Sweetpea Manor Musings

That was a good deal on the computer chair after all. The guy said it was a $850 chair but I was thinking, "yeah, right" but I liked how comfortable it was. I found out it is a Steelcase Leap, more than likely used/repossessed as it has a few scratch marks on it.
http://store.steelcase.com/go/products/detail/46216179/

And I need to get off my butt do laundry and pack. The flight leaves at dawn. When I bought the ticket, the first class prices were really low so I thought, why not? I've never flown first class before. I'm a big girl and will appreciate the larger seats, and I'm just sick enough of all the crap they are putting people through to fly...and my tax refund had just came in. *g*

I hear the booze is free in first class. *g*

I'm taking the laptop so I'll give updates.

Ya all have fun.

This might be fun for Criminal Minds fans or writers. It's a free silly program that:

Giveaway of the Day - Digital Physiognomy

November 15, 2008Digital Physiognomy is an entertaining psychological profiling software application that determines person’s character and traits based on facial features. It uses a technique analogous to police sketches (sometimes called photo robot). Among the characteristics it evaluates are Temper, Intellect, Self-Esteem, Sense of Humor, Level of Optimism, Will Power, even Luck. The application comes with a set of more than 500 faces that belong to famous people.


http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/digital-physiognomy/


At the very least you can profile your friends and find out they're sneaky. Or have fun making faces with templates like the police use to make 'sketches' of wanted people.

Okay, I'm going to go to bed and turn off the tv and every thing else--but not the A/C.

I do pray that no one gets hurt today and god speed to the brave firemen. I don't know how they do it.

VERY!!!

I went out grocery shopping tonight, a lot of stores, stocking up on kitty stuff in preparation of our up coming trip. I was using the program Checklist on my palm Life Drive. I LEFT my baby in the shopping cart!! I went back about 15 minutes later, but it wasn't in the stack of carts and the checker denied anyone had turned it in. Now that I think about it, one of the shoppers currently in the store probably had it. :( I called back later, talked to the manager and left my name and number but I swear he sounded barely literate. He didn't know what a PDA was, so I said it was a small computer. Hopefully, when whoever realizes that without buying a powercord, it will be useless when the battery runs out, they will return it. Yeah, I don't think that will happen either. An honest person would have brought it right in.

So, everything was backed up. I have an enormous amount of fanfic on a SD card--gen and slash. Someone has my porn..... :(

I've already brought my Dell Pocket PC up to speed, got the latest fanfic on it, the games reloaded; it's ready for my vacation next week.

But damn, that makes me annoyed with myself!! That was my entertainment center!

I've been to ebay and am watching a few possibles.

So, do any of you have a cool newish PDA that you think is fab? I want to play games, read fanfic and have some photos loaded in it.

:::sigh:::

We have earthlink. We've always used Netscape as a browser. In fact, we've still been using Netscape 7.0 because it has email with it. I downloaded 8.0, but hated it; people told me AOL had bought Netscape and made AOL-ish changes to that version of the browser and that's why I hated it. I'll take their word for that.

So, as websites started getting snotty with our old browswer, we moved on to Firefox and love it. I downloaded Thunderbird to be the new email program on the new laptop and it seems okay. I still have to call India and fix why I can't send outgoing email, but that's a small thing and probably my fault somehow.

So, I wake up on Sunday to find Mom has another computer story. She said Netscape was gone off the desktop. HUH?! What I find out, is that her Netscape 7.0 browser email is gone. Completely. Like there is no record of it being on our computer. I even tried a 'restore' but nada. Zip.

When I try to load her profile, a webpage pops up that says AOL does not support that version of Netscape anymore and it encourages us to get a new browser.

So, the question is, how did fucking AOL manage to tell my computer to delete her email?! Her bookmarks are still there. Netscape downloaded the email onto the desktop so it's not like AOL was cleaning out her mailbox on their site. WE DON'T HAVE AOL in any case!

I've wandered through Windows Explorer and I can't seem to find where the email is or was. Maybe I need to go tell it I want to see the hidden files?

Well, Mom doesn't see to be too upset with it but then again, I just took her to the airport and she and the spiffy little laptop should be taking off right about now. Of course, we've a Santa Ana wind condition so that ought to be fun. Not. 12% humidity. The turbulence should be nasty. I hope that cheese omlete I made her doesn't make a reappearance.... But I digress.

Luckily, my profile and email are still there--until FUCKING AOL finds out it's there and somehow deletes my profile, too!

I bet Homeland Security is behind this somehow...and Dick Cheney. Humpf.

Scooter had a very good day today. He marched into my room (which he hasn't been in since he went all Mount Saint Helens over the place) this morning and demanded I get up and feed him. And then he ate a half a can of food. Tonight, he was alert and loving and playful. Okay, I think he's gotten past this. We are very happy. :)


( Read more... )

And we drove 90 miles up to the high dessert to see a Jethro Tull concert. It was at the Lancaster Performing Arts Center and it was another wonderful concert. The musicianship is wonderful as always. They performed a couple of new songs that sounded a bit like the stuff from Divinities. And they did a new version of Aqualung that was more instrumental, slower and poignant with a lot of flute. Awesome!

There was a signs about requesting, for the enjoyment of the rest of the audience, that people not whistle or shout. And in an audience where most people were well into their 50s, there still were a few asses that just had to whoop and shout proving that either men will always have the self-control of feral teenagers or that they are already becoming senile. It wasn't too bad until My God, which has achingly beautiful and haunting flute passages and it was spoiled by men obviously trying to outdo each other instead of enjoying the concert. But, other than that, it was sweet. :)

We also took the laptop out with us. I wanted to try it on a wireless network and I wanted Mom to learn how to connect to it. She's taking the laptop to Salt Lake City soon and her hotel will have free wi-fi. She has a tendency to just ask me how to do something and not try to figure it out herself. We went to a Marie Callendars for dinner and as I was waiting outside, I booted the laptop up. We went to a Starbucks with wi-fi, but I guess those places aren't free? Anyway, I noticed that a hotel next to the Marie Callendars had an unsecured network, so we went back there after the concert, sat in the parking lot and connected. Yay! I think it is road worthy now. :)

Work has been really busy. Premature babies are a dime a dozen at the moment, but I've finally got a few days off. Tomorrow, we go to the Los Angeles Country Fair. Hucksters shilling household items, food on a stick--what's not to love? :)

And now I can try to finish setting up the laptop. All was slogging along as expected until I must have entered the wrong info for the outgoing mail. The paperwork Earthlink gave me was smtp.earthlink.net but I have a strong suspicion it should have been smtpauth.earthlink.net. I think I ran into this problem 3 years ago when I set up this desktop computer; I'd scrawled it on the envelop the earthlink paperwork was kept in. It would have been nice if I'd maybe been MORE CLEAR about what that meant as I only access that infor every 4 or 5 years! :::sheesh::: And now I need to figure out if that is truly what I need to do and how to do it, particularly the router. I think I entered that in the router and I need to faq linksys. :( :::sigh:::

Complicating things, Mom very sheepishly and anxiously describe a worrying event last night while I was at work. She says she felt the wireless mouse tingle with electrical current. Things weren't responding and she shut stuff down. The new laptop wouldn't shut off so she put it on the stove and went to bed (she thought it felt too warm.) I turned it on today and it seems okay but the battery was exhausted. The desktop seems okay except for a few things. It couldn't access the net, until I bypassed the router and then I hooked it up through a different port. Zone Alarm acts like it's just been installed, asking which programs can access the net. The event log only goes back to yesterday. Defender seems to think it was active only since yesterday. Everything seems to be okay, but I'm thinking an electrical surge gave my desktop amnesia somehow. How a wireless mouse had a charge, or how it transmitted to the laptop or how it wiped Zone Alarms memory is a mystery and doesn't seem logical. But something did happen. I'm thinking Mom may have had a charge and it was leaving her body where it touched the mouse, but still...?

And this is how superstitions occur. Everything was going along fine until I brought the attention of the Technology God to my house with that laptop and router. Did it change the electronic feng shui and upset the chi? Is the Technology God a jealous and angry god? What sort of sacrifice is needed to appease it?

Mom, 75, will be going to Salt Lake City to do geneology research (just her hobby, we're not LDS.) Rather than lug huge notebooks, she asked if she could load her program on my Lifedrive PDA. Nope.

But, that kinda gave me a green light to buy a laptop that we can both use. I've wanted one for years so, why not? I bought one something like this, but new:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=300148947595&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=020
It's on the small side and seems to have lots of cool features.

I also decided to buy a router and make the house wireless so we can both be on the net at the same time. Woo who!

So, I've been up all night fiddling with the bits and making decisions and playing with all the parts. I need another piece of DSL cable before I can add in the new computer to the router. And then I can start downloading stuff like Firefox and Thunderbird. Bill Gates hasn't made Vista incompatible with those, has he? ::looks worried:::

Then I need to figure out what sort of security a laptop should have. I don't suppose some of my more techie-blessed flist has some words of wisdom? I kinda don't want Norton as it crippled my desktop last year when I went to renew it. Defender seems to be doing a good job with here.

Round two, tomorrow, or should I say later today....