Saturday, May 16, 2009

My exciting weekend takes off

books01 It’s Saturday morning at Books-A-Million and I have my 20 ounce coffee at hand.

I had my Mini 9 set up at another table, but had to move when I noticed the guy at a table directly behind me had a persistent books02productive cough and bad sinus drainage. I don’t like to think of  myself as paranoid about disease, but I’m smart enough to minimize my exposure when I notice it. So I gathered up my stuff and moved to another table on the other side of the cafe.

It rained overnight and there is more rain in the forecast all day, so whatever thoughts I might have had about motorcycling will have to wait until tomorrow. Likewise, no lawn mowing today.

Maria called about 9 a.m. (10 her time) to say she was on her way to Bainbridge to collect Austin and his stuff. Their to-do list includes closing out his checking account at the State Bank of Lizton – something like a $50 transaction, but still worth the time as long as they’re in Indiana.

I served up the last of the IAMS dog food this morning when I filled food bowls, so my to-do list includes picking up another 40 pound bag, probably at Sam’s Club.

I also did some Internet exploring this morning for ways to tweak the performance of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9. I have no complaints, but more memory is always better. I discovered I can double the RAM from 1GB to 2GB for about $28, so I whipped out the credit card and ordered a 2GB chip from Crucial Technology. Happily, the intelligent design of the Mini 9 makes a RAM swap an easy 5-minute job.

The SSD (solid state drive) that came with the Mini is 8GB and I have an 8GB SanDisk thumb drive plugged into one of the USB ports, so I don’t have a burning desire for more hard drive capacity. The last time I checked, SSDs were available in sizes up to 32GB. They can only get bigger and cheaper, so there’s no rush.

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