I thought I’d give a small update on my Home IT duties that were pending at the time yesterdays post went up:

• Upgrading the Kids Memory – It winds up that the machine they have, an HP Pavilion 700 series, is maxed out at the current 512M. Bummer.
• Recovery Disks for Windows XP machine – I got all of my data centralized into one place on the Windows machine – ready to burn to DVD – when I realized that I don’t have a DVD writer on the laptop. Once I realized I’d have to burn 4-5 CD’s worth of stuff, I abandoned the idea of rebuilding the machine for the evening. Since the weather is so beautiful today (hey, at least its not snow), perhaps I’ll do it later in the day. I’m currently copying everything up to the Linux box, which can then be migrated to the Mac, and a DVD burned with all the data.
• 80G hard drive swap – Taking the main server down takes DNS and external access to the internet – things needed for things like homework – so I didn’t complete this either
• Setting up the network printer upstairs – This also has to be done today, since the connection was eaten all day yesterday

All in all, yesterday was pretty productive. I was a tad disappointed that the Pavilion wouldn’t take any more memory, but overall I got a lot of things done that have been waiting for quite some time in the queue.

I also got an unexpected treat. Back in August I had thrown a link in my del.ici.ous links about Bryce, a 3D rendering program, being released for free for a limited time. I had downloaded it back then but had never done anything with it. I used to love this program back in the day and would spend hours playing with it. I’m not really the artistic type, as I tend to get extremely frustrated when I try to do anything even remotely resembling “art”, but I loved that program.

Last night I was able to expose Jake to it, which was pretty cool. He loved it and spent some time playing around with it starting with a base landscape that I threw together just to show him what it could do. I found it extremely cool to share something like this with him from back in the day that he was actually interested in seeing. For me, it was cool to play around with an old friend again and to share it with one of the kids and actually have them find it interesting. Those moments come few and far between as the kids get older.

I’ll end this with the final rendering of what Jake was working on last night, while I go check my file copies from the Windows box.