keep your screen clean
For those of you who don’t like a dusty monitor, click here to clean your screen.
update 111807
Sorry for the lack of updates. There seems to be a lot going on, and with the holidays quickly approaching, there’s not a lot of time to do much blogging. My laptop has also been giving me grief for the past week. Windows Media Player has suddenly stopped recognizing the WMV file format, so I’m unable to view videos. There are other media players that I can use offline, but when I want to watch movies on Netflix’s site, it no longer works. I completely uninstalled and reinstalled WMP, but I still get the same result. My friend suggested installing Windows on top of everything, but that didn’t work either. So I’m currently trying to back up all my data so I can do a complete rebuild. This normally wouldn’t be such a task for me, but without an external HD, it’s a challenge (and time-consuming).
Christine and I have started to spread the news of her pregnancy to our friends and co-workers. Those we have told are very excited and happy for us. We had stopped in Babies R Us the other night, and I have to say, it was pretty humbling. I learned …
- about swaddling,
- that Serta makes mattresses for babies,
- and that I can’t hear the baby’s heartbeat unless I have one of these.
I certainly cannot wait for our little peanut to come into our lives!
hardware failure?
My external hard drive may have crashed last night. What kind of data did I have on it? Well, let’s see – music, digital images, videos, installation files, etc. My digital images are also on my laptop and the family pc. As for my music, well, the majority of them are on both my iPod and the laptop. I may have lost everything else, which is really not that big a deal. I think the most precious items would be our pictures, and I (usually) back those up immediately after they’ve been uploaded from our cameras.
I’ll have to crack open the case and try hooking up the HD to the pc as a slave drive to see if I can salvage the data. I’ve looked into professional help for data recovery, but I read that the diagnostic fee alone could run me $500. Not worth it at this point in time. Looks like I need to continue burning CD’s/DVD’s in addition to using an external hard drive (back up my backups). Well, if the external hard drive is still usable, of course.
coping
So I’m back up and online. I did not use a computer at all on Saturday. How was my day? Uneventful. Shutdown Day should’ve included TV, iPods, video games, radio, etc. And it’s my understanding that a good part of the online community did NOT shut down. (more…)
Shutdown Day approaches
Saturday is Shutdown Day. I’m participating by going the whole day without a computer. No e-mail, no internet, no Twitter, no Twittervision, no Digg, no iTunes, no Flickr, no del.icio.us, no Google, no Wikipedia, no YouTube, no WordPress, no Netflix, no games, no widgets, no blogging, no blogroll, no uploads, no downloads, no troubleshooting, no ripping, no burning, no RSS feeds, no Wi-Fi, no way Jose.
I’ll be back on Sunday to tell you how my day went.
Shutdown Day – March 24
“Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?”
I had done this before for even longer (during Lent), but that was nearly 10 years ago. I rely on the computer for news, communication, work, and entertainment, and with everything being digital these days (from photos to music to video), it will be tougher to do. I’m sure I could handle 24 hours, but I don’t think I could repeat a 40-day performance.
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate! Shutdown your computer on this day and find out!
Dell to recall 4 million batteries
The recall affects certain Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and XPS notebook computers shipped between April 2004 and July 18, 2006. Fortunately for me, mine is not on the list.
friday five – computer habits
1. How much time do you spend on the Internet daily? – on weekdays 3 hours; the weekend probably jacks the daily average up to 7 hours. That’s just the Internet. I’m always on the computer.
2. What are your favorite 3 websites? – Digg.com, Flickr, and I’ve just started using Bloglines.
3. Do you eat at your computer? – Occasionally at work. Almost never at home.
4. Pick one and why – Reading the news online or in a newspaper? – Online. It’s cleaner. For local news, I watch it on TV.
5. How many people are on your instant messenger buddy list? – just 2, on Gmail – my wife and my helpdesk partner at work.
update 050206
- Laptop is better. I’m trying new things, like not having any icons on the desktop.
- Storms continue to rage through the area. I slept through Sunday’s set, but last night’s rumbles kept me up. Today was beautiful – sunny and 80. Tomorrow: more storms.
- Unbreakable – **** – great storytelling from M. Night Shyamalan; Bruce Willis shines.
- Sahara – **** – nice mix of humor and action (a la Indiana Jones); very entertaining.
- American Idol – the girls don’t stand a chance as we approach the final four. My personal favorite is rocker Chris Daughtry. The man won me over with his rendition of Bryan Adams’ “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” I never liked the original, but Chris put some heart and soul into his performance. I would purchase this song if it was released by him.
- I haven’t had a chance to edit the audio from D’s fine arts festival. I plan to be out in the yard this weekend (weather permitting), so it may not be until the following weekend.
clean install
Yesterday, I tried ridding my laptop of the junk that comes free with any purchased computer these days. Roughly 20 GB of crap sat on my hard drive, and it was time to clean it up. The only true way to do this is to restore XP from scratch. This task is never an easy one. In fact, each time I do it, I always seem to mess something up.
- This time, it was the ability to play a DVD/CD without booting Windows (known as MediaDirect).
- Not only did I break that function, I lost the decoder that plays DVD’s in Windows.
- And just when I thought things were bad, while trying to fix MD, I somehow erased some of the data I had backed up on a DVD.
Nearly 12 hours, 13 backup disks, 2 restore CD’s, 9 downloads, 3 message boards, 4.5 hours of sleep, 3 mishaps, and 2 XP installs later … I’m somewhat back to normal. Just a matter of restoring all the little apps I use. MediaDirect is working again, and I can play DVD’s both in MD and XP. However, the data is gone. Oh well; it could’ve been worse.
fast weekend
Time flies.
- Cut the grass for the first time this year. I’ll need to treat the yard for weeds and prune some tree branches.
- Washed CL’s car; after last week’s trip, dead bugs everywhere. Looks good now.
- Being outside this weekend is beating me up. My allergies are getting the best of me. Need to stock up on drugs.
- cooling pad before
and after 
- Jarhead – *** – great performance by Jake Gyllenhaal.
- Mission: Impossible – **** – a birthday gift from the kids. It’s amazing how much more you enjoy a movie when you actually “get it”. Looking forward to M:I-III.
- Chicago Cubs 7, St Louis 3 – Greg Maddux still got it. What else is there to say?
Final week of April; one-third of the year is about done. Time flies.
1 year
A lot has happened since I started on Blogger a year ago today …
- the creation of teny jr dot com
- CL and I celebrated 5 years of marriage
- got a new job
- D became a teenager
- spent my first Christmas in CT since ’97 (CL’s and D’s first with my family)
- got my new laptop
I reposted the original entries that got me to start blogging – basically me bitching about work. Since I no longer work there, I felt it was ok to put them back in (names were changed to protect others).
A total of 283 posts, and I don’t plan on stopping.
update 022106
Weird day at the helpdesk. Got all kinds of weird calls, and I felt befuddled. I’m glad it calmed down as the work day came to a close.
I’m enjoying the new laptop. I’m still trying to get used to it, as opposed to the main family PC. I like the keyboard very much, but the touchpad is not as easy as I thought it would be; a wireless mouse for my birthday might be good.
I’ve finished transferring the majority of my files to the laptop. The next big project I’ve got is upgrading to WordPress 2.0.1. After the upgrade, I’ll revise the blog’s theme.
I’m giving up the iPod for Lent. I’m in the process of converting certain AAC files to MP3′s. This way, I can still use my smaller MP3 player. Now some may think this is cheating. I didn’t say I was giving up music; just the pod itself. I take it everywhere I go, and it has well over 10 gigs of music. And I’m also losing the best feature – the smart playlist. My other MP3 player doesn’t even support playlists. That’s gonna suck. I’m gonna have to start listening to “albums” again.
Monday’s “hour” of 24 was another dull one for me. Too much indecision from the President, a lot of sneaking around behind the boss’s back at CTU (that happens a lot), and not enough Jack. When Jack did show up, he knocked out his fellow CTU agent Curtis and took out 2 bad guys and a helicopter with no more than his pistol.
Just finished watching the ladies on American Idol. A few good performances, but I couldn’t tell you who. Also saw Italy’s Enrico Fabris take the gold from Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick in 1500m speed skating. That might teach someone to keep their mouth shut.
update 021906
The M140 features:
Intel Pentium M 740
Windows XP Media Center
1 GB RAM
80 GB HDD
DVD burner
I’m currently trying to remove all the “crap” Dell preloaded it with, then add the apps I want to have on it.
Been enjoying the Olympics, but does it all have to be on at primetime? They stretch it so late that I’m so tired the next day. And in the age of the internet, it’s very easy to get realtime results of big events taped to be shown later that night. On several occasions I’ve already known the outcome, and the anticipation is gone.
4 degrees. 10 below wind chill. Yeah, it’s cold here.
my new toy
Dell XPS M140
My new laptop arrived Friday! A very special “Thank You” to my family for this Christmas gift!
major bummer
Talk about a letdown. I’ve been expecting to receive my new laptop by the end of this week. Tracking the status of my order on Dell’s website, I found I misread the estimated ship date. I thought the ship date was Monday the 13th; it’s actually Monday the 20th. So I have to wait at least 7 more days.
All they gotta do is put it in the box and on the truck!
update 021206
Congratulations to Chad Hedrick on winning gold in the 5000m!
I have a new doctor now, and I had my first physical in 7 years. This doctor is big on preventive medicine, and he’s very thorough. His diagnosis – I’m a healthy 33 yr old with a little bursitis in my knee.
It’s finally been winterlike here; temps in the 30′s. January was unusually mild (avg temp in mid 50′s). All we want is some decent snowfall; wouldn’t mind one storm like the one they’re getting back home.
Ordered my new PC yesterday. Due to the constantly changing deals by Dell, I opted for the XPS M140 instead of the Inspiron 6000. Surprisingly, the powerful M140 is more affordable than the 6000 after I customized them with the features I want. I went back and forth between the two many times before finally weighing the pros and cons. And the M140 won decisively. I should be receiving it this week. I’m trying to contain my excitement, but it’s difficult. 
