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Archived News starting from 05-23-2014 and earlier

I spotted the carnival on my way to work and was determined to bring Lila, who is now almost 3 inches over the 42" minimum height requirement. Last year she was only allowed 2 rides in the whole thing which of course prompted a tantrum when I took her home. This year only 2 rides were off limits and I made sure she rode every single one. Lucy didn't seem to mind missing out as she was fully occupied chewing on a straw and laughing at Lila. The carney folk were strangely upbeat which I attributed to it just opening. I found myself surprised when they talked to Lila but maybe I'm just a cynical pesimist and this is the normal carnival experience.

The bright side of Lisa's grandma passing is that every cousin Lila knows arrives for the funeral. As an Xbox fanboy, it's my duty to bring the Xbox One to all events containing children, including funerals which is totally inappropriate and therefore exactly what I did. Farming achievements with children at a funeral may be the lowest thing I've ever done, but fortunately the parents thought it was a great idea and I was not banished from the state. Lila and Lucy entertained as well and judging by the amount of sleep they had also enjoyed themselves thoroughly

Knowing my grandma won't be around forever, I was determined to visit her one more time so she could meet Lucy. Despite the alternator failing on the car, then Lisa forgetting documents she needed while the car was locked in the dealership, then raging tornados across our route we managed to and enjoy 2 solid days of grandma time. That's when Lisa found out her grandma had just passed and off we went to the funeral. While Lila proved to be too toddler for my grandma to handle, I was thrilled Lucy brought the same smile to her face as everyone else who holds her.

After my colossal SpaceX fail, Lisa and I made a pact that we would move somewhere warm after Lucys 1st birthday. The preceding mega vacation had Charleston, South Carolina as the front runner on account of Lisas aunt and cousins who lived there. While Florida is still my top pick, I said I would take anywhere that has the ocean, palm trees and no snow. Since Charleston fits all requirements I'm ready to relocate. With Lucys birthday in less than 6 months, we decided to scout our future home. After looking at over 20 houses we put $500 down on new construction scheduled to be completed in late October. With that, we were locked into Charleston as our new home. Hopefully my job allows work from home, or I find something equally enjoyable since for the first time in my I don't have a definite financial plan. It's exciting and terrifying, but I know come November I'll be glad we did it.

Easter at Lisas parents involved coloring easter eggs, blowing bubbles in the yard, visiting cousins and of course an easter egg hunt. Lila started pulling her own weight this year by helping Pa pick up dog poop and nailing down some warped boards on the deck. She also got to visit an upper class playground complete with snooty kids to which Lila promptly pooped herself into oblivion and saturated the car seat. Lila also learned how to become a pool shark before we made a stop at the fish conservatory and finished the visit with an ice cream social.

Today Windows Phone 8.1 released for developer preview and I immediately upgraded. I was happy to discover The "Siri Killer" assistant Cortana is equally capable in doing text-to-speech as the old system, which is all I previously used. The notification center is yet another new feature I don't really need on account of live tiles, but the central location to find alerts is handy, and the quick toggle buttons at the top are nice for bluetooth/wifi battery savings. Project my screen is so far my favorite new feature, displaying my phone on my projector for mobile games feels excessive, but I'm worth it! The Wi-Fi Sense feature caught me off guard when I connected to a hotel network and it started accepting the agreement. I was convinced Steve had hacked into my phone and was downgrading me to iOS but then the internet connection completed and I remembered it was a feature. Amazingly, the upgrade seems to have increased the benchmark score significantly. UPDATE:
Looks like Cortana is a snoop. After granting her access to my email, she told me about Lisas flight and told me it was time to leave for a reminder I setup.

With temperatures peeking above 30° today, I decided it was time to finally swap my Focus spare tire for the newly repaired wheel. I also took the opportunity to scan the OBDII check engine light which had been lit for the last 3 days. It turned out to be a misfire, but since it only reported one I took the chance and cleared it hoping it's only bad gas. The proper tire location also cleared the "tire pressure sensor malfunction" giving me a warning light free dash. To celebrate, a full car wash was completed, including the now safely tucked away spare tire.

With my Lumia 928 approaching it's 9 month birthday, and the long rumored Lumia Icon finally launching, it was of course time to spend my $500 work anniversary gift card on an unsubsidized phone purchase. Aside from the Snapdragon 800 chipset upgrade, which blows away the S4 on the 928, I get twice the RAM, twice the resolution (720p vs 1080p) and an extra half-inch of screen size. Amazingly, it does all this weighing only 4 grams more, with all dimensions within 2-3mm of the 928. Sadly, I lose the Xenon flash and glance feature from the 928, the latter of which baffles me, and I hope it will be added back in at some point in the future. I'm glad this 5" moderate beast came to Verizon instead of the 6" 1520 gigantor AT&T got, I just wish Verizon would get on board with external storage like AT&T seems to be happy to approve for devices on their network.

My Bitcoin madness reached a new level this week with the purchase of a second ASICMiner cube. This time I only paid $315, bringing me up to a total of $700 investment and 80 GHash/s that has thus far only netted $56 since Jan 22nd. Two of these miners quickly heated up my server room, then larger family room before I decided on their final setup in the hallway between my basement and garage. Here they can run overclocked with the fans on low, constantly sucking 700w of power. This translates into 16.8 kWh a day rated @ ~ 7¢/kWh, so $1.18 / day I need to make just to break even. Not satisfied with Bitcoin, I decided to add Litecoin and Dogecoin mining as well. These use the Scrypt hashing algorithm rather than Bitcoins SHA-256 and as of yet there is no specialized hardware for it, meaning my two nVidia GPUs had a shot at making some Litecoin. It also meant I could buy a cheap video card for work and take advantage of free electricity despite the lowly 300w power supply in that computer limiting me to under 90 Kh/s. After accepting that nVidia video cards do in fact suck at mining, I found a gently used Radeon 7970 card with 3 fans for extra kickass and paid a whopping $400 for the privilige to mine with it. Hopefully the two nVidia cards sell for at least half that, which would put my new hobby at $900. This is close enough to the $1,000 barrier that I'm ending purchases and allowing the coins to roll in. The impressive 688 KHash/s I was able to get from the new card caused a GPU tornado in my tiny server room, and after creating a startup script to auto-mine on power up I introduced my Bitcoin miners to the new Litecoin/Dogecoin miner. Now at a combined 900w I'm slowly killing forests of trees all for some numbers that may or may not end up being worth something.

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