Month: March 2003

Leelee

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

Can You Hear Me Now II?

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.

Can You Hear Me Now?

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.

If I Only Had A Brain

At work they have this bulletin board where they post all kinds a things for public consumption, a list of Activities Committee events, birthdays that month, etc. On the list of heath related items for March are several things, including that this is National Brain Awareness Week (10th – 16th.) Huh? We need to be reminded of that. Well, now that I think of it, I know quite a few people that need constant reminders to use their head for something besides a hat rack

The monitor made it from Greensboro to my house today. My wife was kind enough to let me take it out of the box and set it up before we drove off into the rain to Hilton Head for the weekend. Ooooh, nice.

2/3 Of My New PC

It was raining for the ride in, it was beautiful during working hours and after. Hurried home because 2/3 of my new PC was delivered. Got speakers and the CPU, the monitor made a sight-seeing trip to Greensboro, NC in the back of a UPS truck. It is on its way back now, last I checked it was back in West Columbia, SC. It should get here tomorrow. We are going away for the weekend to Hilton Head, so I won’t even get to unpack it. Sunday. I am running on the new CPU now. I started it up in XP just to see what it looked like, but then promptly fdisked it, partitioned into a 12 and an 18 gig drives and loaded Win2K back on. I’ve got just the bare essentials on now, I’ll load the apps as needed. (I haven’t loaded the spell checker yet, so if this is spelt a little rough….)

Purchased Today: Zero
Money spent since 03/03/03: $31.75
Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 44

271 Miles

Ran the gage down until it was right on “E”, so I spent the most money on gas in recent memory. 10.24 gallons @ 1.659 per equaled $17. I went 271 miles on that tank so I got about 26 MPG. Glad I don’t drive an 8-cylinder SUV or live in California.

Purchased Today: $17.00 in petrol
Money spent since 03/03/03: $31.75
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 42

RADIOIO

I have been listening to Radioio for a couple of weeks now. It is a listener supported site that plays a mix of music that really agrees with me. Freeloaders such as myself are only allowed to listen to the lo-band/mono stream. The high-band and a bunch of different category streams are for subscribers only. $20 bucks a month or $200 a year gets you the works. The have a free 3 day trial so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Signed up Sunday night buy PayPaling them 20. It was Monday before I actually got upgraded, and right away there was trouble in radio paradise. 1} Can’t get it at work. The network weasels have got it all blocked (can’t blame them, our bandwidth already sucks, Internet access is slower than dial-up sometimes.) And 2} all those other variety of streams are vaporware, not available yet. I cancelled – back to free for me.