Rants

Never caught the “Reality TV” bug. But I do get my own version of it via the internet – blogs. You get a glimpse into the personal lives of people all over the world. Back in the Blogger days I would always check a few of the recently updated ones from the front page, then they had this thing called Next Blog that would send you a random site. The latest thing I stumbled on uses Google technology and the fact that everybody has a digital camera and posts their pictures on the net. Random Personal Picture Finder

Don’t do it. The girl at the paint counter at Home Depot tried to warn us, but we were undaunted. We had picked out a nifty maroon paint color called Vin Rouge to redo our bedroom in and went out last evening to get the paint. The girl, before she even mixed the paint up, explained that red based paints use an ink base for the color as opposed to clay based for the rest of the spectrum. She pointed to a board that was divided into 4 squares, one white , one a light pink, one a dark pink and another a light red. She explained that represented a white wall with one, then two and finally 3 coats of red paint. We want that color we told her and we will see her tomorrow if we needed another can. She also warned us not to panic when we opened the can because the paint would look kind of pink, but would dry dark.

After this morning’s one coat, it looks like we will need at least three coats. The first coat even when dry looks magenta except where there was some overlapping which looks more like the finished maroon. Good news is that it only took a half a gallon to do that first coat. We will be able to get by even if we need four coats on the can we bought yesterday (and the one we bought today.)

Now I know why you see red walls in rich peoples houses, they can afford to hire someone to do all this painting and all the paint they will need to do it. So take my advise if you decide to paint a room red, don’t do it, use wallpaper, one coat will do.

The other day I noticed that my Radio/TV card was not working. I kept reporting that another device was using something or another. This morning I decided to fix it. I uninstalled the software and while I was at it I uninstalled some other software I wasn’t using anymore. Then I uninstalled the entries in the hardware section using the Control Panel. While I was at it I also uninstalled another couple entries. There was a question mark item there too, so I thought that would be a good thing to get rid of too. Wrong! A couple seconds after I hit next, my mouse cursor went away and the PC kind of locked down. I fumbled around mouseless for a while and figured I should just reboot. As the PC came up I had a 640 x 480 display with only 16 colors. And it proceeded to find nearly every piece of hardware as if had never heard of any of them. I had to reinstall drivers for audio, video and networking to go along with my planned Radio/TV stuff.

Oh well, I’ve been threatening to reformat C: and start over again with a clean install…I guess I’ll start on that right after I get through with this entry.

I bought a new car in November. They sent me a survey to fill out rating my experience with the purchase. I thought about throwing it out, I now swear that thought is true, but Mazda thinks I filled it out. As a way of thanking me they sent me a bottle of touch-up paint. That was the end of January. About a week later I got a second bottle, it was packaged differently and included a couple of other items, but the main contents was a bottle of touch-up paint. This last Saturday, a familiar envelope arrived in the mail, that’s right, another bottle of touch-up paint. So Sunday I emailed them:

Today I got a reply:

Oh no you don’t, filling out a survey is what got me nto this mess to begin with…