The Shuttle Launch

After my computer store excursion I had to go into stealth mode. Trina had returned from out of town and I was already in trouble for the handiwork she did know about. You would think that a wife would be grateful that her husband would do things around the house but not my wife. Of course her ideas for home improvement and mine seem to be diametrically opposed.

She sees things such as landscaping, house painting, and minor repairs as at the top of the list. I am more inclined to think of rewiring the house with optical cable, running Ethernet over power line, or adding home automation devices as home improvement. I mean seriously who doesn’t want to control their lights from the comfort of the computer or be able to set the thermostat from the Internet?

Still I guess she does have a valid point. Our house is filled with technology goodness but my backyard still has not been fully landscaped since we moved in 14 years ago. I blame the electronics industry. If they would come up with cool landscape technology I would be all over it.

The idea of bringing out the new Small Form-Factor Super Computer at this moment seemed like a bad idea. She had already been snooping around trying to figure out where all these small boxes were coming from so the last thing I needed was for her to realize that we had yet another computer in the house. Computers already outnumber family members by an order of magnitude so it just seemed like a good plan to leave it slid under the desk until a more appropriate time.

We are getting ready to leave on vacation tomorrow (after the Diamondbacks game of course) and I had decided that vacation would be the perfect time for me to do a little server building and configuring. So while Trina and the kids were busy packing such mundane things as clothing, jackets, and food I focused on the important things like computers, drives, switches, monitors, speakers, cables, keyboards, mice, and other indispensable things that have to go on vacation.

When Trina began to see all of the computer equipment being gathered into the living room she began to question what was going on. I explained that I just needed to take a few things with me on the trip to make sure that I could get the work done that I had to do. This of course led to a rather lengthy lecture on how this was supposed to be a vacation. Well duh, I knew that. But just because we are on vacation doesn’t mean we had to stop living.

I did have to admit, looking at the pile of technology in front of me it looked more like relocating an IT department than it did a family vacation. I was told that I had to pare down the amount of computer equipment that I could take with me. There was just no way I needed 4 computers with all the various peripherals in order to go on vacation. So after Trina left the room I put two of the desktop computers back and slid the small form factor computer out from under the desk and added it to the pile.

This worked out perfectly. She couldn’t possibly get mad at me now. After all she just told me that I needed to take a smaller computer footprint on vacation so really this is her idea right? I am sure this whole Shuttle computer idea is going to fly with her. Trina is going to be so proud of me.