Peggy's new hardware

I gotta say....I love my wife! Peggy did some work in Payson at the begining of this week and came home with a huge case of ammo for my AK-47 and a special gift just for herself. It's a S&W nickel-plated J-Frame Revolver in .38-Special caliber! She also had laser grips installed. Then she signed us both up for concealed carry permit training. Awesome wife!

Nice!


If you see this, just stop whatever you're doing. Right NOW!

And before you ask...no, I wasn't standing in front of the gun to take the picture. That's what timers are for.

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Daxton Boxes

I was going through my old email and found the link Angie sent me for her friend's blog. After reading an entry she made about missing her boy I couldn't keep from welling up. I'm almost full-on crying now as I write this post. Partially 'cuz I'm thinking how I'd feel if I lost a kid, and partly 'cuz I didn't go to the blog long before now. I clicked through to her post about the 'Daxton Boxes' she's creating and I've just sent an email asking where to send a donation. If you haven't already...please check it out;

http://dbkunz.blogspot.com/2008/11/daxton-box.html

I'm going to keep a link to it in my sidebar. Help if you can - it's a wonderful idea and a wonderful service by an obviously wonderful person!

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My New Rig

Our old computer tower was starting to get a little flakey, so back in February I decided I should work on a replacement. Peggy kindly agreed to let me build a new system for my anniversary gift and here's the result:

Full height tower with five 120mm fans (very quiet)
nVidia 680iLT SLI motherboard
Intel Q6700 Core 2 Quad processor at 2.6Ghz
Ultra modular 800-watt power supply
8Gb OCZ DDR2 SLI-Ready memory running at 1600MHz
Two Seagate 1.5 Terabyte Hard Drives
~ One with Windows Vista 64 Premium
~ One with Ubuntu Linux (Yay!)
LG Super-Multi DVD Burner with LightScribe
15-way flash memory reader

~ AND THE BEST PART....
Two BFG GTX280-OC graphics cards in SLI mode!


This monster is giving me video frame rates (in games) of up to 300 frames per second at max settings and 1680x1050 resolution! Even in very texture intensive scenes, I'm still seeing right around 200 fps. Can you say smooooooth?

I guess it's a good thing I built a new PC when I did. Just as I got Windows installed on the first hard drive, the drive in the old computer (with all our pics and data on it) crashed and wouldn't boot anymore. Luckily I was able to connect the crashed hard drive to the new computer and rescue all our data. I connected the drive externally and was able to move it around to a position where it would spin up. Even though it wouldn't boot, I managed to copy our data and settings off and incorporate them into the new computer! It took all day though, and the drive was making scary grinding and squeaking noises all along the way. Even luckier is that none of the data seems to be corrupted. Whew!

Zoom in to inspect all the yummy goodness packed inside!

Pretty lights!
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No Rules Pinewood Derby

For achievement day the girls had a no-rules pinewood derby. Charlotte chose a '66 Nova and I had just got done designing a '76 Corvette for Klara when she decided she wanted a box of popcorn. Both cars came out great and are loaded with lead shot! Unfortunately it wasn't enough lead. The winner had a 2" trailer hitch ball mounted to it! Klara won the Most Original Design category and Charlotte did pretty well in the races, but finally got beat out by cars several pounds heavier.

That's okay, we had a lot of fun making and painting the cars and then racing them. Enjoy the pics...

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