Rants

Noow What?

Yesterday I whined aboout the laptoop drooping the letter ‘a’ if the key wasn’t hit in just the right way. Toonight my nifty lighted keybooard seems too be dooing doouble ‘oo’s.

OK, maybe I exaggerated that a bit to much, but earlier when I was composing an email it must have happened ten times. I know there is a setting in windows to regulate the keyboard pressure, but it was only happening for the letter ‘o’. And now, later, I can’t seem to get it to do it unless I force it, like above.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 27

I’d Like To Announce…

…my intention to form an exploratory committee to judge whether or not I should think about the possibility of seeking the Party’s nomination for the office of the President of the United States.

If elected, my first order of business will be to pull our troops out of Iraq. We are going to need them to invade Iran.

Why is the SciFi Channel showing wrestling?

How does Carl Yastrzemski feel about a birth control pill being named after him?

The ‘ ‘ key on the lptop is strting to ct up. You hve to hit it in just the right spot to mke it work.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 27

Another HP Rant

I was still a few applications short of a full compliment after the reformat of New Year’s Day. Tonight I wanted to scan something, so I decided to install the software suite that came with my HP4850 scanner. Usually I just install the TWAIN driver, but I wanted to do a little OCR work, so I opted for the full boat. Turns out when I say full boat, that is close, it is more like one of those Indonesian ferries that are forever capsizing from overloading. We got an application to control the scanner, a thing that wants to be my multimedia gallery, some other stuff, including Microsoft.NET, all told over 500 Meg.

When I plugged in the scanner it wasn’t recognized. Huh? Turned it off and back on again. Still no joy. It used to work. I tried plugging it into a different USB port on the PC. Nothing. I uninstalled the software and reloaded it. Still unrecognized. I tried to manually install the drivers and it still said that the thing was an unrecognized piece of hardware on my USB controller. I tried using a different USB cable and that didn’t help either.

Don’t ask me why I tried it, or more importantly why it worked, but I decided to plug the scanner into the cheapo 4-port USB hub I have and DING, new hardware found, HP 4850 Scanner. Now all I have to do is to get XP to stop reminding me that the device might work faster if it is plugged into a USB 2.0 port…

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 24

HP Pavilion Support Experience

A coworker’s mother had her PC crash. She talked to someone on the phone at HP Support and was told that she needed a new motherboard. HP would be glad to repair it for the sum of $339 plus shipping. It would take approximately 6 weeks. Jonesing for a PC, mom went ahead and just bought a new one. But she still wanted to fix this one.

The coworker came and asked for my advice on where to get a motherboard. I searched around a few places on the net and found them for this PC from $225 to $325, but from no place that I had ever heard of, so I was skeptical. I asked her to bring me the CPU and I’d look at it. Maybe it was just a toasted power supply or bad hard drive. When I got it and opened it up, nothing obvious was wrong, so I turned it on. Non system disk! I was going to do a system recover, but I better ask if there was any valuable data on the drive first.

The next day I asked the coworker, who asked her mother, who said, “No. Just make it work.” So that night I tired the system recover option. It got part way through and asked for recovery disc #3.

The next day I asked if her mom had any recovery discs. Mom did indeed have the disks, she had ordered them from HP over the phone.

Today I got the disks. There are 10 CDs, what could be on all them discs? I’ll never know. When I attempted to boot to disc #1, the system told me, “These discs are not for this series of Pavilion PCs.” Dang, I guess I’ll try and see if the hard drive is any good. I got out my WinXP CD and loaded it on the Pavilion. Seemed to take a real long time to format the hard drive, but after that Windows loaded right up. I plugged in my network cable and was on the net.

I went over to the HP support page and entered the PC’s information to see if perhaps she got the wrong recovery discs. I went through the order process until I got a part number – 34naheblu2 – and found it would cost $16.93 to mail them. The only thing on the plastic wrap around the 10 CDs I had was 5069-6299. That’s helpful.

There was a link for online chat support, so I thought I’d give it a whirl to see if they could tell me if I had the right CDs. After 30 minutes of waltzing around, I was informed that the discs I had were the correct discs. The trouble is that the PC was old and would need tattooing to accept the discs (ever hear of this?) and I had 2 options; A) return the PC and get HP to fix it or B) take it to an authorized service center. When I asked what these would cost I was told that the HP option would be $339 (where have I heard that number before?) and that the cost from the authorized service center would be up to them. The closest center is a Best Buy in Augusta, good luck with that….

Nice. HP sells you recovery discs for $17 and they are worthless unless you spend another $350 to get them to make your PC able to use them.

If the PC were mine I think it would be time to load Linux, but if I was her, I’d head out to the flea market this weekend and see about finding a pirated copy of XP (or maybe even Vista) for $20.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 23

Click the more link below for the entire sordid details of the chat, misspellings and all.

Well, I’m Glad That’s Over With

We went out briefly today to run a couple errands, one of which was to burn up Donna’s gift card at Target. She wanted to buy some ribbon and other Christmas stuff at half off. As we made our way to the back of the store where all the holiday stuff was we passed by the greeting card area where an associate was busy putting out the Valentine’s Day cards.

A stop at Kroger to pick up a couple of prescriptions took us by the seasonal aisle. The Christmas stuff was piled into shopping carts with hand lettered signs proclaiming 50% off while unopened cases of heart shaped boxes of chocolates stood by ready to take their places on the empty shelves.

While watching TV this evening we saw a commercial for a Hugh Grant / Drew Barrymore movie that will be opening February 14th.

I’m glad we got that whole Christmas thing out of the way.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 519

$#!@& Gallery

Last night after I sucessfully loaded up the new Florida Trip gallery I was feeling good about myself, so I tried something I tried back in June, upgrade the gallery script to the new and improved eSPG.

Big mistake. Before uploading the newer version I backed up the existing files (I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid) just in case something bad happened. I made all the appropriate changes to the config files, uploaded the new files, changed all the permissions as required and checked for the results. Sure enough it wouldn’t work, kept throwing server errors. Re-uploaded to make sure I used ASCII and not binary when FTPing. Re-changed the permissions and tried again. Crap, still not working. Seems like this is how it went when I last tried it. I must be doing something wrong, but what?

I erased the new files and put the old files back. Guess what, now the old gallery didn’t work either. Let’s see, now what? Made sure I uploaded them correctly, yep, but still error pages. Last time when the thumbnails weren’t working I emptied the cache files, maybe that would help here. That didn’t make any difference, still no galleries.

I then figured I had nothing to lose, so I uploaded the new gallery files and one directory of pictures. When that failed to work I just went to bed.

This morning when I got up I checked the original galleries and for what ever reason (Internet Elves?) it was working again. I checked the new gallery and I got the main thumbnail page, but clicking on the thumbnail to enter the gallery returned my server error message. I logged on as admin to see if that would work and it did. I could even see the photos that I couldn’t before. The admin functions worked and even when I dropped out on an image, the image would display in public view, but that was it, you couldn’t go forward or backward. Curious. Oh well, at least the original galleries are back up.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 504

50,000 Pieces of Wood

Johnny LawSomewhere just north of St Augustine the Emperor glided past the 50k mark. I guess I was wrong the other day when I said there would be miles left to travel on the warranty when we ran out of time. Just the opposite, the 3 year/50k warranty has expired with three days left.

We drove out of Georgia on I-95, but 36 miles was all we could take. Just after stopping and getting some free OJ at the welcome center, we got off the ugly Interstate and picked up A1A. We then drove the whole way down to New Smyrna Beach following the coastal road. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tacky, sometimes crowded and sometimes nearly empty, taking the slow road, if you have the time, is the way to go. It helped that it is off-season which kept the crowds way down. The big trouble for us was that the weather was way off-season. Average high this time of year along the middle Florida coast is is 75, but today is wasn’t even 55. Combined with the 10-20 MPH mean that the top was up all day and any ventures out to look at the beach and waves was very brief.

Even though I was running right at the speed limit, Johnny Law shadowed me for a couple miles when we drove through Daytona Beach.

Before dinner tonight we took a walk around a mile and a half circular boardwalk that is at the north end of New Smyrna Beach’s coast. It was a quick walk over about 50,000 pieces of treated wood. The sun had finally popped out from under the clouds, but it was too late to raise the temperature any as it traversed the last 10 degrees of it’s arc before disappearing beneath the horizon.

Food for today consisted of the “deluxe” continental breakfast at the Village Inn, bah. Lunch at another Barbara Jean’s (which turns out to be a mini chain of about 6 restaurants), very good, but finished off any possible crab cake cravings for a month or so. Dinner was at Vincente’s in New Smyrna Beach, a small Italian place whose baked ziti was just the right amount to split and very satisfying.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 471