Monday, February 21, 2000

Ah! then let Misers bury thus their Gold,
  Who though they starve, no farthing will produce:
But we lov’d to enjoy and to behold,
  And sure we cannot spend our stock by use.
— Katherine (Orinda) Philips (1631–1664), To my Lucasia, in defence of declared Friendship

I might have been done better for myself by burying my Gold today. More on that later.

I spent much of the weekend working on an application that downloads a particular weather webpage to a computer (thanks to wget), then reads through the webpage, extracts the weather information, and displays that information on the screen. I’m going to be running that on a spare computer in my room, and my plan is to wall-mount the monitor on one of those TV wall mounts.

So I ran out to the store to buy a grand total of four things: a TV wall mount suitable for 14″ monitors, a monitor extension cable (when the monitor’s mounted on the wall, the cables will probably need some extra slack), a computer power extension cable (ditto), plus a 50-foot 10-Base-T cable. That latter was for a little experiment of mine: now that I have Network Address Translation running on my network, I can feed my one 56k internet connection to all of the machines. I wanted to hook up Mom’s computer, which is in the room directly above mine, to my LAN, so that she could feel that power.

Now, I’m trying to save up for my retirement. I’ve decided to try to put USD $10,000 into the stock market, using The Motley Fool‘s Foolish Four. At that rate, I only have about USD $200 to spend each month. No sweat, I thought. I had about USD $80 left to spend.

I bought only the items listed above (well, plus a Twix bar). The total came to USD $120. Eek. There goes my budget.

Ah well. We ran the networking cable out the window, and down into my room, and BOY did it work well. Now to figure out a way to install it inside the walls. Dad says that we can run it through a convenient cavity that runs next to both rooms.