durbn.net

Can you play and RPG and save money at the same time? Yes. Now you can with BankQuest: A Tale of Savings!

From the blog article:
In August, toymaker Takara Tomy is releasing this ultimate piggy bank for gamer geeks. It's called BankQuest: A Tale of Savings, and it's a dungeon-shaped vault with a LCD screen that turns your penny-saving experience into the ultimate role-playing game. Every time you feed it a coin, the screen will update you on how much you've saved and tell you what weapons you can buy with that money. The more you save, the bigger weapons you can buy, and the closer you get to successfully beating the Money Monster.
The RPG piggy bank will retail at about $40.

Wow. If you're like me and never purge your inbox or sent mail folders perusing through them is a trip down memory lane. Go ahead, sort by date and start at the earliest one. It's amazing remembering all these things. My sent items go back to 2004 and my inbox goes back to 2003. Heh.

Peace, Love, and Happiness,
Mike

My wife has an old iBook G3 800mhz laptop that hadn't been used in years because the power adapter was missing. So I spent a couple bucks on ebay and bought a generic apple-compatible one for cheap. I powered it up and had to endure the horrible apple 'ping' and logo while it booted into an operating system designed by and for pre-schoolers. I still don't understand what the pull is to apple. The hardware is nice and nice looking as long as you ignore the glaring usability issue of a one-freakin-button mouse. The software on the other hand, while based off of the pure raw beauty (and security) of the Mach BSD kernel, falls all the way short when you get to the gui.

I had an unused cheapo Belkin wireless USB adapter lying around that I thought would be a nice addition to the iBook. Unfortunately it was not supported by MacOS. At least not natively. There were drivers for MacOS 10.3 and up but not for the 10.2.8 that I had. Bah. I decided to shelf it until I got linux up and running.

After trying to teach MacOS how to play nicely with standard file sharing protocols I managed to back up all the data. Even their valiant attempts to make things simpler failed as I started to find files strewn all over the place. I suppose that can be added up to user ignorance though.

I had my freshly burned copy of Debian 'Lenny' Testing ready to go as soon as the last file was copied safely to my Linux file server. Of course before I could boot off a cd I had to look up how to actually boot off a cd under a mac. Not quite as intuitive as you think. They say you just have to hold 'C' but I ended up holding Shift + Ctrl + Option + Delete until it worked. Silly boot process.

My wife had a bad cough today where she was coughing every minute or so. Not being able to take traditional medicine on account of the breastfeeding we turned to the internets for natural remedies. Lo and behold we Google pointed us to: http://www.pitt.edu/~cjm6/sp99cough.html. This web page may have been designed in 1992 and the remedy taken from a book from 1982 but it works! I've seen it firsthand. It literally cured her coughing within 5 seconds. Since taking the stuff she's only coughed lightly once in the last hour, not every minute like before. Of course, looking at the ingredients, this stuff makes your mouth burn up. Try having a glass of milk or bread handy just in case. But remember, the milk may neutralize the acidic components, so if you can, try and wait.

• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons water

Mix and take by the teaspoon. Try 3 teaspoons for starters.

This was recommended by a nurse and if you follow the link above it breaks down the active components and lists what does what.

Buckley's and Robitussin beware, this may be your demise.

I've got a bunch of photos up at http://gallery.durbn.net. Go check them out for up to date pics of our lovely little girl.

I want to introduce everyone to our wonderful and beautiful baby girl, Nadia Raya Kornelson. Born on April 8, 2008 and weighing in at 9lbs and 1 ounce.