Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

Here's the play-by-play about the move with the cats on Saturday, November 28. 4:24 AM - left the house. The GPS estimates it will be 991 miles and take 15 hours and 9 minutes (estimated arrival at 8:38 PM Central time) 5:06 AM - I turn on to Interstate 76. The GPS says my next thing I have to do is 504 miles away. Guess I don't need to pay attention to the GPS for a while... 6:56 AM - I made it to Nebraska. 789 miles remain in the trip. 7:15 AM (Mountain time) - I break for breakfast. 9:47 AM (Central time) - First gasoline break of the day. 653 miles and 10 hours still to go according to the GPS. 11:59 AM - I break for lunch. At this point, I forgot to keep track of the timing of things.... My arrival into Iowa was through some fairly heavy Omaha traffic, so I didn't write that down. The second gasoline break of the day was in Iowa. I was averaging somewhere around 35 miles per gallon for this trip. 5:07 PM - I cross the Mississippi River to enter Illinois 7:17 PM - I arr...

Well, the move from Colorado to Illinois is in "phase 2". The UHaul has been moved, some of our stuff has been moved into the hotel or storage, and the hotel has been unpacked. Next step is getting Sabrina here, which comes tomorrow (nice way to spend Thanksgiving). After that, we need to get the cats here. Once everyone is in Illinois, we can focus on getting a house here and then work on getting all our furniture from Colorado to the new house. Moving nearly 1,000 miles is quite a challenge.

Today was Janet's last day of being an agent. She is staying with the same company (Country Financial), but moving to a corporate job. That's why we're moving back to Illinois next week. But, since she's switching from being an agent to being a "corporate drone", she needed to terminate her agency. Thus, she was terminated today. Along with that, we both finalized our wills and living wills today. Those were executed this morning. So, Janet was both terminated and executed today. Rough day!

Janet and I are moving from Colorado to Illinois so she can take a new job starting in early December. Given that I am pretty well constantly on the road, the only week we can do the move is Thanksgiving week. And it won't even be a full move at that - it will be into an apartment which we will use for a few months while we find a home. Here is my schedule for that week of Thanksgiving... Friday, November 20 - happy hour after work to say good bye to my Colorado friends. Saturday, November 21 - pick up a friend at the Denver airport who is coming to help out. Get a rental truck that can tow a car. Do a little bit of loading of the truck, but not too much. Sunday, November 22 - continue loading the truck. We will be bringing all of Sabrina's stuff, a couple of bedroom's worth of furniture, and some essentials for Janet and I. 99% of what we're bringing will be in the truck. Monday, November 23 - pack up the last few things in the truck and drive 977 miles from Longmont, ...

Over the weekend I was working on getting rid of some of our computers. I deleted a bunch of files, emptied the recycle bin, and installed Linux. Not a perfect "wipe clean" system, but decent. I decided to defrag as well, to move files around the disk a bit before installing Linux. Here's one computer: That's nearly 8 years ago since I defragmented that drive....

Several years ago, I bought a Raritan SwitchMan KVM switch. It's used so multiple computers can share one keyboard (K), monitor (V-stands for Video), and mouse (M). Back then, there were only PS/2 style keyboards and mice. So that's what the KVM switch handled. Well, over the years I got a new computer, new laptop, and more and more supported USB inputs instead of PS/2. So the KVM switch became less and less useful. I had a converter that converted the PS/2 signal to USB so I could use it on my laptop, but I was having problems with the keyboard - the computer would think a certain key was "stuck" and would type the same letter thousands of times. I eventually bought a separate USB keyboard to use on my laptop. But then I was stuck with separate keyboards, separate mice, and I was using the laptop display (separate displays). That's why I bought a Belkin Soho KVM switch. It supports both USB and PS/2 style inputs. So, I have my laptop (USB), home computer (USB), a...