Hey there! Got a new computer! It’s an HP multimedia type computer, lightning fast, has a DVD burner, etc. I also got a new printer. All my previous equipment was 4yrs old. Oh, and it came with a new 19inch flat panel monitor. Wowza! This thing is as big as my first television (the one Kim and I used from our first year of marriage until 2004).

So I spent the past several hours figuring out how to use Nero Ultra 7. I have taken the first of 16 VHS-C camcorder cassettes and have converted it to DVD format. I plan on doing so with all of our camcorder footage from the past 9 years. Then I took one of our favorite cassette tapes and converted it to CD format and burned it. Wow, that took a lot! I had to record the entire tape on computer as a .wav file, then edit it into tracks, remove the static and noise (popping and crackling), then convert the files to some other type of format, then burn them onto a CD (the whole 30min CD was 367MB at this point). Then I ripped the CD files into Windows Media Player format, which made the whole CD of music 39MB. But I did it, which means that all the cassette tapes that we have, that are not available in CD format, are now safe from destruction. We have a few tapes made by the college groups from our Bible college, and they aren’t on CD. Now they will be ;-). If I could figure out who all the people were that were on the tapes, I might make copies of this CD and send it to them. Hmmm. copyright infringement? Who knows.

Anyway. I like the new computer, and the kids like my old one. Since they got my old 17″ flat screen monitor, we could get rid of their old monitor. This was the first computer monitor I ever owned. It was the original monitor that we bought with our first computer in 1996. The tube was going bad, and it was hard to see things (was getting dark).

One other thing that I did today….I got tired of my WLAN setup, so I changed it. Let me explain. My house has a “great room” (with a cathedral ceiling) on the first floor, a staircase leading up to the 2nd floor, and a loft that overlooks the great room (with a ledge). When the cable guy came to set up my cable TV and internet, he used the cable outlet in the “great room” for the cable box, and the cable outlet in the loft for the cable modem, telling me to just hook up my wireless router to my cable modem, and then use the wireless receiver on my computer to receive my wireless internet signal.

This arrangement worked. Poorly. For one thing, my computer sits in a solid oak desk, which makes for cruddy wireless reception. As I set up my new computer today, I thought to myself…why is it that my computer, which I use for the internet every day, doesn’t have a dedicated internet connection? Why does my children’s computer have one, when they don’t need one? So I called El Cable Compagne! I asked the lady, “Oh LADY!!” (think Jerry Lewis). “How much would you guys charge to come out here and put in another cable outlet?” “$25” sez she. But then, after I explained why I needed one, she said, “Why don’t you just get a cable splitter and use the outlet by your television?”

Silence from my end. Then, “Will that affect the bandwidth of my tv OR internet signal?” She: “Not as long as you get one that handles over 1000mb” So I run off to Best Buy and purchase a splitter. There was one that handled up to 1500mb for $5 and one that handled up to 2gb for $7. I thought, What the hey, and bought the better one (gold plated, even!). I also had to buy a 25′ coax cable to stretch to my desk. Probably could have gotten by with 12′, but as someone once told me, “Better to have and not want, than to want and not have.”

Now my computer is hooked up but good as is my kids computer (my old one…only four years old as compared to their old computer which was six years old). Now they won’t ask me, “Dad, can we install this program on your computer (one they checked out from the public library)? It won’t work on ours.” Hee hee.

Now it’s off to bed.