Black fur, Black beauty
I have had a couple routine upkeep things on the back burner for a bit, waiting for the time and motivation to do them. One of those was to run the rug cleaner in the house. I always say that I would like to do it more often but I never seem to be able to increase the frequency. In fact I am not sure if I have done it in 2011 yet.
One of the reasons that it doesn’t get run more often is it is generally a pain in the ass. That is also the reason that as far as I can recall, Alison has NEVER run the carpet cleaner. Pushing it back and forth several hundred times always results in a burning right shoulder by the end of the process. It’s heavier than a normal vacuum cleaner.
The process is also kind of gross, especially when you have two black dogs that shed. I have to stop on a routine basis to pick up globs of black hair that get barfed out of the cleaner. Cleaning up the unit after I am done is not much fun either. The other annoying aspect is the new cleaner we bought a couple years ago is narrower and has a smaller water tank meaning more back and forth passes to cover the same area and more frequent water/solution fill ups.
However, it is generally my responsibility to do the least fun jobs in the house so I went at it. Usually I will run the Dyson first before running the carpet cleaner to cut down on the hair. Since the Roombas just ran prior to my getting home I didn’t bother. While that decision saved me some time by avoiding covering the same areas twice, it also resulted in even more wet clumps of black hair than normal getting sucked out of the carpet.
It took me close to an hour to complete the chore. As always I was amazed at just how dirty the water I was dumping down the sink had become. Yes, I still would like to do it more often, or maybe, gasp, have Ali and I switch off in the project.
Yesterday my new 360 arrived from Amazon, just a couple days after I fixed my old 360. (yes my repair is still holding up) I unpacked it and checked out the unit. I noticed that there was no external connector to snap on a hard drive. I had visions of just using the 60 gig HDD from the old 360 on the new one. Evidently they are not compatible, sort of.
The 360 S is TOTALLY different than the older models, the most noticeable difference is the greatly compacted size of the unit. I am not sure why I would even have thought the old hdd’s would snap right on. Instead of snapping the hard drive on the outside of the unit, you actually insert the hard drive internally into the unit. This is a good indicator of just how cleaned up the console is. Not only is it smaller, it even has room to stick a HDD inside despite it’s compact dimensions.
So anyway I immediately did some investigations on my hard drive options. A peek inside the unit revealed there is a plain old SATA connector in there that is sized for a 2.5″ drive. If you buy an “official” drive for the unit it comes in a plastic shell that will align the drive with the connector and keep it firmly in place. However you don’t HAVE to go that route.
You can actually just insert a bare drive in there. Sure it won’t be as secure but it will stay in place as long as you don’t drop kick your 360. If you use the bare drive method you can just remove your old 360 drive from it’s shell and jam it into the new 360. I opted to not do that however.
The main reason I was concerned about adding a hard drive was I heard somewhere it was required for streaming video. The 4GB of internal flash memory doesn’t leave much room to spare. However in my tests of streaming from Hulu, Netflix, ESPN and Playon all seemed to work just fine. I’ll still probably throw a hard drive in it as eventually I will need the space if I download some of the online games for the 360.
Even though I have an available CAT 5 cable for the 360, I opted to just use the internal wireless N adapter (something else new with the 360S) The performance seemed just fine going sans wire.
So I have the brand new Kinect hardware in the box yet. I plan on seeing what the going rate for it is on Ebay/CL and act accordingly.
This 4th of July weekend should be busy since I wasn’t around last weekend. The grass is a thick mess since we have been getting deluged with rain the past two weeks. I also would like to tackle another one of those routine but pain the ass chores, reapplying mulch to the landscaped areas. That job is majorly not fun.
We also have the normally massive and hectic 4th of July run to time. Last year we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 people sign up.
I’d like to jam in a bike ride and some swim time over the weekend as well. My right knee is still somewhat swollen so running is off the current cardio menu. I may even relax a little bit, who knows?