cards back in the media center, and adding a "real" video card, and pulled the two 250 GB drives out of my workstation to copy my videos, music, and pictures and various downloads to my temporary workstation. I started copying the Videos to the Home Server shared "Videos" folder, and set the WHS sharing so that the Xbox 360 could stream. I had to leave the copy running, because it was time to go, but I did start "Ratatouille" on the Xbox 360, streaming from the home server, before we left.

That is the power of Jiffy. Wake up early, make computer stuff happen, go to the gym, hit your goals, and then blog about it. Awesome.