New TV Stand

Ok....if you have been to my house in the last few months, you have probably noticed the ice chest that held my TV. I have been given grief about it from time to time with good reason. I have been looking under Craigslist and on-line. I finally decided to use my Christmas gift cards to finally buy one that I can be proud of.

This TV stand I bought from Best Buy. It was kinda expense but well designed and uses nice materials (solid wood). It also has a TV high mount that allows the TV to swivel. The nice part of this swivel is that the pivot point is protruded out far enough to prevent the edge of my TV from hitting the wall.

Here is the link if you want to read more about it.

Lucky me, MRI

I'm at Loveless hospital for an MRI For the first time in a long time I was able to play tennis with no pain. I played my chiropractor yesterday. This game was a rematch from when he beat me but when my back was at it's worst. Final score was 6-2,6-1,6-1 mine :-D.

OK. Finished with my MRI, and have to say I almost flipped out when I was in that machine. I guess I never realized just how clostophobic I really am. It took about 30 min to complete all the tests. The machine is very loud, but they give you ear plugs to use. It sounded like a video game. I can't describe what it looked like inside, as I kept my eyes closed trying to get myself to stay calm...didn't work too good, I was breathing very fast.

Lucky me, MRI

I'm at Loveless hospital for an MRI For the first time in a long time I was able to play tennis with no pain. I played my chiropractor yesterday. This game was a rematch from when he beat me but when my back was at it's worst. Final score was 6-2,6-1,6-1 mine :-D.

I'm at Loveless hospital waiting to get an MRI done. This is due to the problems I have been having with my lower back. Actually, my back has been feeling much better lately, but my doctor thinks this would be good to have in case it starts hurting again.

OK. Finished with my MRI, and have to say I almost flipped out when I was in that machine. I guess I never realized just how clostophobic I really am. It took about 30 min to complete all the tests. The machine is very loud, but they give you ear plugs to use. It sounded like a video game. I can't describe what it looked like inside, as I kept my eyes closed trying to get myself to stay calm...didn't work too good, I was breathing very fast.

Thanksgiving 2008

No longer in Houston, Tx. Orion had waves of reductions so I had to move back to Albuquerque, NM to work on other programs in Honeywell Inc.

Today I'm at my parent's newly built house spending my vacation/holiday here to eat lots of turkey.

I brought my HP dv9207 and gave this to my parents. They really wanted to use a computer while sitting in the living room....hmmm...this is a nice laptop...I hope they don't drop and break it anytime soon. My mom, niece, nephew and myself went to Best Buy yesterday to find a wireless router. My parents have...broadband? Thy have a directional antenna on top of their roof and get less than 1Mb download speed. We got the Linksys WRT54g2 router. They don't have N network cards, and I figured all they want was to just browse wireless.

When hooking up the router, I first changed the router name, SSId, password and tried to get on-line. The laptop got an internal ip number, but it was not able to ping an outside url. damn! We went to a hockey game, so I had to put this project on hold till then. The entire trip to the rink and back, all I could think about was the wi-fi issue.

We got back in the house and I reset the router back to factory settings. Still no outside connection. I then thought that maybe the Internet service provider might be using the original computer's mac number as a verification. So, I cloned the mac address on the router. BOOYAA! It worked. I turned on WPA2/TKIP security. Changed the SSID and admin password. There is a new firmware for this router, but I figured this is good enough for now.

I'm staying here for another day and will be back to Albuquerque, NM on Saturday. Not much to do out here; I ended up washing and waxing both my parents cars. OMG, they were dirty.

I'm way too stuffed to continue....so keep blogging.

Thanksgiving

No longer in Houston, Tx. Orion had waves of reductions so I had to move back to Albuquerque, NM to work on other programs in Honeywell Inc.

Moved to Houston

I'm a little late in posting this, but I just moved from Albuquerque, NM to humid Houston, TX. This move was with my job at Honeywell. I applied to work for the new Orion NASA project. Houston is one of many locations Honeywell is working the Orion project. I was assigned to work with the System Management group; more precisely the Command Sequence Automation group in System Management.

The transfer was a last minute move. I was notified officially around March 14, 2008 and started work on March 24, 2008. I had a house full of stuff that had to be packed and delivered. I decided to drive my truck with my motorcycle in the bed. That is 1100 miles! I had the pleasure of seeing my aunt and uncle on the way, which gave me a chance to say "bye" also. I tried to get clothing from NMSU, but the campus was closed up.

The weather is muggy and seems to rain every other day. My motorcycle seems to have 30+ more horsepower now that I'm closer to sea level. Not sure why, but my motorycle's battery seems to need to be replaced now. Oh, and the chain rusted out in about 2 days in H town.

One thing I love about this city is the abundance of things to do. Great parks, disc golf courses (Jack Brooks park is awsome), museums, etc.

I'll try to post pictures up soon.

Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

Drove to Las Vegas on January 5th 2008. Arrived late that night. Played some black jack and found a place to sleep (Terrible's Casino). Sunday morning I went to the Las Vegas Hilton to get my access badge. Most of the people on Sunday were vendors and most of them were of Asian descent.

I had plans to play some disc golf at some of the courses in the area, but weather kept me from going out. I played lots of black jack and was doing really well. I then decided to play some poker at the Venetian, and lost my buy in.

Sunday evening I had a ticket to the Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian. OMG, it was awesome. It just so happened that Bill Gates gave his last key notes speech during the opera.

The CES was HUGE! Lots of people and lots of vendors. Some with small booths and others that must have spent a fortune setting up their section. OLED tvs were really nice. Very bright and only a few millimeters thick. HD-DVD and Blueray were something else I was very interested in. There was a section for car audio/electronics, and lots of beautiful women/models there to take pictures with.

If you are not familiar with CES (actually this was my first show), it is free to just about anyone. Yes, you are supposed to be in the field but I believe anyone who registers could figure out how to get qualified for the badge.

I'll have to sign up for next year soon. The only thing I would do differently is probably, have someone else to share the drive and gas cost. I'm very glad I decided to drive, since this allowed me to visit more of Vegas than if I took a flight in.

(world's largest plasma tv, 150")














(Savage and myself :-) )















(Bumble Bee)


















(R2D2 HD projector with Melinium Falcon controller)