The replacement for my dead Macintosh computer arrived and I have it set up. The “new” (2006) Mac is a bit faster than the old one as I have it set up with solid-state (SSD) hard drives which perform better than the older mechanical drives used in the previous system. Through the use of original program disks and my backup disk I have everything pretty much back the way it was, I hope! I did lose some photos but the programs seems to be OK.
The neighbors across the street from us are having their annual Boy Scout garage sale / fund raiser so there are a lot of people coming and going, which drives the dogs crazy. The dogs will be restricted to the back yard for most of the day in an attempt to keep their barking to a minimum.
Neighbor’s Boy Scout yard sale
Around the yard, the lilacs are done but the peony plant is going great guns, yellow columbine started to bloom, flax is showing off blue flowers, and iris plants are approaching their height. The yard looks nice with these colors, particularly after a fresh lawn mowing.
We have nothing new in the house hunt project, but I will address something Tabitha questioned in her last comment regarding realtor fees. It seems every region has a different approach to selling real estate. We signed a contract, which appears to be standard in this region, that if we would buy a “for sale by owner” place we are liable for paying a fee to the realtor (even if we locate the listing ourselves). The fee is a percentage of the sale, in our case 2 1/2 percent. We had never heard of this before but it seems to be common practice in these parts. When we first started looking for a realtor in the Montrose area, other realtors also mentioned this agreement. It is not a stipulation we found applied when we were looking for land on the other side of the Rockies four years ago.
This weekend we will begin working on the RV, getting it ready for use as a spare bedroom during our kids’ visit. Felicity and Toby will be arriving on May 25th. Airing out and cleaning will be the order of the day and, along with our normal yard work, makes for a busy weekend.
I did get the Honda’s transmission replaced this past Monday and the replacement appears to be working fine. The shifts are smoother than had been the case previously and it’s nice to have the Honda back in service. Total cost was just a bit below our budget of $2,200.00 as the rebuilt transmission was $1,100.00 (including shipping) and the installation cost $990.20 for a total of $2,090.20. We hope the cost proves to be worth it by extending the service life of the Honda another hundred thousand miles or so.
Pam monitors her Facebook account and remarks on the family photos starting to appear – more Facebook photo activity as the weather gets warmer and vacations begin. Hard to believe we are in the grandparent age group, though, with my sister Kitt becoming a great-grandmother earlier this year. Time is inexorable, I guess, but I don’t feel that old!
That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!
Pam’s Two Cents Worth:
Felicity and Toby have not been back to Colorado at the same time in about eight years. (We have, of course, seen them separately in the intervening years.) This visit is a result of Felicity’s gift of air miles to us – rather than Fields and I taking a trip, I suggested the two of them use the air miles and travel here. This time of year is way better for air travel than the Christmas holiday period, when flying in and out of Denver International Airport is a crazy idea. Now – let’s see what the May Colorado weather has in store this week.
Happy Trails.
Realtor split-commissions. It appears that realtor commissions are a bit lower than the 6% average. The buyer realtor takes his/her half, and is suppose to fully represent the buyer during the sale — the FSBO is on his/her own (paperwork, listings, etc).
No doubt realtors constantly “prowl” their territory, looking for FSBO’s, etc.
In some states (mainly East), rental is by realtor only. Only if you actually know the rental owner gets you around paying realtor commissions.
Good to hear that you again have a functioning computer, and that you were able to recover almost all your files. Perhaps an external SSD/Flash in the future for backup and recovery.
SSD’s appear to be the way to go in the future — faster and less volatile, though currently more expensive. The “Big Data” market seems to be moving towards “Flash blade servers” as prices come down and petabyte systems become reality.
Larry:
Thanks for the note. Computer stuff…I use a USB external drive for backups and that seems to work quite well although the MacPro uses USB 2 which tends to be slow. Next go-around I may use a FireWire device; the MacPro has 400 and 800 mbits ports which give much faster transfer speeds than USB2.0
I am experimenting with some of the new flash-based storage that uses the PCIe interface for main storage. If interested, look up “M.2” in Wikipedia or on-line. A good example of this new technology is the Samsung SSD Evo 850 M.2 which the unit I am experimenting with.
A problem so far is getting older systems to recognize the device as a boot volume and not just another storage device. Fun stuff!
At any rate the “new” mac is somewhat faster due to the SSD drives and upgrade to 16gb of RAM. I have one more upgrade to install; I am replacing the stock video card with a higher-level unit mostly for movie clip work. That card should be here in a few days.
Thanks again for the note!