I just received my two newest cubes. All the way from Greece! Rubik never made anything bigger than their 5×5 “Professor’s” cube, and some claimed that anything bigger would be impossible or highly impractical to manufacture. V-Cubes has proven them wrong, and I now have their 6×6 and 7×7 cubes. So my collection now includes:

• V-Cube 7×7
• V-Cube 6×6
• Rubik’s 5×5
• Rubik’s Revenge 4×4
• Rubik’s (standard) 3×3 of course
• Rubik’s Mini 2×2
• Even a 1×1, as a joke (a die with the same colored stickers as a Rubik’s cube)

Also, I am a loyal fan of CubeSmith’s replacement stickers and tiles. They are so much higher quality than the “stock” stickers; all of my cubes have CubeSmith tiles (much more durable than normal stickers).

It turns out that solving a 6×6 is roughly the same as solving the 4×4. The 7×7, while needing a lot more steps than the 5×5, doesn’t appear to be much harder either. I don’t think I’ll ever be one of those “Speed Cubers” but I enjoy the challenge.

I find it’s a lot easier to come up with a 140-character update (that’s the size limit of Tweets) more often than it is to write witty, articulate, full-on blog posts. So watch the Twitter box on the right, or better yet, get on Twitter and follow me.

By the way, the 5D was injured during the last wedding. I was holding it with the hand strap, and the XTi was hanging on my side with the longer lens. Somehow, the two bumped ever-so-lightly, but it was enough to put a fairly bad scuff in the center of the screen. It will soon be repaired, though. The replacement plastic screen is on its way from Canon (cheap and easy to install) and I also have another protector that will go on top of the screen that’s actual glass. I’m not sure why Canon doesn’t put iPhone-quality glass on their screens. I’ve never once had the slightest scratch on my iPhone, and I put it through much more torture than the 5D. At least Nikon puts a replaceable cover on their camera screens.

It’s a nice 3br/2ba duplex on the corner, right across from the Y, and it has a covered car port. I looked for places with a garage, but they all were either too expensive or way far away. As you can see above, the living/dining room is quite spacious, so I’ll have to experiment with furniture layout.

The kitchen seems to be in good condition. (relatively new dishwasher & fridge, older stove/oven)

Decent back patio – a little small, but I wasn’t looking for much there.

All the bathrooms have obnoxious wallpaper, but I ran across an idea to counter that, in the event they won’t let me change it.

I think it will be a nice place to live. Better than my current apartment, although I was happy enough with it – just time for a change and a bit of an upgrade.

Note: I’m compiling a list on Google Notebook of possible things I’ll get for the new place.

It’s a little hard to grasp that I’ve seen 10,000 days and nights and have been breathing for (roughly) 14,400,173 minutes. It’s so easy to abstract our lives into months, years, and decades and lose the sheer scale of it all. I’ve been through a lot in my first myriad, though not as much as I would have expected. I’m sure my next myriad (which ends on Feb. 6, 2035) will be much more interesting.

I didn’t plan any kind of clever celebration for my D10K, but I am enjoying the gift that Steve got me. A few possible D10K ideas:

• 10,000 red hots, M&Ms, Jelly-bellies, etc.
• 10,000-candle cake (probably a fire hazard)
• 10,000-bubble sheet of bubble wrap (that doesn’t sound half bad, actually)
• 10,000 pennies (55 lbs for $100)
• Any other ideas?

It’s been quite a while since my last post on here. I’ll try to post more.

It handles much better now, doesn’t threaten to slip on acceleration, and the road noise is drastically reduced. I’m very impressed – well worth the week and a half wait for the tires to get to the Waco Discount Tire store. The tires are pretty scarce around the country, so they had to call in some favors from other stores. The front tires (225/45) came from California and the backs (wider 245/45) came (late) from Fort Worth.

It was a very unique experience. The course the ship took was on the boundary between vast wilderness and vast ocean. The only other boats were fishing boats and other cruise ships, and ships visiting the tourist towns add a few extra digits to the town populations. Many places simply would not exist if cruise ships didn’t stop there. Days were around 18 hours long, and the rest was dim twilight. All of these things were very foreign to me. The world is such a big place – and yet such a small place at the same time. It took a total of about 4 hours on an airplane to reach Vancouver. A hundred years ago, 4 hours was barely enough time to make it across the average county. The world moves so much faster now – almost too fast if you ask me. It’s good to take time off and admire creation.

Thanks, Mom & Dad for a great trip!

Well, I wasn’t planning on upgrading my system quite yet, but I lost all trust in my previous motherboard. It was probably damaged somehow by heat. So above you can see the basic specs that Ubuntu Linux sees. Once I assembled the hardware parts, the system booted up just fine, and apart from a minor tweak (The video card address changed in the move to the new system.) everything started up perfectly without any hassle.

Needless to say, everything is noticeably zippier. Linux loves to eat memory for breakfast, but so far it can’t stomach all of the new memory. Linux (Ubuntu at least) is getting very close to the “stuff just works” phase of an operating system that Mac and Windows have been at for some time. For so many years, I’ve had to struggle to get the simplest things to work – recompiling code, installing thousands of library packages by hand, etc. And to be fair, once things worked, they were reliable. Nowadays, I can install Ubuntu on a new system and everything works – sound, video, network, dvd – without having to do as much “geeking” as before.

Oh, and the new system is crazy quiet. Seriously, it’s borderline absurd. I hear the water pump going, and the radiator fan (the only fan in the whole system) in the back, but the case lid is still open. My other machine was a gas-powered leaf blower by comparison.

There were some issues getting the water-cooling kit setup in the new system, but that was the only tough part. Time to get some rest after a hard-fought battle.

Incidentally, I’m really enjoying my Canon SD1000. Canon has similar models with image stabilization, but I wanted a Canon point & shoot that was as thin as possible. I’ve already demonstrated that I have a fairly steady hand, so I don’t miss the stabilization. The SD1000 has quite a decent sensor, and the firmware is zippy – faster than my S200 that now belongs to my sister. I’ve gone so long without a small everyday camera that I forgot how nice it is to have something I can carry everywhere. The XTi with the big honking (“honking” is the technical term) lenses doesn’t exactly fit in a pocket.