Bells of the Sound at Tibbetts

Tonight I'm here at the Tibbetts church in West Seattle to listen to the Bells of the Sound play some interesting pieces on a huge bell choir... I can't remember how many octaves this bell choir is, but it's more than average.

Anyway, playing with Wendy's netbook, trying to connect via the churches wifi, but having trouble making the connection so far. Kind of fun to be able to sit here and type something up. Finally broke down and set up my mobile for the connection so that I can post this. Glad I kept it charging in the car on the way home.

Some very nice piano work

I've been listening to Imogen Heap quite a bit lately, and just found out that while she was on vacation in Hawaii, she recorded some jazzy, free roving piano work. It's very nice, and I look forward to hearing more in the future!

Enjoy!

Electric MR2’s and other stuff

I was at the Sustainable West Seattle Festival today, and saw something I thought was totally cool. Besides the hybrid Honda ZipCar display, and scooters, and bikes, there was a 1985 Toyota MR2 that had been converted to electric.

This thing was really cool. It’s based on a 1985 Toyota MR2, filled to the gills with 6v golf cart batteries, and can go about 50 miles in the best conditions. Brian Hughes did a really nice job on the conversion. It uses the original transmission, has slightly narrower wheels than original with special low-rolling resistance tires. The frunk (front trunk) and radiator area house 7 batteries, there are 4 more in the rear trunk, (the floor was altered to make additional room available), and there are 10 more in the engine compartment over the electric motor and transmission.

Brian has a great write-up on his website, and it looks like this could be a fun project someday. Hmm… someday maybe I’ll have to make an electric BMW E30…

A couple of pictures from today, many more on Brian’s website:

New Computers can be fun!

I recently acquired a replacement for my aging Dell 5160 laptop, and have spent this last weekend getting it up and running, and all of my old data transferred over. It’s been kind of a long boring task, but towards the end of the week, I got to kind of test out the machine and see what it can really do.

Needless to say, there have been some changes in the capabilities of mobile computers of the last 5+ years… Yes, I had the same mobile for over 5 years. I upgraded a couple of things, and replaced a couple of burned out parts, but it did me well for that time. It was a fairly fast machine, with a 2.3 GHz Multi-Threaded Intel P4, and I maxed out the RAM, replaced the HD with a larger drive, and upgraded the video card. Even burned up the upgraded video card and had to replace it a second time. I was very glad I still had the original floating around as a spare, so I didn’t have any serious down time.

On to the new machine, though, enough with looking back. The new  machines have saved on weight, improved display technology, and gotten much faster over time. This new notebook is much larger than my old, but weighs in about the same, maybe a smidge lighter. It runs about the same time on the battery, but is so much more capable and powerful, I wouldn’t expect it to be able to run for very long at all. The previous machine had been loaded down and filled up and trying to run things it had no right to be running, and seemed to have become very slow. This new machine is positively snappy.

Now on to the specs…

• Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q900 @ 2.00GHz, 2000MHz, 4 Cores, 4 logical Processors
• 1066MHz FSB
• 6 MB L2 Cache;
• 6 GB RAM
• 17" WUXGA display 1920x1200
• NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GS 512MB GDDR3 VRAM video card
• 2 (two) 320 GB 7200RPM SATA drives
• Integrated 802.11 b/g/n
• Built-in Bluetooth™ V2.1
• Built-in 4 speakers and array microphone

Those are the basics. What is it? Oh, yeah, forgot that part… It’s an ASUS G71G Q2 gaming laptop. This thing should satisfy my computing needs for at least another 4 years.

So, that’s what I get to play with now. It’ll keep my busy and productive for quite some time. I’m finding that I can actually do more with it than the last machine, as I no longer have to wait on  the machine. Big difference in performance for the types of things I’ve been doing lately.

Until next time – Ciao!