Rants

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…

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.

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.

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.

This evenings walk consisted of a stroll along busy Pine Log Avenue from the Home Depot over to Bi-Lo to get a couple grocery items inadvertently forgotten on the Sunday shopping trip. it is really cool to see drivers reactions as two people walk down a side walk along a busy 5 lane road, they actually hesitate some and maybe even creep away from the curb towards the outside of their lane, pedestrians are such a rare site anymore. On the way back to the car I noticed the sign outside the Jiffy Lube, “TIRES ROTATED IN A JIFFY” and below it, “WINTERIZE YOUR CAR.” It’s March 10th, spring is only a week and a half away officially, update your sign people.