Month: March 2003

Well fun time is over, tomorrow it is back to work. I don’t know what is scarier, having a bunch crap to straighten out from what went down while I was gone or having nothing to fix because they didn’t even miss me…

We stayed in New Orleans at the French Market Inn on Rue Decatur. We were there for a total of 5 nights and our total bill was $800. At first that sounds like a lot, but it works out to 160 a night and for a room in the French Quarter that’s not bad. Especially considering that we got like their nicest room (I think.) It was the size of a decent 1-bedroom apartment. There was a full kitchen, a full bath, a living room, a small dining area and a bedroom with a large closet, nicely done up in a mixture of antiques and modern furnishings. There were 15′ foot ceilings, a TV and phone in the living room and a TV and phone in the bedroom, a ceiling fan in the bedroom, a balcony over looking Decatur Street from the bedroom and it was centrally air conditioned.

Before you wonder if I’ve changed the title of this page to “Brian’s Daily Rave” let me list a couple of things that were wrong with the place:
1) The remote control for the TV in the living room did one thing and that was it – channel down – any button you pressed, and I mean any, made the channel decrease by one. To get it to turn on or adjust the volume you had to use the buttons on the TV. We brought it to the attention of the front desk and they sent up a maintenance person to fix it. He tried a lot of buttons and confirmed my diagnosis, but had no solution. He literally said, “Gee, I don’t know why it would do that.” He did show me that I could use the Nintendo controller to make the channel go up as well as down. Volume and power were still on the TV. Thanks a lot. His parting words to me were, “Boy I hope I can go eat now.” I thought to myself, you must be starved after all the effort put forth fixing my problem. This encounter led us not to call for maintenance for anything else.
2) Both phones had flashing message lights and possibly still do. There were no instructions on the phones so we didn’t even try and figure them out. We unplugged the one in the bedroom so the flashing wouldn’t bother us when trying to sleep.
3) There were no phone numbers on the phones either, so you couldn’t call someone and give them your number.
4) The phone in the living room had the room number 214 on it, nice, but we were in 221.
5) The toilet ran. Nearly every time you flushed you had to go back after a minute and jiggle the handle to get it to stop.
6) The Jacuzzi tub had 2 of the 4 jets missing so we didn’t even turn it on. Might have tried if there were some instructions lying about.
7) It was a full kitchen, but the entire inventory of all the cabinets and draws were 3 plates, 1 fork, 1 knife and one tablespoon.
8) In several places in the bedroom and living room the wallpaper covering the ceiling was dangling. It was coming up at the edges in other places, but most worrisome were the pair 1-1/2 square foot flaps hanging down in the bedroom over the bed.
9) The place seemed dirty, the carpet was badly stained in lots of places and there were a few dangling dust stalactites that looked as if they might be launched into your luggage by the breeze kicked up by the AC ducts.
10) On day 1 we were out of room from 7:30 AM until almost 3 PM and they hadn’t cleaned the room. We snagged some fresh towels off a cart that was in the hall. Day 2 was the same thing. From then on we just hung the do not disturb sign out and would get some clean towels from any cart we saw in the hall or courtyard.
11) We had to share the room with a mouse. Donna, having grown up in New Orleans, first assumed it was a roach when she saw the movement in her peripheral, but amended her identification when she noticed the tail. We saw him a couple times and both times he evaded my chase. To be fair there was exterminator in our room within an hour of complaining to the front desk about Mickey and he was never seen again.

Saturday morning, my wife, her mother and I leave for a week long vacation in New Orleans. We are driving down in Mom’s Honda Civic, so there is one empty seat. First person to show up at my place Saturday morning after 8:00 PM can come with us. Don’t pack too much as I think the three of us will have the trunk full, so your luggage may have to ride on your lap.

I bought Norah Jone’s CD long before she got the Grammy hype. Not that I’m some sort of trendsetter, but I did catch an interview on NPR and liked what I heard. Just stumbled onto a video for “Come Away With Me” on VH1 this morning and I hated it. There is something about it that didn’t seem to fit. Maybe it was just my preconceived notion that the only thing that would work video-wize for her is a dimly lit shot of her playing the piano, maybe in a smoky jazz bar.

Stumbled onto the Dell Support forums while rummaging the support area. Sure enough, there was a long assed thread on the SoundBlaster Live card I got. Part of the reason I spent a few hundred more on the 4550 instead of the 2350 was the separate sound blaster audio card and an nvida video card as opposed to built in stuff on the motherboard. Turns out the Sound Blaster is a proprietary Dell thing made in who knows where and not supported by Creative Labs at all. So I have two options, buy a real card or go back to XP. I went to Staples and bought a SB PCI512 card. It is a step down from the live, but budget only allowed a $50 expenditure. I know I could have got the Live for fifty online somewhere, but I wanted the easy return option of a neighborhood brick and mortar store just in case the card wasn’t the problem. It was. The new card works fine, I’m happy now overall, but unhappy with Dell.

Couldn’t get audio out of any of the CD devices because there were no audio cables running from either drive to the sound card. Can they get the sound to the card via the IDE cable? I found a cable I had laying around and hooked it up to the DVD and now I can play a CD, but the sound is garbled just like the DVD sound. I suspect I may not have the right drivers, but I can’t get them from Creative as the SB Live card is a Dell OEM model SB0200 and I can’t get any info from Dell right now as my service tag is not in their database…