I can't think of a subject

That flat tire took out the tube irreparably (rode a few feet too long on it, there are a dozen tiny holes). I had a brand-new spare in the garage, but it had dry-rotted. I guess in the future I'll keep my spare rubber in the basement, the garage gets very hot and very cold and probably has petroleum fumes and such, and I've had tubes rot there in the past. I should probably move my tires out of there as well.

Went to Meijers this morning, but they have nothing but those horrible "self-sealing" inner tubes. That's code for "won't actually self seal, but it'll spray gunk all over and make it impossible to patch. And we'll charge you double. Forget it, the bike shop will be open this afternoon.

They also stock nothing but 27" tubes. Now, 27" tubes will work in 700c tires, but they're not optimum. As far as I know, nobody has made 27" bikes for a decade. Maybe some of the department store crap bikes are 27", I don't know. It does lean me even more towards thinking that if I ever buy a touring bike it'll have 26" tires. You can ALWAYS buy 26" tires and tubes, at any department store and in any country in the world.

My tomato plants weren't terribly happy this year. I'm nursing some Big Boys and I think one Early girl and I think they'll make it and take off soon, but the Cherry that I put in the ground a few days ago died; I probably injured the roots. Next year I'm going to use rolled newspaper pots for everything. The cukes I started like that are happy.

...but Meijers doesn't open their garden section until some late hour like 8AM or something, so I went across the street to Lowes. It's too bad I didn't need Big Boy tomatoes or one of the ridiculously-sized tomato plants, because they have literally hundreds of those. They had ONE SPOT for cherry tomatoes, which means maybe 16 plants (2 flats) and of course they were gone.

So I grabbed one grape tomato plant. What the heck, I've got a couple of empty spots. Maybe we'll find a cherry tomato plant somewhere else.

Next year I'm going to put some work into a more proper seed starting system. I really need to have a cold frame, and perhaps a heated base for sprouting, they seem to be pushing that stuff. Just getting them up out of the basement and into actual sunlight would probably help a lot.

A lack of animal hair

It took three tries to get a good application of screen protector on my new Nook. There's so much cat and dog hair and just dust in the house that no matter how careful I was, I wound up with at least a couple of cat hairs under the protector. I tried twice at home then gave up and brought the job to work. First try on my desk worked perfectly, no dust, hair or bubbles (well, no bubbles that I couldn't chase out with a credit card).

It's a good thing that Kindle protectors are 3 for $3 shipped on eBay. The first was actually an official B&N protector that Jenn happened to have sitting around, which had a $14.95 price tag on it (though I don't think we paid for it, they included that at the time), but the only difference that I saw was that the cheap ones have a protective film on both sides instead of just one. That and the B&N one had a little strip protector for the color touch screen on the 1G.

Oh, and the community seems to have settled on "NOOK STR" (simple touch reader) as the online shorthand for this model. I've looked in to a few threads on MobileRead and it's amazing how defensive people get about their choices; anyone who doesn't agree that their own choice in reader is clearly the right choice for everyone in every situation is attacking them personally.

B&N marketing insists that the name of this device is the "All-New Nook" - though clearly that's silly (being silly seems to be what marketers do). They refer to it in many places in their literature as the "Nook Simple Touch Reader" but they officially say that's NOT its name. In other places they have said that the new device is now to be referred to simply as the "Nook" and the old one is retroactively renamed the "Nook 1st edition" which I'm shortening to Nook 1G.

Main computer back online

It was a mainboard failure, but I think I've identified the actual culprit. About a week ago I put in a nice, cheap USB hub. 10 ports. It seemed to work well. However, the manufacturer decided to save 3 cents by installing a zero-ohm resistor in the "D0" position (should be a diode). I discovered this today after the following escapade. This diode is intended to prevent power from backfeeding into the computer from the hub. Without it there, it was freaking out the power supply and I think eventually it probably caused enough oscillation on the power bus to blow something on the mainboard.

Due to the swapping around, the chassis for this machine didn't have a power supply so I just dropped in the new one I got today (I like to have a spare around). I think this power supply is smart enough to detect shenanigans and refuse to play. I was careful to test proper power-up several times during assembly, but when I plugged everything in, it refused to power up. I quickly determined that the hub was the problem; with it unplugged, no problem.

The hub works very well otherwise, so I'll probably install a diode there and keep using it, but I certainly won't be buying any more of those (I was thinking about it since it's nice just having a huge pile of ports).

Oh, and since the new mainboard has a completely different chipset, I had to reinstall Windows; the old hard drive just got to "Starting Windows" and the specks started flying in for about 2 seconds and it flashed a blue screen and rebooted. At least Windows 7 installs pretty fast.