low_delta

I had the day off, and decided to organize computer stuff. I had ordered another external hard drive, which arrived today, so that was helpful. And I got another power strip. I unplugged everything and swept under the desk.

I also recently acquired an ethernet switch. It's like a router only... not. It's basically a splitter for CAT 5. I ran one cable from the router to my side of the room, then plugged everything over here into it. That is my computer, my work laptop and the wireless thingy for the garage door opener (it's nice to have that working again). When we both started working from home, we ran out of jacks on the router.

I've got eight devices plugged into power over here. Computer, laptop, monitor, lamp, ethernet switch, garage door opener and two external hard drives. I have more hard drives, but those two have power switches so I can leave them turned off. One of them has some kind of startup routine on it which messes with my computer during startup, so it is not connected to the computer until I need it. They're only for backup storage, so that's fine.

Anyway, I got everything plugged back in, and the cables routed nicely and tied together. There are, like, 20 cables down there. The only downside is that the power strips are just sitting on the floor. I feel like I should mount them to the walls, to keep them from drifting around the floor.

I've only got one free USB port. I switch it between my webcam, phone or a USB stick. I've got a USB hub. I wonder if I should dig that out and hook it up. Nevermind, I guess I no longer have its power supply. Dammit, I saved it all these years!

We'll see how long this tidiness lasts. Now I've got to backup some files.

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Spent the better part of tonight and last night trying to get the resolution set, on my new monitor. It shouldn't be this hard. I had to order a graphics card, as the one my computer came with doesn't support a resolution that high.

Tomorrow night I'm drinking whisky with Doug and the new guy, Austin.

I have a backlog of three concerts to post about.

I was over at my mom's on Monday, helping her with her computer. She was annoyed because she lost her homepage (Google). And also because her browser was different - and annoying. Turns out she was running Chrome, and it's obnoxious Ask Toolbar, and its annoying default menus/toolbars/etc. So I uninstalled Chrome. Then some toolbars. It wouldn't let me uninstall the Ask Toolbar Updater. Bastards.

When I was done with the uninstallations, I found that IE wasn't working right. I must have deleted one toolbar too many. If she clicked on a link in e-mail, it would open up a new Window of IE to her homepage. Not the page that the link intended. Just her homepage. Grr. I messed around for a while, but couldn't figure anything out.

I went back tonight. I started out with a Google search, but couldn't find much. That is a tough search. Most of them deal with links that just plain don't work. The closest I could get was links that open up blank pages. All of the solutions there dealt with reinstalling IE and/or somethingsomething the registry, or things that made even less sense to me.

I was trying to read through all this and make sense of it, when my mom got home. She came in and sat down to talk. Every time she started talking, I let go of the mouse and turned towards her. After she was done, I'd get about two sentences in before she started the next topic of discussion. After a while I decided I'd ignore her completely. This didn't stop her. Then she mentioned that she wanted me to help her with her DVR. I just told her it was the Program button she needed to press. That kept her occupied long enough for me to install Firefox.

I'm not getting the data back from my hard drive. I had a couple of people look at it and tell me it was a hardware problem, so it would have to be reassembled to get the data off. The Geeks Squad tech indicated that it could be around $1200, give or take a couple hundred. I had convinced myself that it would be worth spending $1000. I figured that three hours of work per week for ten months at a going rate of ten dollars an hour would be well over $1000, so it would be worth it in the time it would take to replace my work. Then add the stuff I couldn't replace. But the final estimate from the Geek Squad was more like $1600 to $1800. That's over my limit.

I keep remembering things I've lost. The pictures from our trip to the Chicago Botanical Gardens with Mike and Lynda, which I never fixed up (I'm surprised those are gone, sine that was relatively recent). 75% of the pics from the airshow. Pics from the family reunion. Those were ones which I never fixed up. Everything between Thanksgiving and midsummer is gone too, but I had fixed up most of good ones and uploaded them to the internets, so I've got those. But to get them back on my computer, I have to download them back, and then probably have to rename them all, and many of their properties are gone. I can rescan the Polaroids and found negatives, but that was a lot of work. And I spent a lot of time making templates from the Polaroids.

I just realized I lost the files for the photos that I had printed for the show I was in. I still have the originals, but not the work I put into getting them ready for the show. Oh well. I probably won't print them again.

I've lost a whole lot of work in my Scotch info. Every tasting I do, I spent two or three hours writing tasting and distillery notes. Now I have to start over. The lists of what the groups have tasted already. I got lucky that I had recently sent my own tasting list to my phone! That would have been a huge loss. My dad has a lot of info that he can send back to me.

Music. I ripped a lot of CD's last year. Now I'll have to do those over again. And a few songs that I had bought online. I wonder what they were. One thing I did this past year was go through my music collection, song by song, and weed out the ones I didn't care for all that much. And then I went through the ones I kept and corrected all the file info. That was a lot of work!

I lost all my e-mails. Okay, I'm not really missing those. It's kindof a scrapbook, so I wanted to keep the stuff, but there's nothing I'm really missing. It's inconvenient to lose all my contacts, though. My internet favorites are gone too, but that's not a big deal.

People struggle with loss all the time - real loss - so I can't be too upset about this. The only thing is that I could have it all back for "only" a couple thousand dollars.

I got my new computer. I had to pick it up on the way home from work, but it wasn't done, so I had to go back. I had to go out to the Highland Games, since my dad won an award (Celtic Person of the Year). But I was late, so missed the awarding of the award.

I took along a flask of Scotch that was half Talisker, half Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban. My dad guessed both distilleries.

So.. computer.

How long has it been since computers stopped coming with Outlook Express? Now I need to figure out how to get my ISP mail.

There are only two USB ports on the front of the box here are only two USB ports on the back of the box, and they're taken up by the mouse and keyboard. There are no alternate ways to plug in the mouse or keyboard, so my old ones are trash. I didn't think I'd had the mouse for very long. The new mouse seems decent, but I want an "ergonomic" keyboard.

Maybe Monday, I can see if I can get my data from the old hard drive.

Antivirus. I bought Trend Micro. Not impressed at the moment. My mom had Kaspersky, and I found it a little annoying at times, but I think I prefer it over Trend. I've had Norton forever, and thought I'd try something different. There's just very little to see on the Trend. No details to control, like when it updates and runs scans. Maybe I'll like it better after a time.

So now I've played around a little. Now I have to get some files on this thing. And start replenishing my favorites/bookmarks.

This new machine doesn't sound like a jet engine when it starts up.

I was using Photoshop CS2. I wanted to upgrade to the latest version, and buy it so I was legit. I knew it would be expensive - I expected around $400. Turns out it was double what I expected. That's a good bit more than the computer cost.

It appears that my hard drive has crashed. At the moment, I'm on Cyn's computer, but this is not pleasant. I guess I'll go out and buy a new computer tomorrow, and will soon be back to normal, except for one thing. I was horrified to see that I haven't done a back up since last freaking October.

Ten months ago. I seem to have lost every photo I've taken since Thanksgiving. Except the ones I've fixed up and uploaded somewhere. And I haven't fixed up many in the last couple of months. I didn't do anything with the pictures from the air show, for example, and I just deleted them from the card on friday. I do still have whatever remains on my three memory cards. Not sure if that includes the ones from our Chicago trip.

And of course there are other documents. I may have to take it to a data recovery specialist. I understand they charge through the nose.

October! I knew it had been a while, but I was guessing six months. But aside from that, I really blew it. I was uploading pics from this weekend, and I kept getting "out of memory messages". I deleted other files to make room, but it was still a bit of a struggle to get everything in. I knew I had to back it up and clear it out, but I was itching to look at photos. Then, I got the "no bootable device" message. I shut it down and tried it again, and it booted up just fine. The next day - nothing. If I'd realized just what "no bootable device" meant, I would have freaked out and started backing everything up. And not powered the thing down.

So back your shit up!

As I mentioned a while back, my computer was sucking. After some helpful advice, I decided a memory upgrade was what I needed.

A Google search told me what memory was recommended. I picked up two 1GB sticks at Best Buy. I first put them alongside the existing 256MB sticks, but it didn't fire up. I removed the old ones (and swapped slots for good measure), and it's running well. It definitely booted up quicker, but I probably won't notice a speed difference very often - only that things don't bog down when I have too many windows open.

Took me a trip to the store, half an hour, and $120. Much cheaper than a new computer.

I'm fairly certain that I had my mouse in the serial port. Now it won't work there. Why not?