April 30, 2008
Dear Everyone:
A lot has happened in the past two weeks.
Two weekends ago, I called “Jeannie” Saturday
morning to see what she wanted to do.
In a nutshell, she had too much work to do (this is a
good thing!) to spend any
time with me. So I took
myself to lunch then went to a clothing store that caters to ladies of
generous proportions.
They were having a special.
I went in looking for a pair of pants that I could wear to the
office during the summer. I
wound up saving $133.53, with a complete new summer wardrobe and two
pairs of pants to wear to the office.
Next I went to the Big Blue Electronics Warehouse
Store where I found a wireless
print server made by the same
manufacturer as the
wireless router that has made my life so much
easier. I even got it for
$50 off because I had another one of those rewards gift cards from work.
On Sunday, I was getting all sorts of things done.
Laundry (all those new clothes to pre-wash before wearing.)
Filling and running the dishwasher before noon.
Changing the bed linens.
At a little after 3:00 pm, the phone rang.
I could see that the call was coming from “Jeannie’s” house, so I
answered.
The first thing she said was:
“Everything is fine.”
Uh-oh.
That means everything is fine now,
which means everything was not
fine up until now.
Seems she was exercising on her
treadmill when she heard
something that caused her to look out the upstairs window.
Cop cars. Lots of cop
cars.
Lots of cops with guns drawn.
Something was going on in the apartments across the
way from “Jeannie’s” place.
Something that involved gun shots and (later) an ambulance.
“Jeannie” wisely decided to step away from the window.
Later she explained to various police persons that
she really didn’t see anything because she had stepped away from the
window. All agreed that that
was a wise move. Everything
is fine now.
I didn’t see anything about it on the news that
evening (evidently, I was watching the wrong channel.)
I did find a few paragraphs in the online version of the local
newspaper on Monday.
In other news…
We moved from our palatial
cubicles last Thursday.
I packed up 16 boxes of various stuff.
This is an improvement over the last move because that time I had
17 boxes. The reason I know
this is that one box never got unpacked.
It still had the label identifying it as “Box ? of 17”.
It was never unpacked because it contains the
ARMA Mt Diablo
Chapter Library, a collection of books and periodicals begun 10 years
ago when we started the Chapter.
We had to be out of our cubicles by 3:00 pm that
Thursday and were not allowed back into our “new” offices until 6:00 am
the following Monday. Since
I didn’t have any work that absolutely couldn’t wait, I took Friday as a
vacation day.
Around 4:00 Friday afternoon, I decided to install
that wireless print server.
At first, everything went right according to the instructions until Step
6. At that point, the system
was unable to do what the instructions said it could do.
So I went online to the manufacturer’s site and wandered through
their diagnostic “help” for about 20 minutes.
Then I decided to try online chat help.
I connected with someone claiming to be “Jean Paula (27964)”.
(This suggests that they have over 27,000 technicians working in
chat rooms.) “Jean Paula”
asked to remotely take control of my computer in order to fix the
problem.
So I sat and watched “Jean Paula” copy files, open
and close folders I never even knew existed and generally work the
problem until my laptop ran out of
RAM and hung, unresponsive.
“Jean Paula” told me to reboot and reconnect with their site when
I was ready.
This required a “hard shutdown”, meaning holding
the power button down until the machine shut down.
Not something you want to do very often.
Once the system came back up, I shut it down properly and brought
it back up again. Then I
went back to the help site.
This time I got “Maricel (27352)”.
Since “Jean Paula” had fixed the initial problem and had even got
the print server configured, “Maricel” just walked me through getting
the print server connected with the network.
A mere three hours later, the print server was working like a
dream.
Everything was working great until Saturday
afternoon when it all went to hell in a hand basket.
Suddenly the computer could see the wireless network, but
couldn’t connect to it. And
without the network, no printing.
Even worse, when I tried to shut down and reboot, the system just
hung and I had to “hard shutdown” again.
After that, the computer would start, but not bring up the Start
Button, taskbar, icons, nothing but the background.
I finally got it back up, but it took about twenty
minutes. Not good.
Should have backed up my data.
Checked “My Documents” and found it contained over 5 gigabytes of
information. Shut down
(gently) for the time being.
On Sunday, I went up to “Jeannie’s” and she showed
me where the police had been.
I fixed a few things on her work computer and told her the sad
news about mine. It’s not a
question of if your hard drive will crash, it’s only a question of when.
When I got home, I took the laptop upstairs and
physically connected it to the wireless router.
When I turned it on, it started up just like normal.
I was able to figure out how to reconnect it wirelessly, and the
printer worked fine, too.
“Everything is fine.”
Now. I went out and
bought an 8-gigabyte
portable (“flash”) drive and copied everything from
“My Documents” into it. As
the copies were going over, I realized that “My Documents” includes all
my pictures and my Music Library as well as all the files that I copied
from “Jeannie’s” computer to mine last year.
So now everything is backed up (not including this
Letter and yesterday’s backup of my checking account).
And, once again, “Everything is fine.”
Until next time.
Love, as always,
Pete
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