Rants

With the Tress and the Horses and the Rocks and the Sheep

Lunch at the Stoplight Deli. We split a California Pita and a bowl of chili with two waters to wash it down.

Meal Cost: $10.87
Tip Jar: 13¢
Spent on Lunch: 11.00
Year to Date: $385.17

 
Ate diner out with friends at the Patagonia Grill, a new South American restaurant in Evans, GA. I had an Americanized version of Anticuchos, marinated pork on a skewer. Donna had Anticuchos de Camaron, grilled shrimp on skewers and covered with a white wine sauce. Again, waters to drink. Good food that definitely warrants a return visit..

Meal Cost: $33.87
Forced Tip: $6.00
Spent on Dinner: $39.87
Year to Date: $425.04

 
The Emperor got a sponge bath (Meguiar’s Quik Detailer and a towel) this afternoon in preparation for tomorrow’s nine city Post Office Road Trip. Prosperity, Little Mountain, Chapin, White Rock, Ballentine, Lexington, Gilbert, Leesville & Wagener.

Started down, went up, back down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 53

Squish Squish

Shore BirdsWhen I stepped up to the refrigerator, as I went about my usual after work business of fixing of chilled drinks for us, my foot made a squish sound. It was water. There was a nice wet spot surrounding the fridge. I pulled it away from the wall to see water leaking from the coupler connecting the ice maker input line to the supply line. Dang. I hate plumbing.

I headed out to the garage and my tool box to get a couple of wrenches. I was not to be so lucky, just tightening the fitting had no effect on the leak. So outside I went to shut off water to the house. I really hate plumbing. With a trip to my local home warehouse store imminent and the water to the house off, I figured now was time to take a look at the kitchen faucet that had developed a drip. You could get it to stop by turning it off and then moving the handle a touch. Move it too little or too much and the leak stayed or even get worse, but I had mastered this shut off maneuver. On the other hand the major faucet user was not to happy with the arraignment. What the heck, Valentine’s Day is coming up.

At the store I bought the new washers and springs for the faucet and also the little ball on a stick thing controls the water flow. I bought a new coupling and as a extra precaution bought some of those little white plastic crush rings (or whatever they are really called.)

Back home I put all the new faucet pieces in and buttoned it up. Next I put the new coupling on the water line. I went outside and turned the water to the house back on. The faucet worked like a charm and was an instant hit with the spousal unit. The coupling on the ice maker water line was spraying a fine mist of water all over the place behind the fridge. And just like the first time, tightening it a little more with the wrench had zero effect. Back outside to turn off the whole house line again. Have I mentioned I hate plumbing?

I took the new coupling off and put the old one back on using two of the new white sleeve things. Success, no leaks (he writes, as he simultaneously knocks on wood.) Pushed the refrigerator back against the wall, but coiled the ice maker water line in such a manner as to leave the coupling easily visible for frequent checks.

By the time everything was tidied up and the tools put away it was much too late to cook dinner at home. Acropolis, here we come. Large Greek salad to split and a gyro each. Water for her and iced tea for me.

Meal Cost: $18.50
Tip: $3.00
Spent Today: $21.50
Year to Date: $355.17

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 43

Afternoon Snack

Mine! Mine!This afternoon I had the sudden urge to get a bag of chips or something from the gedunk machines in the cafeteria. I usually don’t need a snack, but today for some reason I just had to have something. This unnatural craving must have come from some leftover subliminal suggestion implanted during my watching of Super Bowl commercials.

Mixed in between the three soft drink machines, the coffee machine, the change machine and a sandwich machine are two snack machines filled with a selection of salty or sweet or salty/sweet choices. Even though the 2 machines have a nearly identical mix of products, before choosing an item you have to look over every item in each machine before buying something. Almost everything is a national brand, but there are usually a couple of regional selections. Today, if I wanted (and I didn’t) I could have had a bag of Danny’s Pork Bits, AKA pork rinds, AKA the skin of a pig with a layer of fat still attached that has been deep fried to a crunchy consistency. The nutritional information proudly displayed on the front said that a serving of this snack would have 7.5 grams of fat and 70 calories.

I opted for something I thought might be a healtier, a 1-1/2 ounce bag of Lay’s Sour Cream & Chive Potato Chips cooked in sunflower oil and advertising no trans fats. As I sat at my desk enjoying my chips, I read the back panel’s nutrition label and discovered that one serving of these chips had 15 grams of total fat and 240 calories. Wait a minute, how could this bag of chips have twice the fat and 3 times the calories of a larger 2oz bag of pork rinds (which are essentially fat fried in fat?)

I went back over to the machine and re-read the pork skin’s nutrition label again. Yep, 7.5 fat and 70 calories. Oh, here it is, serving size 1/2 oz, servings per bag 4, so if you ate the whole bag yourself, not sharing with 3 of your buddies as expected, you’d get 30 grams of fat and 280 calories.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 33

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.