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Dec. 29, 2005 There are big joys and sorrows in life, but lets face it, most of life is a collection of small joys and pains. Of course, moving both changes and adds to these. Complaining is easy for me, so here are some positives. I love drinking eggnog, cold, right from the carton. The kids don't like it, and what their mother doesn't know won't hurt her. I love nuts, Brazil nuts being my favorite. The pain in cracking them is worth the reward. Sometimes you find that perfect nut with just a tiny drop of oil in the center and that extra nice flavor, roughly similar to coconut. I love the German chocolate that my mom gets for us every year. Germans seem to replace peanuts with hazelnuts in all of their chocolate bars and such, and I love the unique flavor. I also love that the Aldi food store chain carries some of these German brands at prices similar to American candy. I love seeing the kids tear into their presents, and I love raiding their stockings after hours. I love the wonder they still feel at seeing Christmas lights and that they consider putting up the tree a treat, not a chore. I love coming home and having the kids shout, “Daddy!” as I walk in the front door. I love putting on socks after my feet get cold from walking around in my new, half-finished, basement. And then I love to take them back off after my ankles get itchy, to feel the new, soft, carpet on the main floor. I love how clean and organized a totally empty house looks, right before it transforms into a warehouse of boxes with dirty high-traffic alleys in between. I love falling into a seemingly dead-sleep when I'm really really tired and sore. I love setting up my entertainment center and computer network – I never have it the same way twice. I love to think about the options – I prefer to have the most flexible design possible. For example, I want to be able to record a show on one channel and watch another – but I want to watch another not just from the cable company, but also from a disk or video pushed from a computer. I love being able to push audio from my PC to one or two TVs, and I like being able to switch which set the output goes too without having to unplug anything. It's just plain fun to sit on the ground with a bunch of cables of various types, splitters, switch boxes, converters (RF modulators, head-phone type plugs to AV cable audio, etc.) and plan and try different designs. I love putting old junk to useful work. I have a very old video capture/output card in my PC ($15 from eBay). It doesn't have a tuner, so it can only record whatever signal it receives, but I have an old mechanically shot, but electronically sound, VCR under my monitor that does that job and solves that problem so I can capture from any channel. It also serves as a second RF modulator, since my capture card outputs only via AV cables. The AV cables run into this old VCR, which in turn runs a coax cable back to far-off TVs. The condition of my basement allows me to drill holes in the ceiling under any room above and avoid a mess of cables running through the house (not that I mind cables running through the house in the least, but I'm told that, “it doesn't look nice”). I also have a few old computers running Linux doing useful work. I have a 166Mhz Pentium1 with 48 megs of RAM from about 1996 (that came with Windows95) acting as a file server and doing very well, and an old Gateway laptop, Pentium2 running at 233Mhz with 64 megs of RAM, acting as my router (allowing all of my computers to use the same broadband Internet connection to go online) and firewall, as well as running programs like Seti@home 24/7. Virtually any PC with two network cards can double as a router, and running firewall software on a PC other than your main work PC frees resources and keeps everything running and feeling new. The woman of the house appreciates that I can hide all of these “toys” in small rooms in this basement, but I thought they looked fine in the old house, where I had them right in the living room... I'm not yet interested in wireless-networking – not only is it insecure (your data can be recorded by someone outside of your home encrypted; decryption is then simply a matter of time), but it's not fast enough to move DVD sized material around from PC to PC in a timely manner. If I upgrade, it will be to 1000megabit Ethernet, not WiFi. Anyway, getting back on topic, it feels good to have some time for writing again; writing is another little happy thing. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ This is my second foray into the UK writing discordia. This time around, I want to be a tad more raw - maybe a bit edgier (does that sound "art-see"?) Maybe I'll address even more issues that most Americans consider taboo... About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. 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