Not extinct!

No, no... Techosaurus Rex has not become extinct. My apologies for being so quiet lately.

With the holidays and my habit of getting submerged in things I've been fairly dormant, but let's catch up! The first big sticking point for me has been Battlefield 2 - I just love that game - then they HAD to go and release Battlefield 2142 - which is quite awesome. Then I've got this weird little love affair going on with MS Flight Sim X.

Santa was VERY nice to the Techosaurus family this Christmas! The whole brood got shiny new PC's under the tree. The little ones even got 15" flat panel monitors so they can share a table.

I bought a pile of refurbs from Dell. I know, I know, why would *I* REX TECHOSAURUS builder of mighty computers for nearly two decades buy off the shelf Dell boxes? Simplicity for one thing. I still would recommend most people build a custom PC - you will always get more for your money. However the Techosaurus clan is getting preparing for a mighty adventure in remote locations where the need to swap pieces between systems outweighs the need of tweaking each individuals system for just their needs. More on this adventure later.

I have been fairly impressed with the Dell machines we bought. I got a good deal on a lot of 4 from eBay. I did have some difficulty finding the half-height dual head 256MB video adapters I wanted for me and Mrs. Techosaurus (once you move to two monitors there is no going back) but managed to find some good deals for them on eBay as well, tricky to find, tricky to find. I will be going back to the trough to expand RAM on the grown-ups machines.

I did frankenputer a little bit - pulling my 400GB SATA drive from my PC and installing it in my new Dell box. I had a little talk with the hard drive fairy recently so Mrs. Techosaurus may be getting an increase as well.

I'm in geekasaur heaven with the 4 replaced computers sitting there calling me softly to tear into them and the other machines around the house to spread the computer goodness as far as I can. The new dell boxes also came with onboard gigabit LAN - so of course I had to go out and buy a couple of netgear gigabit switches. A 5 port for upstairs where Mrs and Jr Techosaurs plug in plus a 16 port rackmountable for the cave.

While I was at it I also hooked myself up with a couple of 19" rackmount shelves. I have 2 5U APC UPS's in the rack currently - that I'm not using and whose batteries have certainly expired. But they are quite useful as shelves, even though they do take up 5U's in the rack and weigh close to 80 pounds each...

I'll be taking my old P4 and building it into one of my rackmount cases to run as a bit torrent/burner machine with gobs of storage. The little small form factor Dell cases just can't handle multiple DVD drives.

I did buy an external USB 2.0 5 1/4 drive case for my burner but am disappointed with the speed. I'll keep my current DVD burner in there and give it the Mrs. to use and I've ordered one of the swanky new Dual Layer DVD burners with Lightscribe along with some Lightscribe and dual layer media.

The DL/Lightscribe drives are very inexpensive but the media are expensive compared to regular DVD+/-R media though not horribly priced and fairly reasonable.

I gave up on little slivers of plastic to store data a long time ago and only really burn disks for special occasions, like pictures for grandparents or long term data backups. The additional cost is well worth it. I'm not burning every piece of software, document or data to disk - that's what RAID is for, it would be unreasonable to use Lightscribe or DL media for that, though the drive I got will handle the vanilla formats as well.

All in all a pretty busy few months in the geek-lair of the mighty Techosaurus Rex - busy, busy, busy! Here's my geek to-do list:

1) Rebuild Mrs T's old machine to replace the squeky P3-400 that's been running the scanner and color printer back in her office.

2) Rebuild Mr T's old machine to be the new burner/torrent box.

3) Scavange remaining bits n' pieces from those machines with the boys old machines and see what I can come up with...

4) Rebuild the rack with new shelves replacing old UPS's and install the new gbit switch.

5) Recruit some teenagers with strong backs and little sense to help clean out the basement. Entice them with promises of free computers (See #3 above).

See, it's time to clean out the basement...and the garage...and the bedroom...and the attic (Do we have an attic? Is there anything in it?) and the living room and everything else. Like any good tech guru dinosaur I've got more than a decades worth of little bits and pieces of computers, and other crap piled up in all corners of my house (creating new corners and thus new places to store more crap). Why this sudden desire to dig out of my comfortable den after all these years?

Am I moving? Yes, probably, most likely. But that's not why. I'd just box it up and take it with me if that were the case. Mrs Techosaurus and I have undertaken a plan. A plan that requires us to jetison the majority of worldly possesions through friends and family, eBay, yardsale, freecycle and landfill. We've decided to punch the time clock and drop out of the rat race. We're pretty serious about a plan to move to the South Pacific.

Why should folks in India be the only ones to benefit so strongly from the new Global Economy? Hell, all I need to make a fairly decent living is a good internet connection and a PC. Not enough income working that way to stay here in the states with gargantuan infrastructure and other overhead costs.

So we're heading for greener pastures, okay, jungles. We've realized that even though we are lower-middle class here in the states we're still in the top 1-2% globally. Let's take our equity and our income potentials somewhere that will stretch it the furthest. Some place warm, friendly and wonderful? Sure, it comes with some challenges but I love a good challenge.

When my brother was in his mid 30's he up and joined the Navy to everyone's surprise. He had a couple degrees already and he told me once "the biggest adventure I have on any given day is deciding whether I should get out of bed and go to work or not." He's a lot more like me than I think sometimes.

ADVENTURE! It's out there! We're going for it! So now does it make sense why I went out and bought a bunch of homogenized computers? I'll still have fast internet access and can buy whatever I want on eBay or NewEgg or ZipZoomFly - but the freight will be a bitch!

Stay tuned...