Home Improvement Tool and Toy Reviews

I am actually sitting at a table inside of Common Grounds Coffee Shop as I write this and have to say that this place is great. It has a very warm and friendly feeling to it. There is free wifi and they even have a Mac hooked up so that you can check your email if you don’t have your laptop with you.

On my first visit I ordered a poppy seed lemon bread slice (which they warmed up for me) and a small Cafe Mocha. I was informed that they make the bread themselves. The Mocha was absolutely delicious and was even delivered to my table for me. They also serve sandwiches and breakfast tacos. Finally they have several different wines that you can taste and/or purchase.

Finally one of the coolest things that I like about this place is that they have a play area for children. They have little tables and chairs for the kids and most notably they have a little wooden train set for the kids to play with. I will definitely be coming back with my son so he can play while I hang out.

Common Grounds is one of the nicest coffee houses that I have ever visited.

Technorati Tags: Coffee House, Round Rock TX, Free Wifi

Well I decided to wake up early this morning and head over to the park to see if I could get some flight time in. There was a slight breeze with a couple of gusts of wind but I decided to give it a try anyway.

Actual Flight Time

After a few adjustments to the plane I go about 5 minutes of total flight time in without ant major crashes. I even was able to have a couple of smooth landings - cool.

Near the end the wind was picking up more and more and the on one gust it caused the plane to nose dive into the ground which caused the plastic nose to crack. I snapped the it back together and it looks like it will not affect the plane.

The other thing is that my tape job on the wing started to falter so that was starting to affect the performance. I decided to call it day and head to work. A storm is blowing in so it looks like it might be the weekend before I can give it another try.

(more…)

No doubt that just about everyone has either seen or at least heard about the movie March of the Penguins. It is a moving story of what Penguins go through to have children.

Well in France the name of the movie was translated to March of the Emperor for whatever reason. What resulted from this translation is this very funny commercial involving someone’s imagination.

Technorati Tags: March of the Penguins, March of the Emperor, Commercials, Funny , Comedy, Movies

After the destruction of the electrical components by crashing into the electrical poll I went and purchased a second Yellow Bee from Harbor Freight yesterday. So basically for the same price as the one plane that I had received from Radio Shack I got 2 Yellow Bees - nice.

Plane # 2 - Flight # 1

I found a church that is building a High School that has 2 football fields next to each other near my work so after work I went to try out the new plane. After talking the 10 or so minutes it takes to get the plane assembled I headed down to the field despite the steady breeze that was blowing.

As you may have guessed the first flight did not last long since the breeze turned into a gust that caused the plane to crash. This crash caused the wing to break in the exact same place as the the first plane’s wing. The reason for the breakage was not because it landed on the wing put because of the whiplash effect that the downward pressure of the crash had on the weak spot of the wing.

(more…)

Harbor Freight Yellow Bee - where do I begin talking about this RC airplane other then to say that it is awesome. It is sturdy, strong, versatile, and cheap. The normal price for it is $40 at Harbor Freight but you can usually get it for $30. Just about every part is replaceable by calling Harbor Freight but you can usually get wing assemblies (front and rear come in the package) for $10.

 I had been eyeing this baby for a while and for Christmas this year my dream of having one came true thanks to my lovely wife.

My wife had originally gotten me a Horizon Hobby Night Flyer from Radio Shack and took one look at it and knew that once I crashed it that it would never fly again. I took it back to RS and took the money to Harbor Freight to get a Yellow Bee.

My First Flight

At first when I tried to get it to fly it would barely climb (more…)

I have not ranted a while about EA Games so they are overdue.

The reason for my rant? A patch for Battlefield 2 no doubt.

This time the rant involves having to download a 500+mb patch to go from version 1.4 to 1.41. The caption of the patch is “updates any version to 1.41″.

Gee thanks EA for again making things 10 times more difficult then it needs to be.

I swear EA Games must be owned by Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: EA Games, Battlefield 2, BF2, Microsoft

Our oldest son is a “Christmas Light Junkie”. He wants to go Christmas lights every night.

One night my wife and I were watching TV when he ran in the room and start saying something that we couldn’t understand and was pointing towards the door. I thought that maybe he had seen someone outside of his window or something so I cautiously went and looked out side - I didn’t see anything out  of the ordinary. He was still talking and pointing so I opened the door. He ran over to the car and was saying “drive, drive - lights”. I finally understood what he was saying - he wanted to go see Christmas lights.

I can only imagine when he is older how his house is going to look with all the Christmas lights he puts up.

Technorati Tags: Christmas Lights, Round Rock TX, Christmas, Austin TX

I see the RSS feed from digg.com several times a day due the the fact that I have it setup on my Netvibes homepage that is my browser home page.

It is funny to see an interesting article that someone had dugg and then try to go to the actual site itself. Almost 50% of the time the site is down due to all of the traffic that it is getting. This is known as “The digg effect”. The have a service called the digg mirror that usually takes a snapshot of the the site and stores it on a different server in case the original site goes down.

That got me to thinking - what if I got dugg? If that happened there is not doubt in my mind that this site would go down - and quick. The reason for that is that I have budget hosting and it just cannot handle the type of traffic that a dugg site will get.

I have looked around at other hosting companies and have checked out their forums to see if their service is any better. I see the same thing over and over again - web server outages, MySQL outages, DNS issues - it is not pretty. I was looking to switch until I saw this at so many other places.

Isn’t there a good hosting company out there?

Technorati Tags: Web Hosting, Jodo Host, VIP Hosting, Reseller Account

The other day I was working on my home computer and had a message pop up from my antivirus software telling me that it was expired. I had not been too happy with the software I had and had already decided that I wanted something different.

I started searching on the internet for something that I could download right away. I can accross antivirusdownload.com which had Norton Antivirus downloads that you could download and install right away. I wasn’t that sure about which version that I needed for my computer and fortunately they have a comparison chart that gives the specifics of each version.

I you are in the market and/or have expired antivirus software you want to get protected right away.

Technorati Tags: Anitvirus Software, Norton Antivirus, Mcafee

The Texas 130 toll road from Highway 79 in Round Rock to Interstate 35 just north of Georgetown opened today.

This means that you can bypass all the traffic from Georgetown to North Austin and take the 290 into downtown now. I know that this is going to make a lot of people happy as I know there are several people that are stuck in that traffic going to and from work.

Personally the toll roads have cut my commute down to a steady 25 minutes regardless of the time of day. I fell sorry for those are still stuck in traffic.

Technorati Tags: Round Rock TX, Texas 130, Toll Roads