Daily Life
I loath Indiana clay, and digging in it.
In the early morning we went to the gym, met Dave there around 9:30. From there we made a stop at Menards to get me some electrical terminals, and then we went to Petsmart. I was so looking forward to seeing the other puppies, but there were none there. Foiled again. We got some dog food for Nokes, and a new knotted rope with a handle because he trashed his puppy rope, and headed home.
First it was breakfast, eggs and hashbrowns, and then we sat down for a half an hour and I watch This Week In Baseball. I haven’t seen that in forever, man how the format has changed.
It was about 12:30 and we headed outside. Today was the day. I had marked on the calendar later in the summer to get outside, hopefully when it was a little cooler, and start digging out our 6+ tree stumps that are growing next to the fence posts in our yard. What a pain, and I knew it would be, but right after a workout in the hot weather, it zapped me. We were outside until 3 working on those, some we had to trim below the surface and pray they didn’t come back, some we had to trash the fence to even get them out they had grow into the chain so bad.
Inside, I took a nap while watching the Yankees Red Sox game, peeking in from time to time just to know what was going on.
Around 7ish, I got up and got back to work, did some more Rotheblog post transfers, and then did some freelance updates.
I don’t remember what I did for the rest of the night. At some point I took the new terminals and attached them to the Pengo, and I also figured out that the voltages were way too high, so who knows if I fried my board or not.
We watched a little bit of SNL and went to bed.
Relaxing Friday Night
After work, since it wasn’t a workout night, we came home and took Nokes on a walk. It has been miserable this week, and even doing a short walk will make you hot and uncomfortable.
We didn’t do a whole lot the rest of the night. We had some dinner, I did some small updates on a dance website and we put in “Primal Fear”, wow does Edward Norton look young.
At about 10 pm, I went back to the office to let a friend of Doug and Dave’s into the back to park a car for the weekend. When I got home, Justin and I talked for a little bit and then Sarah and I continued to watch the movie before going to bed.
BW3’s has the worst service on the history of the planet.
After church, I met with Rick to take a look at the computer lab. I wanted to see what was on the computer there for an operating system and other software so I knew what to expect when I ran my work / training session on using WordPress to maintain the church website in 3-4 weeks. That is, if they had sufficient resources, and I think they do.
From there, we heading out with Wes and Kate and Brown’s down to BW3 or Buffalo Wild Wings in Greenwood. Now, this would have never been my first choice, but we were celebrating for a reason I can’t disclose. (Not for us) I have never thought much of Buffalo Wild Wings, but I don’t really do wings. I think their menu is overpriced for the food you get. They just seem to have a really good marketing campaign.
So, it was just before the game, and it was crazy of course. But we sat there, and we waited an hour for our food. The people behind us who came in after us, same waitor, got their food without ours in sight. The tv’s were horrible for the game, projection screens with the sound distorted you literally couldn’t understand what they were saying. Plus, they had the damn tv’s programmed to all sorts of different games, and only one or two to the Colts. Who cares about Buffalo and New Orleans? Seriously, turn it to the damn Colts, every channel. And stick the random Bengals fan off in the corner.
So, we got up and left. It was total crap how long we waited for something simple. The waitor just kept telling us 5-10 minutes, he must have known we were going to tip him crap even if we ever got our food. But why did the people behind us get priority? Sounds like someone isn’t pushing hard enough in back. I may not be sympathetic to the wait staff crowd here, but seriously, think that through and you know I am right.
Sarah was more angry than me, and is going to write a letter. We’ll see if she has the time.
So we went down to Brown’s, got Donato’s pizza, and just chilled with Deuce to watch the game. It was a nail biter, the Colts almost gave it away to a much improved Titans team with Vince Young full of confidence this year.
When we got back, I was supposed to play Tennis with Dave, but things didn’t work out. I still had to finish the quote I was working on, do some follow up calls, and do the website updates from yesterday.
Soon after the phone calls started. We talked with her parents, and I talked with Justin for awhile and got to play some minesweeper. Sarah headed to bed at a decent time, I stayed up and did some post transfers on Rotheblog and then watched a half hour of the Lonely Hearts movie we rented on Saturday.
Laptop is in the mail
I finally got to send it out on Saturday morning before the gym.
Friday night, I went over to Indyweb’s new location and Mike helped me back up my hard drive. It was pretty easy actually, the drive in the laptop is a SATA, so I should be able to mess around with it at home as well on my SATA hard drive enclosure.
He didn’t end up charging me anything for the 20 minutes of work. I barely had any files on the computer really, so it was an easy job. We did it pretty quick, put some on my flash, some on a CD.
Later on Friday night I hooked up my drive again to my desktop and I just went through and deleted personal files. Don’t like the idea of HP going through my DV9225 laptop to fix stuff and just browsing through whatever. The whole process is very invasive, I don’t like it at all.
Fedex told me that it didn’t matter whether I brought the box by on Friday night or Saturday morning, it wouldn’t arrive to Monday either way. So, I took that time to do the backup Friday night and went Saturday instead.
Now, 7-9 days to fix. They will probably have to replace the motherboard if video is built on. Not a small deal, glad it is under warranty. I will have to check with them Thurs-Fri to see where things are at.
More Marley, baseball and bonfires
We ran the laptop by Fedex in the morning really quick and then met Dave at the gym at 9:30.
After we were done, I said Dave could come over for breakfast if he wanted, and being a single guy, I haven’t seen him turn down the offer yet:) We stopped to pick up some groceries and a gift card at Target, and then we headed to the post office where I needed to mail out some arcade boards to get fixed.
While Sarah and Dave cooked, I ran to Blockbuster and the bank. When I got home, we all ate quickly.
Dave made some large pancakes that were supposed to be crepes, we think next time we’ll concentrate on making them crispier. We also had waffles, links, and eggs. Dave had to run out to get ready for the Vincent wedding.
Sarah and I sat down and read our 30 pages or so of Marley. Towards the end of that amount we started to get really choked up. They had started to talk about putting him down, and that was just a little too close to home after what happened to us in February. We weren’t sure if we could keep reading together out loud, so fortunately it was our quota for the day, and it was time to stop.
Sarah headed off to the Settle wedding that she got invited too, turns out the reception was right across from the street of our old apartment.
Sarah left and I mowed the back yard. Everything has been growing like crazy. This past week, wham!, fall hit. All of a sudden we have these really cool temperatures, we open up the house, I am wearing wind breakers in the morning. Temps here are like a lightswitch. It was cold in the morning when I got up and wandered around to find my breakfast.
Came inside, I had a quote to do and some website updates. The updates I couldn’t do, the website was down, so I turned on the Red Sox Yankees game and laid down. I was really cozy, it was nice to take a nap, watch the game, and watch the Red Sox whoop the Yankees 10-1. Sarah called during to see if I wanted to come to the reception, apparently it was fine. But there was no way I was moving.
Later on, Dave called from the wedding. He wanted to know what we were doing after, sounded like maybe we would all get together and go out to Wes and Kate’s for a bonfire. Sounded like fun. I had a late dinner, worked on the quote a little bit, and then we headed out.
Paula and Dave both came as well as Styf’s. It was a gorgeous night, we setup some powerful free standing lights and tossed a football around. The girls sat by the fire and talked, some about the wedding, mostly about general stuff. We had some drinks and just chilled out. Wes was really funny tonight, so we just let him do all the talking. Styf’s had to leave pretty early, they had a house guest, so it was just the six of us for most of the night, and it was pretty low key. But that was just the perfect way to end the day.
Car & computer maintainance and reading about a dog named Marley
Busy busy day. Dropped off my car in the morning for an oil change. We got to head home about the usual time, a little after 4, picked up the car and Sarah headed home as I headed up the street to Indyweb. They were the good old boys that we shared an office space with eSystems for a while at Sherman park. Mike said he could help me out and do a backup on my laptop harddrive, and for much cheaper than Best Buy or Circuit City would do. They made me an awesome offer of $100 for 9GB of data. Man, if my laptop was my primary machine, that would be very expensive.
The whole backup took only 20 minutes. After I saw the drive out of the computer, and what Mike did, I knew that I could do it from home. I wanted to do it from home again too, we just copied my files off the drive, and I wanted to erase most of my files before I sent it off to HP. Something about having them see my personal photos didn’t thrill me, and with the possibility of the laptop being wiped out, why not right?
When I got back Sarah and I took Nokes for a walk. I found out I had until 8 pm tonight to take the laptop out in the provided express box, or just take it tomorrow morning, it would arrive at HP at the same time.
When we got back, Sarah relaxed. I had some feedback for a client I needed to get out on a project scope.
Last night we had talked with my parents about a book that we would be getting for free, a 401K financial investments kind of book. My parents had read it out loud together, and I thought that sounded like a good idea. I knew that this meant Sarah and I needed to finish reading “Marley and Me” first. We had gotten through about 170 since last December, most of that was while we were on the road over Christmas. I hadn’t felt that motivated to me, I wasn’t as captivated by the story given the subject matter as I thought I would be. But I knew Sarah wanted to read it, so I figured if we read about 35 pgs a night for four nights, we could be done.
Tonight we read 50, so we are in really good shape to be done with the book by the time the 401K book arrives in the mail.
That was about it for Sarah. She was pretty wiped out from the week, being sick, and the general frustration of her class.
I was up really late, actually. With all of the files I got from my laptop, I did a ton of file organization and needed backups that I had put off for a month. I also went ahead and disassembled my external hard drive so that I could tap into my sata drive from the laptop and clear things off there as best I could. I got things around for the morning too, there were a coupe of packages that would need to go out and a bill or two, so I got that all ready.
HP DV9225 Laptop broke, video display issue
A week ago when Chapman’s were down, my laptop screen wouldn’t come back out of sleep mode. All of the lights were on, and all indications were that it was working fine by the lights, but the screen wouldn’t come up.
I have an HP DV9225, and it was pretty high end when I bought it in February. But it is still brand new in my mind and shouldn’t be having any issues.
I spent over an hour on the phone, maybe two, with some Indian tech support that I could hardly understand. After removing and putting the battery back in the computer came back up fine. He had me reset the BIOS, and I also went in later and removed the John Deere software I had installed over the weekend. I figured things would be fine.
But this weekend it did it again. I got the series of three beeps again like I did the first time when I freaked out. I know a series of beeps is a hardware error.
This time tech support had me do the same stuff, and re-seat the memory. Nothing worked. So, now I get to be without it for two weeks at least to send it back to them on their dime to repair it. It is a video display issue, and I hope it doesn’t magically fix itself in the mail on the way to them.
But to say that I am disappointed is an understatement. There is the obvious inconvenience, but there is also the fact that I chose this laptop based largely on brand loyalty. I have had good luck with HP stuff in the past and I thought I would stick with it. I had gotten the blue screen of death (BSOD) a couple of times since I had it, some sort of memory dump. So, I am hoping that the video display part was just faulty and it will work perfect for a long time when I get it back.
But I have to think about buying HP again in the future. I don’t like ever being without my machine, and don’t like the fact that I can’t return it somewhere more local. The tech support guy couldn’t tell me where the repair location I was mailing the DV9225 laptop was located, he just didn’t know. I have to wait on the box, and then wait on them. It should be under the manufacturer’s warranty, but if it is not, I know that I won’t be buying HP again. I can only assume replacing the whole screen potentially on my dime, would be costly.
