Irving Berlin's Piano

This is Irving Berlin's piano from the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The Museum of American History is temporarily closed while it is undergoing renovations so the Piano is at the National Air and Space Museum across the National Mall.

Irving Berlin wrote "God Bless America," "Puttin' on the Ritz," and "White Christmas" in case your aren't up on your composers ;). Supposedly he could only write compositions in F-Sharp Major (hard!) and D-Sharp minor (really hard!!). His assistant would then transpose the score to something that other people would be able to use. Yet another of those brilliant Russian Musicians. . .

Kill-a-watt, no seriously!

My family and I have this thing about electricity: we hate to use any more than possible. So when we found out that our local electric company had this thing called a watt-meter to find out how much energy appliances, computers, or anything that plugs in uses. Our electric now thinks we are crazy; once we tried the watt-meter we were hooked. We have borrowed it from them three or four times. It is great.

Enter Kill-A-Watt: A few weeks ago I was browsing a site and found a good deal for a Kill-A-Watt meter. "Great", I thought, "now we can meter things whenever we want." I was able to pick it up for $20 bucks shipped. I don't know why we didn't get one before then as little as it was. At any rate, we have been metering lots of things lately. My laptop uses very little to charge; my desktop monitor, a 19 in. CRT, uses a lot; and our new Bosch 500 series washing machine uses very little for a washing machine.

It is also great for testing electrical outlets: you can see the voltage, the amps, the watts, the Hz, the VA, and, of course, cumulative watt-usage. We put in some new outlets in our dining room and it was very handy to be able to tell if the breaker was off or if the outlet was working by simply plugging this little box into the outlet.

Another very detailed review is here. Here is the product page on the P3 Kill-A-Watt.

SAT scores tomorrow!

Tomorrow I find out the scores from my SAT test of the last month. I hope I do really well. I am hoping for 720 on math and 640 on critical reading; writing I don't care about as much ;). Those first two would give me a combined of 1360 which would be pretty good. College Board is sending my scores to four schools per my request and I can send to more later.

How do you like the neat screen shot? It was made very easily with Microsoft Vista's sniping tool, a built-in screen shot program. It is very handy and can save directly to jpg, gif, and png. Vista does have some nice features even though I crash about once a day. . .buggy drivers, me thinks!

Heap Big Snow!

We got a solid dose of snow here over the last 36 hours. About 6 inches fell, but it is not 6 in. hardly anywhere: 0.5 here, 24-36 there. We had three vehicles stuck in the snow within sight of our house. Two trucks and one SUV! So much for the mobility and power of a 4wd truck! Two of them didn't get out until this morning when the road commissioner came by with the grader and a snowplow. It is now suppose to get cold, high of 12 today and low of -1 tonight. I am glad we don't have the 10~ ft of upper NY!

The sun is shining now and it is very pretty!

Free Music Guide

Napster

Lately, I have been listening to loads of free music at fairly good quality. All courtesy of Napster, which has yet to get any money out of me. It is a program where you can listen to any full track up to 3 times. After that you can only listen to 30 secs of it. So far I haven't run out of things to listen to in Napster's vast collection. There are ads in abundance on the album pages and sometimes between tracks on the play window. It uses a Flash stream for the audio so you have to have Adobe Flash* (you can get it here if you don't have it). You can sign up for this here.

*Adobe Flash. . .something just sounds wrong about that. I don't know how long it will take for me to not think Macromedia Flash ;).

GYC 2006 Media

Hopevideo.com

For anyone that missed GYC2006 or wants to hear the main programs again take a look at HopeVideo.com media w/ GYC 2006. They always seem slow to get all the programs up but on the other hand they are all free so that is a big thumbs-up in their favor ;). Supposedly they are going to get some of the seminars up too. We'll have to see. . .

MS Home Server Beta testing signup

Blogs.technet.com

I signed up on the odd chance that I can test it. I would put it on the upstairs computer or if I have the new desktop done by then on it. You are suppose too have 300Gb of space on the computer. I will have to keep my eyes peeled for more hard drive deals at that rate. . .