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…
Three posts in one. Friday the monitor arrived and I got about 15 minutes in front of it. Donna graciously let me at least take it out of the box before we piled into the car and drove to Hilton Head Island for the weekend. It didn’t rain the entire drive down, but close. Saturday morning was spent visiting about 8 of the condos Jerry manages to take pictures for the web page update. Saturday evening the four of us, me and Donna and Jerry and his Donna, went out to eat at place called Charley’s Crab. The hostess who seated us reminded me of Helen Hunt. I couldn’t stop looking, every time she came near our area to seat other customers, I would take another peek. I hope she didn’t notice, but then she is probably used to being stared at with those looks. Actually she was a lot younger Helen, more of a Leelee Sobieski.
Sunday we drove home. It wasn’t raining really, but it was too cold and damp for the top to be down. We got back in time for Donna’s Mom’s famous St. Patrick’s Day feast of corned beef, cabbage carrots and potatoes. The neighbors across the street came over and we all stuffed ourselves. After dinner I went over to help this fellow out of a computer jam. He started using AOL. but after a year or so he traded them in on MSN. He recently got tired of paying 21.50 a month for the service so he moved over to ATT Global Net. Did I mention he is a computer novice? He has only had a PC for 2 years, having finally broke down at the age of 75 and joined the internet revolution. He was still getting a dellnet thing popping up in the background, so I headed over for what I thought was a 5 minute fix. I came home an 1-1/2 later having fixed a few things, but still left a possible virus alive. His son mentioned he might have the Klez worm, so I went to the Symantec site to update the Norton virus stuff he got with the PC 2 years ago. Trouble was he had Windows ME which I know nothing about it peculiarities. Left him with the downloads running, so I’m going to have to check back with him tomorrow to see what happened.
Purchased Sunday: 12.25 in fuel
Money spent since 03/03/03: $43.00
Started down, went up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 45
Something isn’t exactly kosher with the PC’s setup. Can’t play an audio CD and when a DVD movie is played the audio is all garbled. It also scrambles the audio when I try and load a software title from a CD in the DVD drive. I only installed the drivers from the Creative CD, because I didn’t want all that extraneous crap cluttering up my system, but it looks like I might try installing it all to see if there is some sort of setup program. Or maybe I need to open the case and check to see where the CDROM sound cable(s) are hooked up.
We went out to dinner with friends at Hilton Head. They took us to a very nice restaurant called Charley’s Crab, cloth tablecloths and everything. During the meal at the next table someone’s cell phone starts ringing. As usual, a totally unimportant conversation ensues. Bad enough we had to hear her end of the conversation, but the poor folks she was dining with had their face-to-face conversation put on hold while this woman chats about her day so far. Before the drive back to the condo I made a pit stop in the Men’s Room. While using the urinal a phone rang in the stall right next to me and the guy answered it. He then carried on a conversation about how busy it was a work that day, etc.