¶ 10:16 PM 0 Comments

  Over the last couple weeks or so I've been driving out to some random coffee shop (usually but not always starbucks) and sitting to try and make progress in that book I was reading (PHP/MySQL Head first). Although I haven't really made a lot of progress.

Recently I did see an add for one of those "universal laptop battery" deals for like $30 or whatever. And since my laptop never did have terribly great battery life to begin with never mind two or so years later so I decided to buy said universal battery pack, in particular the iRecharge Universal Rechargeable Battery for Laptops.

Took me a while to figure out that there was no "input" adapter for my HP, just an adapter for the "output".

I put on charging as soon as I figured out how to hook it up. Took a surprisingly long time to finish charging. I mean the charge indicator (several green LEDs you get when you push a battery status button) has all four green LEDs but the LED that turns green when it's done still stays red for a while.

The instructions also suggest charging the laptop battery fully before using it so I did that as well. Then, finally, I tried it just now. Plugged in this new universal battery and powered up the laptop.

If the status bar in Windows XP is any indicator the laptop thought it was plugged in to AC. At least, there was no battery icon in the system tray to tell me. I was only on it about five minutes at the most, using the internet mostly. As soon as I was done I powered off the machine and plugged the battery back in. For some reason even 15 minutes later the LED indicator is still red. Seems a little odd frankly.

I have no idea how long this new battery is going to add to my total time but I'll be happy with 90 minutes. Apparently how it works is you plug the universal battery into the laptop with a fully charged internal battery and then when the universal one runs out the laptop runs on the interal one for the rest of the stretch. So maybe if I'm lucky 2 1/2 hours of battery life.

The whole point is maybe I'll be able to sit much more "where ever" like outside or at a table with no accessible power plug and still be able to study or whatever. Some-what fortunately I can still work without Internet access, though that is actually nice.

I feel like I should write this down as long as I'm thinking about it (it's almost on topic). At one point I was trying to think of all the ways I could automate installs of Windows including detecting if Windows was installing on a desktop or a laptop. Other than testing the detected processor type as reported by "systeminfo" and comparing that to a list I was at a dead end. Then two things occured to me: laptops have that extra set of settings for what to do with the lid is closed and also see the battery as an actual device in the device manager. So one or both of those two things must be stored in the registry some place. So wouldn't it be possible to simply test if either one (or both) of those two things even exist and take action based on the results?

The laptops ya see have wifi, whilst the desktops do not. So the desktops probably don't need the wifi auto configure stuff. And the laptops could have the preferred power scheme imported I suppose via reg import feature. Horray. There was another minor difference I wanted to vary depending on laptop/desktop but now I can't remember. I'll think of it again later probably.

I'm sure I have more to write but instead I'm going to bed.  ¶ 9:48 PM 0 Comments

 
I hope skipping a day isn't going to become a habit. Like anyone cares.

A show I enjoyed to some degree last season has premiered once more. Of course, I don't have cable TV no more so I didn't watch it. But when I found out it had premiered I brought it up on Hulu.

The show is called Dollhouse, the latest Joss Whedon creation. That's the main reason I tried to watch it consistently. Whedon's shows, at least the episodes he writes anyway, are always the best.

Unfortunately Hulu and/ore my browser and/or my computer seem to be having some issues today so I may or may not make it through this season 2 episode.

It seems at random I lose my network connection. I use the little right-click menu and tell it to repair, which is does.

For some reason on Hulu even when the buffer reports to be "Full" I'll push play and it will immediately say "buffering" and stay like that for several minutes. So why does it say full then? I don't know even know. Obviously the buffer isn't full if it needs to buffer.

I am course using Firefox Portable for my browsing needs. Makes moving from PC to PC and re-install to re-install so much easier as all my book marks and plugins/extensions are conveniently already installed and ready to go. But I think it collects entirely too many flash and flash-related files and that some how starts to have unfortunate side-effects. Perhaps I'll try loading this episode in the dreaded IE 8 (which is good for all I know, never bothered really trying it).

Now, about my network: I don't know if I've talked about it before but I'll re-cap anyway. The cable modem is out in the living room near the larger TV (having no cable TV it's not used a lot these days). I tried for literally years to get internet into my room and my main desktop PC in particular with only limited results. Then I bought one of those ethernet-over-power kits for $100 or whatever. So the cable modem connects to the little netgear router, the router goes out to among other things the little "wall wart" and that connects to a second "wall wart" in my bedroom.

That wall wart goes into a normal consumer-grade switch which conveniently serves my desktop, media extender and "server" where all my media and other stuff is stored away along with any other device I happen to feel like connecting via eithernet.

So there are in fact several layers of possible failure points, aren't there. Add to that my current desktop PC has two onboard NICs (not sure why) and one of them has already decided to stop working and you really have an "easy" issue to sort out.

Of course so far simply doing a "repair" on the connection via windows has fixed it. But who knows what's going on. The other NIC could be going bad, could be a network cable, could be the switch, could be one or both of the wall warts have decided the warranty is up and therefore it's time to stop.

Oh, and that ethernet-over-power technology is very tempermental. It's really blind luck that even made the things work to begin with. Maybe theirs just noise in the electrical wiring or something, I don' tknow.

The last time it the network apaprently went down I did ask my room mate who was just using a direct wifi connection to the router and he said the internet worked perfectly fine for him. In other words I can probably rule out the router directly. That just leaves the wall warts, the cabling and everything else on my side of the equation.

So far it's just a minor, temporary inconvenience. I can only hope it just grow into anything beyond that.

I suppose what I could do is just have a copy of a very minimal, hardly used firefox portable stored away and then make a copy of that folder every time I need to do any viewing, or at least any time I'm having difficulty Hulu or whatever. Then delete that folder when I'm done with it. I have no idea if that would work

I have no idea if I mentioned this minor detail either, probably did: in August, after years of complaining, my landlord/roommate and I finally called Comcast and insisted they run some kind of test on the modem from their end. Which they did. And decided apparently there was something wrong with our cable modem and could we please go to the local office and pick up a new cable modem. And yes, yes we could.

So I suppose we could just have a bad cable modem. I mean it wouldn't be the most unheard of thing after all. Ironically I never had these random connection issues , I don't think, prior to this new cable modem. So figure that one out.

Ok I've probably went on and on without saying anything long enough now maybe I should move on. I also don't remember if I have mentioned the new series of books I've been reading by one John Scalzi. I've read his "old man's war" trilogy and have recently begun reading "Zoe's Tale" though since it is the same story as the third book of old man's war (the last colony) I'm not nearly as excited to read it as I was to read the main three. In that I've had it a few days and it's not done. Those books are really incredibly well written and well paced that it's easy to read a lot to all of any one of those three without hardly realizing it.

Oh, now I remember what I really wanted to talk about: should I go to Hawaii? I mean why would an unemployed person living on government checks *possibly* hesitate to leave for Hawaii for a week? I mean I'd never have time off other wise sure.

There is one minor wrinkle though: I'd be going with my mom and her live-in husband-like-guy, not by myself. So ya, I'd feel like "that guy" who still goes on vacation with his mom at the age of 30. On the other hand when am I possibly going to go to Hawaii (or any place else for that matter) outside of such an offer. Although if that week falls on a unemployment-is-due week then I suppose the post marks may or may not be noticed by the California government, right? Maybe I'll get a call from some one saying "...did you uh...go to Hawaii recently?" to which I'll reply "why would I do that? That just rediculous...". Or something. Ok maybe they have so many forms coming they really don't have time to track them all down. I don't know.

Anyway I've resisted my Mom's offer of a heavily discounted trip to Hawaii for a while now but the idea is actually growing on me. Hopefully no one from the state is reading this and/or knows how to figure out who I am. By the way I love you state...

For the record I've still remained non-commital for the trip. I haven't actually gone on any trips.

It might clash with my planned one-day job anyway. The one at the end of october. The one whose contact still hasn't called or written back despite both an email and a voice mail. Ya, that one. It was friday though. Guess I should be more patient, eh?  ¶ 8:20 PM 0 Comments

 
I didn't use a title for yesterday's post. That is kind of odd for me. I'll try to do better for this one. Or at least come up with a title.

Since yesterday's post was at night right before going to bed not a lot has happened. I haven't finished with the verification for the answer site yet. I think I'm going to go by the college and see if I can get my password reset for the site. I don't know if this is possible, guess I'll find out.

One thing I have not yet mentioned is that I bought a book about PHP/MySQL. Which in and of itself isn't all that special as I have purchased entirely too many [computer] books the last year or so and read few to none of them. Or even opened them for that matter. But this one was going to be different. This one I was going to try and complete one chapter a day for as many days as it took to finish it.

Only around chapter four I got a rather horrible cold. I know I had a fever but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was not the flu, pig-related or other-wise, just a really bad cold. For instance my eyes hurt in their sockets indipendant of my head (which also ached). It took roughly eight days to get completely over it. Which is actually a bit faster for me as far as colds go.

This is one of the few times I felt some-what grateful for being unemployed. I just layed in bed, kept a steady stream of movies and TV show episodes running and tried to breath through my nose and move as little as possible.

This cold, mercifully, was not anything like my last one. That one was just awful, just awful. That one it actually hurt to breath.

I had also purchased this new water bottle of roughly 30 ounce size. I drank several bottle worth of water per day. Like at least three. I think this actually helped quite a bit.

It was a bad one (ok, i already said that). At first it was just the fever, chills, head/eye ache and a sensation in my lungs/chest. Nothing in the head at that time. At some point it moved into my head and set up camp apparently to stay resident for several days. I knew I was getting better when I could sleep through the night without waking up around 2:30.

I was also drinking water regularly after the cold. At some point this became less and less common. Now I have a different water bottle and I dont' remember to keep drinking from it non-stop all day.

I think I'll come back and keep writing this entry later...

Later...

I was writing the above at a coffee shop with free Internet (It's-a-grind). I finally got up to leave said coffee shop, I'm in my car and of course it won't start.

This actually happened three or so weeks ago when I was house-sitting for my Dad roughly an hour from my house. I ended up having my cousin come out and jump it for me and also loan me an AC-based car battery charger so I could leave it charging over night. She's a very nice cousin.

Anyway it's been running perfectly since then but then today bam: no starty.

Why I'm not sophisticated enough at this age to simply go back into it's-a-grind and solicit volunteers for a jumping I have no idea. Some how I have much higher expectations for myself at the age of 31 (or so).

Eventually I took it over to a tire-and-care-service franchise in the same plaza/strip mall/whatever you call it. Ended up paying $300 for a new clamp that attaches to the battery, a test to see if it was the battery or some other part like the alternator and finally a new battery. The test cost $30 but at least I have piece of mind enough I know it's not some other random part. And the clamp was $8 but $50 for labor. I know, WTF right? Anyway I am slightly more confident my car won't be comatose in some parking lot in three or four weeks time.

I'd like to but a different car. A used preferably, not much more that $5,000 or something. But between the taxes, registration, environmental whatever-the-fuck, save the trees fee, and whatever else the state is going to charge me I'm now leaning more toward just sinking whatever little money I have into keeping this car a wee bit longer. That means at least $500 for a new corner window, some amount to replace the wind shield (which I'm sure will also crack within weeks of it being replaced) and who knows how much to fix my drivers side door which I can't even use to lock the car any longer.

That probably won't come out to ~$8000 an alternative vehicle would cost but whatever it would come out to would certainly be a good start on the other car.

Oh it's a 1996, it has roughly 250,000 miles on it, and it's the original engine. Runs perfectly fine though. Just has stupid batteries fail every so often. I guess that's to be expected. Still, seems like it's just delaying the inevitable. Also it's going to be raining soon. So what's going to happen sooner? A new car or rain? Probably rain. That means I most likely have to replace the stupid window.

If I do that I'll probably move out as well. I'm tired of this getting broken into bullshit. You'd like think a relatively rural, isolated place like this I'd be safe enough. But I'd be wrong.  ¶ 2:47 PM 0 Comments

  Apparently I had to skip a day. I had recieved a call at 6pm from a recruiter. He was responding to a resume I had submitted for a help desk position. Normally I avoid help desk positions at all costs. But I also have to eat. So there ya go. I submitted it anyway.

The recruiter said he wanted to meet at 10:00am Wednesday (today). I wasn't expecting anything else from him in the mean time.

So yesterday I was up at my sisters house, playing with my niece and volunteering to look at her father in law's PC when I got another call from the recruiter saying I was going to get a phone interview from the client (at 5:30pm no less). They walked me through some questions I might get asked and encouraged me to be upbeat and enthused.

Well I'm not really that way normally but I was even worse yesterday because I have been doing so horribly in falling asleep the last few nights. I'm not sure why. I've been writing and taking walks much more regularly than normal. By all indications I should be much easier to get to sleep, not harder.

Anyway I'm talking to the recruiter and I have to switch phones because there's only one bar at her house. I try to explain this but he's not really hearing me. This is what happens when you're not expecting any calls.

So I go home, get some fast food for dinner, take a cold shower and try to prepare myself for the call. Only it comes 15 minutes late because the interviewer was calling the wrong number. Not sure why or how that happened. Anyway due to my apparent loss of any interviewing skills I didn't do so good on the interview. There's was a time I was in the right frame of mind I could have made it through literally any interview. I was that on top of how to answer interview questions effectively. But apparently I lost it. Eventually I WILL get it back though.

I did go to the meeting today at 10am. I didn't talk as well as I would have liked for that either also because of lack of sleep last night. So that's two nights of very little sleep. Perhaps tonight will be better.

In better news I have signed up for one of those paid answer type sites (not sure I should mention which, at least not yet). I signed up for the Computer category. I was asked 10 technical questions. Most of them I knew off the top of my head, some I had to look up (who memorizes all the switches for PING anyway? Or uses netshell?). I shorthly thereafter recieved a congratulatory email instructing me to verify my credetials via LexisNexis. This is where I still am since it wants such specific dates for my college attendance and I can't seem to get in to my college web site. I guess my password was extremely good since even I can't guess it. I will definately finish tomorrow.

In also-better-news I also applied for and recieved a call on a different job. This one the work really isn't until the end of October on a saturday but they say as soon as all the paper work is in I can get other jobs. Apparently it's a 1099 indipendant contractor gig converting a business that was recently purchased. Or something. In any case I also have that paper work to fill out and possibly fax in. So no help desk but up to and including two 1099 jobs. Both of which can be done in conjunction with a full time job. At least that's the theory.

The other thing I've done, hardly worth mentioning, is going to the DMV. There's a stereo type of this being a rather horrible experience. But this experience was actually not that bad. I came in, flashed up my renewal form and was handed a number for the queue. Every so often a pleasent recording anounced a number and which window to go to. This was also accomponied by the numbers written on a TV screen. I was only there for approximately 45 minutes total. And that includes getting a new driver's license picture taken. I'm only about 80 pounds heavier and 12 years older than the last pic. I hope the two aren't depressing when placed next to one another. I think I went off track any place. Where was I? Right. DMV. Better. Not fitting with the stereo type any longer. I mean it was 1:00pm on a Tuesday and I waited 45 minutes but the customer service was actually quite impressive. Once I got to the window it went extremely quick.

Ok: I'm going to bed.  ¶ 10:01 PM 0 Comments

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