Long time no blog....

Wow, it seems like forever since I've blogged. Maybe I can get Melissa to kind of pick up my slack on this sometime. Anyways, what a weekend (or month or two). I had a lady approach me about moving a VHS over to DVD. I used to have an ATI All-in-Wonder card and could do it no problem. Since then I've upgraded to a different video card and had lost the AIW capabilities. Not wanting to turn this lady away I said of course I could do that. So I got her VHS tape and then took the next weekend and ran to Circuit City in St. Louis. I stumbled across an ATI TV Wonder Pro on the clearance rack for $58. Lucky for me, tax returns are in. The card triggered a domino effect of upgrades for my computer. I then added another gig of ram (bringing my total to 2GB), a 200GB SATA hard drive, an internal sound card (instead of the onboard that I had) and a faster dual layer DVD burner. All of this to make $15 converting a tape over to DVD. I picked $15 because Wal-Mart does it for $20. I'm sure I'll have the ability to recoup some of my costs from this by doing this for others. It also gives me the ability to transfer my wedding over to DVD.

Speaking of computer upgrades; the girls computer crashed a few weeks ago. I spent a few days digging through my "graveyard" of computers downstairs. I even went to a friend of mines and dug through his basement. I found nothing worth using. So, for the past few weeks, we've been using a borrowed laptop for Melissa to do her Master's work on and for the girls to play games on. Because it was borrowed I didn't want to load too many programs on it. This limited the girls to online games only. Well, Saturday, my wife decides that it's time to look for a computer for the "girls" to use. I had been thinking this for a while but I'm the "free-spending" one and didn't want to bring it up and start that discussion again. I took her bringing it up as a sign that it was time to look at another machine. The day started out with my mindset being, "Let's get Chris a new machine and pass down the old one to the kids." With that mindset, I skipped over a lot of machines that were fine but didn't meet my obscure list of "must-haves" for a system. By the end of the day, God had worked on my selfish side and my mindset had changed. We ended up going back to Staples and getting the first machine of the day. Moral of the Story - get your attitude right before setting out, it'll make for a shorter, more productive day. So now, I'm happy to say, we're the owners of a new HP Pavilion with LightScribe. I'm also happy to say that now, my computer is just that; mine. Not that I'm possessive, but I hate to wait in line to check my email.