Category: Jake

If anybody’s tried to e-mail me this afternoon at all, you’ll need to re-email me. My MailScanner installation on this server went bonkers thanks to a needed Perl upgrade, and was basically dumping mail into the bit bucket. I disabled MailScanner, and mail went through fine. So I have no server-side spam scanning, but at least I have e-mail.

I mentioned before that I had to send my laptop back to get repaired. I got it back today, and let me tell you how nice it is to actually be able to run more than one program at once and not have to stare at progress bars all frickin’ day. Still have to get re-used to the higher resolution (as the text and such on this thing is fairly small compared to my other one) and the location of the Ctrl key (it’s switched with the “Fn” key compared to the one I’ve been working on for a few weeks). But it is really nice to be able to put more than one program on the screen at a time and run more than a couple programs at a time.

Just really busy with work, personal life and concerts. I haven’t been sleeping all that great, either, because of the heat and just insomnia in general so finding motivation to do much of anything is a bit difficult. That, and I’m still working on my old cludgy laptop that doesn’t work as fast as I do.

Just the same, there is one more Cascade Winds concert tonight at 7:30 at the Tower Theatre. Remember, these are free concerts, tickets given away at the door just for our own inventory purposes, and this is also the last band concert that Michael Gesme will be conducting, so I encourage you to come out and watch the show! And come find me during intermission or afterwards and say “Hi.”

Make sure the next car you get (after the one you’re driving dies, even though it already has 200,000 miles on it) has air conditioning so that when you’re driving home from work behind two NWIHAYGTPM truck drivers that are pulling a load of steers and a crapload of … well … crap, you don’t have to smell it all the way home because it’s 90 frickin’ degrees outside and you have your windows down.

Mentioned that I was working off a variety of computers until I got an AC adapter for my laptop. It’s here, my mail is all downloading into Outlook, and I should be back to regular blogging at some point very soon. After I get all my work done, of course. Which I probably won’t, anyway, as there’s a Woot-off.

You know, I’m thinking I need to start finding something else to do with my life other than be a geek — or at least make it so that I can survive and get everything done on any computer quickly and easily.

As I mentioned before, I’m working on my old laptop until my newer one is repaired. I had finally gotten the thing up and running and working fine, but then working last night, the AC adapter started fritzing out, and finally died. I noticed it was just a frayed wire, but attempts to repair it didn’t help, as I think it shorted itself out before I could even work on it. And naturally, since it’s a holiday weekend, getting a hold of anybody to overnight me a new one is going to be impossible until Tuesday.

Since I split my time between offices, I basically have to work on a laptop to have all my applications and data with me all the time. It’d be one thing if I were just doing geek stuff, as I could probably fit a good chunk of those apps on a USB key and work wherever I wanted. The problem is that I do a ton of design and marketing stuff as well for each of the companies I work for. The Adobe design programs aren’t really portable, and the size of some of the files I work on would fill up the USB keys I have pretty quickly. A laptop just makes life far easier for me to get my work done quickly from anywhere. But when laptops die, I basically have to set myself up somewhere else.

I can fix everybody else’s computers and Web sites, but all my stuff seems to all break at once and at the worst time.

In the meanwhile, I’ve done a bunch of cleaning of my computer closet here at the office, so I am at least getting something done, but I’m just not in the mood to resetup another desktop with all my apps and such. I think I just need to talk a week-long vacation out to the woods somewhere and leave my computer at home.

After being offline pretty much all of the last couple days, either because of illness or because I was tearing apart computers, I’ve finally got my old laptop set back up to where I can function again. I have my e-mail accounts and messages and RSS reader all installed and going back into Outlook (and over 2000 unread RSS posts — yikes). I have Firefox back up to date. I ran Windows Update and downloaded and installed the 62 things it needed to install (this thing hasn’t been turned on for a while). Updated Office XP to 2003, and all I have to do now is get my my CS2 suite reinstalled.

I have the hard drive from my newer laptop in an external enclosure so I can now ship my broken laptop back and get it repaired — hopefully it’ll get back here sooner rather than later.

Back to regular blogging soon, once I clear out all my frickin’ e-mail from the last few days.

If you’ve been wondering where the heck I’ve been, yesterday was my birthday (29, so it’s all downhill from here). And the last 24 hours have been just a mess.

Had to go to work as I was supposed to meet with a bunch of people regarding phone and internet services for a couple offices. From both the Internet guys and Qwest guys, they said “We’ll be there between 9 and noon.” So I was planning on being out in Sunriver at 9. Internet folks showed up at 8:20, Qwest at 1:40. So killed off a good chunk of time trying to figure out what they were doing.

And some other phone guy from some local business phone system company (whose name I won’t mention) showed up at our office because somebody is renting out one of our offices and needed some new numbers ran to some jacks in that office. The guy who came decided to instead of talking to me, who knows what’s needed and what’s not in the building, talked to the real estate agent renting that space, who told him he could cut my network jacks in the room and use those pairs of wiring. Once I realized what he was doing, I told him to stop and put things back as they were.

While he finished up, my wife surprised me and brought me a Pilot Butte hamburger for lunch, which was very nice (Pilot Butte screwed up the order, however, and I ended up with their Tavern Burger, which is a heart-stopper, instead of just a basic cheeseburger). After going back to the office, I come to find out that the office’s DSL line is down — and it’s been down since right after that guy monkeyed with our phone closet. Go figure. I called BendTel to make sure it wasn’t something on their end and it wasn’t and never is as their stuff Just Works. He was already back in Bend at that point, and said that if he needed me to come back out again, I’d have to call his main office. Call his main office, and it’s closed from noon to 1 for lunch. It’s 12:20.

We needed internet access for our online booking server to function (which is a big chunk of revenue), so I called the local cable company, asked if they could procure me a modem (they were closed from noon to 1, too, but I know how to get ahold of them). They could, so I ran a long string of coax cable from the TV jack to the server closet, got the office online, redirected DNS, and we were good to go. Sadly, I’m going to have to cancel our DSL service with BendTel, as they’re great, but our phone system and wiring in our office is too finicky and fragile.

And while all this was going on, I’m trying to copy data (unsuccessfully) from my new laptop to my old laptop so I can ship my new laptop back (broken LCD hinge post), and had to rebuild a busted credit card server whose motherboard went kaput. Never really had a chance to catch my breath.

Finally, after a chaotic eight hours when my phone rang pretty much nonstop all day long, I finally got to go home. We had a few people over for a small little birthday party, I got some money (I’m going to get a new watch and running shoes) and a new DS game, and then my wife and I went to dinner (just some basic Chinese), and came home — to find out our plumbing is all messed up and the toilets and bathtubs are backing up. So I went to the store, got some Draino, dumped it down, let it sit, ran hot water after it, didn’t help. And all that greasy food was starting to get to me, and I need to use the toilet. Remember that scene from Ace Ventura, Pet Detective? You didn’t want to go in there, either, as we couldn’t flush.

So after hugging the toilet and not sleeping most of the night (and calling in to work sick), I got up at the crack of dawn this morning to see if I could get a plumber over to clear out the drain. I know I had somebody with “Rooter” in their name that wasn’t “Roto” before, and they were pretty cheap, so I called Mr. Rooter first. They wanted $300 basically to do anything. Then called Handy Rooter, and it was much more reasonable, and he’s up on our roof snaking our lines as we speak. So hopefully I’ll be able to take a shower after this is all said and done.

Then I’m going back to bed.

Happy birthday to me, indeed.