Here is the link to it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025

For those of you who don’t know what a Solid State Drive is, I will briefly explain.

A Solid State Drive, or SSD, is a storage medium that uses flash memory instead of disk platters to store data. Unlike Hard Drives, SSD’s do not contain moving parts. Solid State Drives typically have much faster read times than a hard drive. However, a hard drive will normally have faster write times.

The end result of the faster read times is your computer will respond faster to opening applications and booting up. Although a SSD will have slower write times, this is not a huge deal because of write caching. Write caching is where your operating system holds data to be written to the disk in RAM until there is free write time available. The danger of this however is you could lose data in the event of a sudden power outage. Luckily that is not a concern for me since my computer is backed up with a UPS (it will continue running during a power outage). My UPS will tell my computer “hey you are running on battery power” and the OS will respond by flushing its write cache to the disk.

I have not had a lot of time to test how much faster things are but I can say that one application I use a lot which is Dreamweaver opens in 1 second or less. This application when it was on my hard drive took about 5-10 seconds to load. Windows 7 boots cold to the desktop (ready to use) in 20 seconds.

How I have this setup is my operating system and all applications files are stored on the 40GB SSD. All my other data like downloads, music, movies, and everything else is still stored on normal Hard Drives.

All in all I am very happy so far with my Solid State Drive.

Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool.” It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking (Wikipedia).

If anyone wants an invite to Google Wave, I have 5 available to give out. Just leave a comment saying you want an invite and leave your email address in the appropriate field and I will send one to the first five people who requests.

DO NOT leave your email address in your actual comment or I will delete the comment and not honor your request. Only place the email address in the email field. Your email address will not be displayed to anyone but me. Please note that it may take a couple days after I invite you to receive your invite. I will email you back personally telling you if I invited you.

I was actually using the computer when all of a sudden I heard this loud pop and saw a flash of light in the corner of my eye. My PC case has a see-through side allowing me to see a flash from the explosion.

I have already replaced the exploded PSU with a new one. Luckily it didn’t damage any parts inside the computer.

What I believe happened was on of the capacitors inside the PSU exploded. However, I opened up the PSU and saw no evidence of anything burnt. Although there was a spark plug thing that appeared to have blown. There was also this hard brown substance along the bottom of one of the capacitors.

Anyways, I knew the fan in the PSU was bad for a long time and was putting off replacing it. I guess it finally overheated and exploded. I also knew there was something wrong with the PSU beforehand because I would always have trouble getting the computer started, although once on it was fine.

Lesson to be learned: When a PSU is going bad, replace it before it explodes

Anyways, I instantly went to best buy and bought a $75 new PSU. Its working much better and is much quieter than my old one.

Click here to see the PSU I bought. (Note this is the newegg page for it not the best buy where I bought it)

He was a devoted Christian and a huge influence in my life. Here is a picture of him taken about 11 months ago when his first great-grandchild, my nephew, Kaleb was born. He will be deeply missed by many.

For my birthday my family and I all went bowling which was fun.

On another note, two days ago my site also had a birthday. On October 6th my site turned 4 years old. Yep, I have been blogging on this site now for over 4 years and I am approaching 250 posts now. My site draws about 600 different (actual) people every month for a total of around 12000 hits per month. My site attracts about 30 different Google searches every month as well. Overall, I think these are really good numbers for a personal blog.

If this global freezing doesn’t come to an end we might enter the second ice age before long. I think I will go out and run my car for a couple hours.

Anyways, I have a bad feeling this might be a really bad winter this year.

First I found an old USB cable then cut the cord on it around the middle. I then carefully used a pocket knife to cut down the sides of the connector. I then expanded the metal connector casing on it and removed the old USB connector. I then took apart my flash drive to be sacrificed for this project. Here is a picture of the flash drive I used:

I simply opened it up and removed the small flash drive from it. I then put this inside the connector on the USB cable I cut and opened up earlier. I securely attached it via super glue. I then put the sides back together with super glue also.

After that I cut the cut cable down a little bit to be around 4 inches long. I stripped the cable exposing the inner wires and I was done. Here is a picture of the finished product:

And here is an image of it in action plugged into my computer:

As you can see it looks like a useless cut USB cable plugged into my computer. Actually its a 4GB stealth flash drive. I wonder how many weird looks I will get using this in public .

I drove about 370 miles of the trip. That is by far the most I have ever driven in a day. In fact, it probably even beats the most miles I have ever driven in a single week.

As for graduation, I guess that isn’t until June 12th. So I guess I have three weeks between my final class and my graduation date. Not as bad as my high school one though, which was like 6-months between my last class and the graduation due to me finishing high school early.

For the past few months my mouse has not been registering left clicks correctly. This made it very hard to use my computer. I really love my mouse though and didn’t really have the money to replace it. Well, today I decided to open her up to see if I could find the problem myself.

I actually was able to discover the problem. The plastic on the bottom of the button that presses the internal button to register the click, was partially warn down. There was basically a small gap in the plastic from where too much pressing had worn the plastic that normally pressed the button away.

To fix it I determined I had to fill in this gap with something. My first thought was super glue, but ours was all dried up. I searched the house for anything that might work. After looking through my mom’s desk, I discovered finger nail polish and thought that might work.

I applied a small dab of polish to the small gap on the mouse’s button and waited for it to dry (with the help of blowing some compress air on it).

To my surprise, at least to this point, my mouse now works perfect!!! I have given it a good 2-3 hours of use so far and it is still holding up. I kind of expect it wear away after a while, in which I might have to reapply some more polish to fix it again. Of course, eventually I will probably just invest in a new mouse.

Who would have thought finger nail polish would serve useful for fixing computer hardware?

In the mean time, here is an excellent song that I think suits all Cubs fan extremely well. Go Cubbies!!!

Waiting for a Miracle

“Waiting For a Miracle” by Mark Erelli; Written by Bruce Cockburn.

Here is an updated picture of him.  This is, in my opinion, the cutest one we have thus far.  It is also, I think, the first one that shows him smiling.

Click here to see more pictures

This will not however affect the way people can contact me by email. This is a completely transparent switch that just works better for me.

Anyone else interested in having their email through Gmail with their own domain can check out http://gmail.com/a/

Apparently Kaleb has a respiratory infection that is sometimes making it hard for him to breathe. He is getting better, but probably wont be allowed to go home until tomorrow or Saturday at the earliest.

We suspect, although can’t confirm, that we got sick from food poisoning from eating Papa John’s pizza. One thing for sure, we probably wont be eating there again. Or at least not anytime soon.

Just kind of odd for us all to fall sick like that so quickly. Luckily, it didn’t seem to affect any of us for much more than a day. I have only been sick for about 12 hours now and already am starting to feel better. I threw up three times, which is probably more than I have thrown up in the last 5 years. I tend to get sick easily, but I almost never actually get to the point that I throw up.

The good news is, so far, Kaleb (my sisters new baby) has not got sick. Of course, he didn’t eat the Pizza either.

I found out today that I actually have one more class to take at ITT-Tech before I can graduate.  Its call Capstone.  I’m not fully sure what the class is about.  Turns out I didn’t have it this quarter because they were not offering it.  I was originally scheduled to graduate in March but I guess I now wont.

Since I have to go to school for another 3 months for that 1 single class I will not graduate until June.  I am kind of disappointed but oh well.  Nothing I can do about it.

Click here to see more pictures

Because this is hosted on my home connection there will probably still be some future downtime.  Also, this will probably cause my site to load a little slow.  I hope to have this site back on my main (fast/dedicated) server within the next month.

Unfortunatly I misspelled “howl” and “Bailee” in the video. Bailee I mispelled numouros times. Just wanted to make sure you alll knew I was fully aware of this.

Jeremyjefferson.com however will remain fully functional and will redirect to jeremyj.com.  In fact, you will notice many links (especially for the page design) still refer to jeremyjefferson.com.

I don’t believe this should cause any issues, however please leave me a comment if you notice any part of my site acting weird, or not working at all because of this change.

Since I really wanted jeremyj.com I placed a backorder with Godaddy.  Even though this costs about $10 more than the registration costs ($18.99).  This pretty much assured me that I would be able to beat any other human trying manually for the domain when it dropped.  Of course, Godaddy is not very good at beating bots from backordering services like Pool or SnapNames.

I placed my backorder three to four days prior to the domain dropping.  It was already in “pending delete” status.  I probably should not have waited this long though because if someone else had placed a backorder on it with Godaddy before me I would not have been able to because Godaddy only permits one backorder per domain from all their customers.

Well, on drop day Godaddy changed the status of the backorder to “Capture in progress”.  It stayed in this status for about 8 hours.

Dot-Com domains start dropping around 2PM ET and continue to drop until around 4PM-5PM ET.  Mine dropped right around 3PM.

At right around 3PM I refreshed the whois database and the domain had still not dropped.  I refreshed about 20 seconds after that and the domain had dropped and it the new registrar was Godaddy.  This made me very happy because this meant Godaddy was in possession of the domain and most likely it was mine.

It took about another hour and a half to get confirmation, which came in the form of Godaddy putting my contact info in the whois database, proving to me and the world that the domain was now mine!

Overall I was very pleased with Godaddy’s backorder service.  Of course, had I lost I probably would not have been.  Jeremyj.com in my opinion is a good domain that I figured would be tasted or grabbed by someone else with a backorder.  Since I know Godaddy obtained it within 20 seconds after it dropped their bots are fast at getting them.  Most likely Godaddy got it within a couple seconds.

I do recommend now anyone who has $18.99 to risk on a domain they want to try Godaddy.  Their backorders do work (as they did for me) and its the cheapest backordering service I can find.

Anyone who has any questions about Godaddy’s backordering service or wants clarification on my experience can just post a comment.  I will respond very quickly to any questions you may have.  Just make sure to leave your valid email address so I can inform you of my response.

Yep, that’s right. I am very excited as I’ve been trying/wanting to get this domain for three years now. Basically when I first bought a domain for my personal site (this site here) I wanted something to do with my name and be short. Jeremy.com was already taken obviously, so I tried jeremyj.com. Unfortunatly this was also taken. Eventually I just ended up with jeremyjefferson.com.

Jeremyjefferson.com is a fine domain for me (I think everyone should try to get their full name in a dot-com), but it is way to long for people to type out or even remember.

Ever since that day I have wanted jeremyj.com and wanted it bad. I hope the old owner of this domain reads this some day, but I sent 3-5 emails to the former owner from 2006-2007 trying to get a hold of the guy who owned it. Basically I said I was interested in purchasing the domain from him and asked his price. I was going to accept anything $200 or less on the spot. Sad thing is, after 2007 the guy didn’t even use the domain and had no site on it. He never responded to any of the emails, so I gave up.

Well, last year during September (2007) I was all excited. Jeremyj.com was about to expire! Unfortunately the dude renewed it and the domain stayed alive until September of this year (2008). I didn’t stop watching the domain however….

Well, September 2008 rolled around again and the domain was ready to expire if he didn’t renew. This time he did not renew. The domain eventually went to auction which I did not bid in (lack of funds at the time). Fortunately no one placed a bid on it.

Now, almost 80 days after the domain expired I successfully obtained it with a Godaddy backorder for $18.99 ($17.01 after coupons). I will be posting an entry here later on my experience with Godaddy backorders. Luckily for Godaddy this will be a very good review.

So now I have this to decide: Should I leave jeremyjefferson.com as the domain for this site, having jeremyj.com forward to it? Should I have jeremyj.com take over as the domain for this site and have jeremyjefferson.com forward to it. Or should I allow both of them to work without forwards?

Personally I’m probably going to go with keeping jeremyjefferson.com as the main or have jeremyj.com become the main and forward the other one to it.

If anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Also, 3 days ago on the 5th of October was the birthday for my website also. My site turned 3 years old on the 5th. I actually had a personal website prior to October 5th, 2005, but it didn’t have the jeremyjefferson.com until that date.