Shuttle launched

Seems, in the end, to have been a particularly trouble-free launch. The view from the external tank camera was impressive.

Something of an adventure

This morning I had the fascinating experience of refinancing my house over the phone. Somebody at the bank had noticed that our 30-year mortgage had 18 more years to run at about 1.5% higher than the current rate, and that our $50K equity checking account was nearly maxed out. So they called us. The flower_cat and I went in to discuss our options and do any necessary paper-signing, but as it turned out all they needed to increase our equity line-of-credit was a phone call. Aren't computers wonderful? That and the fact that the house is now worth significantly more than it was 12 years ago.

While that was being approved (which took all of an hour or two) the nice young lady at the bank was researching our mortgage options. A few more questions, and our 30-year mortgage (with 18 years or so left to run) became a 15-year for enough extra to pay off the balance on the second, and with payments only $200/month higher. The last time we refinanced, we spent two hours signing papers.

Should have done it a year ago, of course. I'm a financial idiot most of the time.

Meanwhile, back at the Starport...

On the way home I picked up some more "recording media" at Fry's -- a Maxtor 200GB hard drive for only $0.45/GB. That's right, you can now store the contents of two CDs for roughly the same price as printing a single 8x10 photo on good paper with an inkjet. The price, $79, is Fry's "get 'em now because they're not making 'em eny more" closeout price -- they'll go down to $69 in a month or so, but only if they have any left. I already had one from a couple of weeks ago, and I get really nervous if I only have one of any particular size of disk.

I figure I'll put them on the main fileserver in a RAID-1 configuration, and retire the ageing SCSI drives before they start failing.

I should have gone to bed half an hour ago.