Kevin Minnis

Well, I decided to try this whole tag thing out for managing bookmarks/favorites. I got my account going at del.icio.us/kminnis and managed to get my favorites exported from Sitebar and imported into del.icio.us using a cool little .Net application called Bunny Hug Updater. I think one of the main reasons I chose to do it was to share some of the links that I’ve accumulated over the years and it’s something different to try out. I think I’ll still keep my links in sitebar for a time to see how it goes. But I think it’s kind of cool to be able to share the same link between multiple key words/tags.

On to other news…this last weekend Kim, Jayden, Kim’s Mom and Niece and I traveled to the Omaha Zoo. We had a good time and Jayden also enjoyed it a lot too. He loved to watch the fish and sharks go overhead at the aquarium, but, he had to be close to Grandma’s side.

Jayden’s been showing some more signs of his increased knowledge of what’s going on around him. He’s started to give waves to people. If he’s done eating or doesn’t like something he’s started to conveniently drop his food on the floor. :/ He’s also starting to like water more as Kim’s been up with him this week in Ames at Camp. Today he didn’t mind at all being in the pool. This next week he’ll be helping Kim get ready for his big one year birthday party on Saturday so that’ll keep things hop’n next week.

Check out his pictures in his 11 month gallery.

OK. Finally, I’m updating my blog and the design. I decided to give WordPress a try. It’s pretty cool so far, but I haven’t gotten the gallery to fit into the whole theme just yet. The gallery and web cam are now links under the pages structure. More will come later as I figure more things out. Hopefully the Google robots will find my site friendly and provide some better search results that actually point to links.

To give you an update on Jayden. He’s now 7+ months old and is getting more “grown” up everyday. He’s sitting up in shopping carts by himself and has graduated to a bigger car seat. He likes to play in water and likes to wear his shades outside. Pictures of Jayen at 7 months. He also likes to visit the farm and see the baby calves. While we were up at the farm this last weekend we also celebrated my Grandfather’s 80th birthday. It was pretty cool. My Grandmother had kept some items that my Great Grandmother had kept for my Grandpa. One of those items was a speach that he had written for school and then his first baby tooth. Kind of neat to be able to hang on to something like that for 80 years.

Kim’s doing great now that she gets to go outside and play with Jayden. She’s looking forward to working for Campfire USA for about 2 weeks here in the Spring.

Well, it happened. My computer that I built around January 31, 2002 had a massive overheating of the VIA VT8366A system bus controller, or northbridge. The motherboard manual states that, “…it houses the high-speed system elements critical to overall system performance while also containing the system interface to the processor. The key functions…include the 266 MHz Athlon System Bus, the 266 MHz DDR Memory Subsystem, the AGP 4x/2x/1x modes Graphics Interface (AGP 2.0 Compliant) and the 33 MHz/32-bit PCI Bus Interface.” The main cause of overheating was a stupid $3 fan quit turning. The first signs of it heading down hill was the video went blank and then came back on. I got a new fan for it, but it did little to help as the system finally quit working all together. The BIOS screen didn’t even display anything. The trouble of it is, if I even wanted to attempt to salvage the computer, I’d have to go to EBay and wait 3 days to even win a bid on a new motherboard.

So, today I ordered our first Dell. I decided to try the Dell Outlet or Refurbished route as they’re cheap. The price of computers these days is so cheap it’s hardly worth spending a ton of money on stuff that’s outdated the minute it leaves the factory. I never thought I’d be buying a pre-built system. Every computer that I’ve owned, except my first one, has been one that I’ve built. My first one was a 33 MHz 16 MB or ram Gateway 2000 (yes, that was before they changed their name to just Gateway). The “new” one is a Dimension 2400, 2.4 MHz with 256 MB of ram and cost $159 plus the rip off shipping of $99. I think my first computer was around $2,500. Luckily, I had my old 233 MHz PC that has FreeBSD installed on it up and running so that Kim could at least surf a little bit while at home. It’s amazing how much our society relies on computers to get ordinary day-to-day activities accomplished.

Well, I decided to give my site a face lift. Bear with me as I work out the bugs. The gallery shows some weird formatting, but I couldn’t wait any longer to release it. Hopefully you like it…I don’t care if you don’t like it.

Well, the guys at work and I were talking about Google’s page ranking and how to get it higher. We also were talking about how some pages don’t seem to be showing up in the Google search results. So, we’re all going to try this on our sites (Derek Brooks and Nick Leeper) and see what happens. Here’s a link to a Krausburger. It’s really just a fictitious name of a burger named after one of our co-workers Kraus (who we’re sad to see leaving Pioneer). Now all that’s left is for Google to index our sites.