Doc’s Personal Blog

Wow, Times goes by quickly when you’re having fun!

Last Friday SWMBO wanted to have BBQ at "Fat Rascal’s"; but when we got there for lunch the place was closed. Notice on the door about owing back taxes and being closed until further notice. Bummer! Their BBQ is great! So SWMBO drug me down the street to a restaurant that’s opened recently; Gino’s. Talk about delusions of grandeur! The "1/2 sandwich & soup" I had was definitely not worth $14! Bread was too thick, Ham was too thin and there wasn’t enough "stuff" on it. The soup was "Salmon Bisque" and the first 3-4 bites were good. After that the Bay leaf took over and ruined it. SWMBO had the ’chicken alfredo’ and didn’t eat all the chicken because they used the dark meat. GREAT view of the bay and the mountains but the atmosphere (and food) sucked. And really, coming from a ’poor’ man’s point of view; we weren’t served enough food to be worth the $30 we spent there.

But, as with any usual ’date night’, the best part was just spending time with SWMBO.

Yesterday, Saturday, the weather persons predicted it was going to rain with the possibility of thunder and lightning. Was actually happened was damn near 80 degree’s and sunny. So I spent the day laying out up at the property. Oh, I loaded my truck up with wood I’d cut earlier to make the trip, uh, ’financially feasible’ or worthwhile but otherwise I just layed out trying to burn my ass off. Was great! I mean it was nice up there.

But all good things must end so I got home about 1700. SWMBO wasn’t home from taking our son to COSTCO so I unloaded the truck and started up the lawn mower and mowed the front lawn. Usually, SWMBO mows and I do laundry/dishes. Front lawn was getting pretty overgrown though so I jumped in to give a hand. SWMBO came home as I was putting new cutter string thingies on the mower and took over the mowing. Sokay with me!

Today, Sunday, was my normal first session of church (where I sang particularly well if I do say so myself) then on out to the property. One of the guys gave a talk in which he says: "There are Brothers in leadership positions in the church that refuse to do Home Teaching and I don’t believe they ought to be able to hold a position of authority for their refusal." Well, Brother Bob, I can agree but mostly disagree. I don’t want a Home Teacher that comes over ONLY because he HAS to. I’d rather he just stayed home. (His home.) Some people can’t relate to the family’s they’re assigned to. Some people are uncomfortable around other people or trying to ’teach a lesson.’ Some folks just plain uneasy visiting other people’s homes. Whatever the reason; if they don’t want to I’d rather they didn’t come over. Other than that his talk was disjointed and didn’t seem to keep to the subject he first stated he was going to talk about. Another one of those people that feel they have to mention every damned thing they can mention scripturally in one talk.

The rest of the day went pretty normally for me. Nice out at the property (was supposed to have thunder, lightning and rain again) so I layed out some more (after loaded another load of wood in the truck). Some folks have found the old gravel pit across the road from our property and set up camp and were running their dirt bikes all over down by the river. None came on our property thank goodness. Left there around 1500 to come home and spend some time with SWMBO before she had to take off for choir practice. Was nice.

Spent the evening playing with Vista and installing all the expansion pacs for FSX. Installed X-Plane, FS 2002 & Magix Music Maker also. Running out of space on the hard drive and it still won’t recognize my drives attached to that Rocket IDE controller. But, I did install Vista on this drive just to test it. So far it’s worked pretty good with all the programs I normally use. Only had a couple of programs crash.

Around here. Well, except for completely removing everything from the livingl room last Monday and running a carpet cleaner across it a couple of times then puttin’ everything back. That pretty much took up Monday and was covered in greater detail in an earlier post…

Tues & Wed Not much going on except for getting things back into the living room that I forgot Monday. It rained like a son-of-a-bitch for about 5 minutes one of those days. Can’t remember which one. Water was coming out of the down spout off from the gutter like someone had turned a fire hydrant on the roof.

Got Windows Vista Ultimate and installed it on one of my smaller (120G) "spare" drives and have been playing with it. I kind of like it but that little box that keeps popping up and asking me if I want to continue or not is BUGGING THE HELL OUTTA ME! Who’s Damned Stupid Idea was that anyway? Of course, I can’t get Vista to recognize my extra ide controller so I lose two drives when I put the Vista drive in and boot. And the Rocket folks don’t make a driver for Vista yet. That built in Media Center looks (and works) pretty good though. Once I got the network set up and connected to our workspace it read the media drives pretty well. Can’t get my ATI remote control to work on MY computer, but I don’t have an ATI videocard installed. Maybe it’ll work on the MediaServer where the ATI card is installed. Anywho, I’m going to play with it (Vista!) until I break it before I switch over completely from XP. If I ever do switch over that is…

Believe it or not it’s Thursday night and I haven’t watched Smallville at all. But that’s the way I usually do it though; once the Season Ender shows I don’t turn "The CW" back on until the next Season Premiere. Damn, except for History/Discovery/NatGeo and Battlestar Galactica I’m not watching much regular tv. It’s just not worth the commercial time for me anymore. And with the MediaServer it’s ever so easy to pick a folder of videos I want to watch and hit play. I really need to get a couple of terabyte drives for the MediaServer though. I’m running out of room to put stuff. So, unless drives get really big (really big) and cheap (really cheap) I’ll probably wind up having to have a bunch of external drives anyway. Bummer!

But then half the time it’s not like I’m sitting still and watching tv anyway. It’s mostly noise in the background and a momentary distraction when needed from ’playing;’ on my computer. Websites to check, blogs to post, PHP/MySQL/accounting/Photoshop/CSS/HTML to learn. Not to mention Morse Code and all the stuff I need to know for a Ham License. (Glad I didn’t mention it!) Tonight I even spent an hour trying to find out why SWMBO’s Zune won’t connect with WMP. Damned Frustrating! The first Zune program was the easiest to use and WORKED. Why did they have to change it? I know that’s the definition of Microsoft though; take something easy and make it use a lot of computer resources to the point of bogging the system down and make it difficult to use. Otherwise it’d be Linux!

Did the first session of Church last Sunday with SWMBO then headed out to the property. Didn’t get much actual work done other than loading wood into the truck (which I later dropped off at our friends house down the road from where we’re living now). Mostly layed around in the sun reading. New Star Trek book in which Janeway gets Borgified and Seven operates the Planet Killer. Was okay. The author injected just the right amount of humor (which has been seriously lacking).

Yesterday. Man. I moved most everything out of the living room while SWMBO was at her usual luncheon with the girls so we can clean the carpet. What a back breaking job! You just don’t realize how much stuff you have in a room until you start to move it all out. Then you realize just how old you’re getting too! Damn! I was sore by the time SWMBO got home and even more sore when she got back from renting a carpet cleaner machine. Then I got to help clean the carpet. (After wiping walls, etc etc. I HATE the wood stove!) SWMBO did an excellent job of most of the living room carpet and helping out moving things back into the living room.

We finally finished cleaning the carpet about 1800 and I spent the rest of the evening moving things back in the living room and hooking up all the electronics. Made a space under the tv for the MediaCenter (in the tv cabinet) so that’s out of the way now. We put the bookcases/dvd shelves back differently. Now the dvd’s are closer to the dvd player. Cool! With most everything back in place it looks as crowded as ever; but it’s a LOT cleaner!

Spent today recuperating and trying to finish up moving things back to where they belong in the living room. Made a run to Albertson’s to return the carpet cleaner and a stop by COSTCO for some things. (COSTCO is getting almost as hard to pass by as Staples is!) Made dinner for 5 tonight; a family from the church has fallen on hard times (mom is confined to bed & dad gets home too late to cook) and we volunteered to do a dinner for them. Drowned chicken breasts in spaghetti sauce and baked it at 300 degrees for an hour or so. Poured all that over cooked spaghetti and added some green beans and Viola; Dinner. SWMBO took it too them after we ate our share. Hope they enjoyed it. If they didn’t McDonalds is just down the road…

Been doing some flying around San Diego in FSX and playing with capturing it with Fraps. Playing with the tcp/ip settings on my computer to see if I can better my download speeds. Put a bunch of portable apps (from Portableapps.com) on one of my usb drives and been setting those up. Learning GNUCash; as a simple checkbook. Once I realized that an entry in one place has to pull the money from another place it all fell into place. I Need A 8 Gig USB Drive! With all the stuff I want to take with me (Portable Apps, plus all the Apache/MySql/PHP stuff plus the PHP Editor plus some stuff for Computer Diagnostics/Settings has stuffed my little 2 Giger.

Not too much else going on in the King household. I’m watching ’Constantine’ and SWMBO is back in her office/sewing room sewing. Finishing up washing the curtains (and other laundry) and putting the odds and ends back where they belong in the living room. Dishes can wait until tomorrow!

I don’t know what I did, but, I just downloaded a 400mb file (from 50 peers) in under an hour. That’s lots better than I’ve done in quite sometime…

The last 3 days or so have been Most Excellent for me as it has gotten over 75 degrees each of those lovely days! Woo Woo!!!!

SWMBO didn’t go to the office last Wednesday as she is on 2 weeks vacation! Cool! Not used to having her around on Wednesday night though….

Thursday, first day of our ’Heat Wave’, I spent up at the property cutting up some wood. Actually, I cut so much wood my chainsaw complained about being tired! Nice having that digger to hold the logs at waist level. Finished up with cutting wood and layed out in the sun and heat for a few hours. Nice! My Ass Was Burnin’!

Friday was our usual ’date night’ and we went to the Family Pancake House for breakfast. Actual breakfast this time! Stopped by Safeway and got SWMBO some cough medicine and a few other things. I went out to the property and cut up some more wood. Had to refill the chainsaw gas tank 4 times I cut so much wood. Then it was time to lay out again.

Smallville season ender was a bitch! Chloe ’Lanafied’ but later cured. Lex bringing down the Fortress of Solitude. Clark destroying Brainiac. Sorry, there’s no other way to say it; Chloe Fucked Brainiac Up!

Today, Saturday, I got SWMBO up for her library day. She has a girlfriend visiting from ’the other side’ so she didn’t get home until late. I went on back out to the property and cut up some more wood until I ran out of gas for the chainsaw. Layed out for awhile but it was just too damned hot. (Y’all didn’t hear me say that!) and I still had many things to do around the house that I’ve been putting off. SWMBO was going to have to eat tomorrow mornings cereal out of a cup!

SWMBO has availed herself of the media center and has been on a Supernatural kick, so I’ve been watching:

You guess it! The old “Lost In Space” series. What A Crackup! We thought it was so advanced and Cool when it first came on tv. The opening shots showed a lot of people sitting in front of banks of flashing lights and flipping switches and Not A Monitor To Be Found! The Jupiter II is STILL a nice ship though. Seemed to go forever on a gallon of radioactivity! The Robot sounded “robotic”, if you know what I mean. It’s amazing how the show seemed to start out as a (seemingly) serious “space opera’ and degenerated into whatever it was when it ended. It’ll be interesting to see the episode(s) where it changed over to just plain silly. At least when they show the ship in space you can’t see stars through it like you could with the USS Enterprise (NCC 1701).

And that’s another thing! Each of these Lost In Space episodes are just over 51 minutes. “Hour long” shows nowadays are just over 44 minutes. Whats with that?

Found my old discs and spent a couple of hours the other day making virtual drives for DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1/95/98/2000/NT 4.0 & XP. Can’t believe I kept all those old “Operating Systems” but it was fun installing them and playing around with them. Especially DOS. I used to be known as the ’batch king’ cause I could write a .bat file to do most anything. (For you young Windows Freaks, a .bat file was the .cmd file of the day!) Even installed some of the old programs I wrote on the DOS drive. My Medical Tickler Management System, written for dbase III+ and compiled with Quicksilver (I think), still worked as it was meant to. Didn’t blink once at the date being beyond 2000 (Y2K fears). Playing with Windows 3.1 is a crack up! Wish I could find my old Windows 1 discs…

Not too much going on around here. Cold rainy day out. WeatherLiars swear it’s going to be 80 degrees Thursday, 85 degrees Friday and a possibility of 90 degrees Saturday. Sure. And if my grandmother had wings she’d be a Greyhound Bus. But I’m hoping anyway!!!

Last Sunday I wasn’t feeling too good when I woke so I skipped church. Hated to miss it on Mother’s Day cause I know they do special things for all the Mothers in the congregation. Felt okay enough to get out to the property late that afternoon. Brought back that last load of wood I cut last week.

Yesterday made a run to the bank and COSTCO. Bought one of those USB Turntables for SWMBO so she can rip her old albums to mp3 files. And I gotta admit she impressed me greatly yesterday. She assembled the turntable, hooked it up to her laptop, installed the software and ripped her first album without calling on me once! Too cool! Guess she has picked up a few things through osmosis!!

Since I’ve basically been stuck in the house today, except for a quick trip to Staples for blank cd’s and dvd’s, I’ve been backing up all the .avi files I’ve made since the last time I spent all day doing this very same thing. Re-ripping Smallville Season 6 to 720p format .avi’s and backing them up. Trying to get all the stuff on my MediaCenter that I don’t have backed up backed up. I’d HATE to have to re-rip and reconvert all those movies and shows. That would be a lot of work! And as for that MediaCenter: I still can’t get the ATI Radeon 9000 card to use both the monitor and tv at the same time. One or the other right now; but not both. Had it working before I rebuilt the system and it seems like I should be able to get it working agian. Every time I start Catalyst in advanced mode the damned computer reboots though. (Yes, I’ve uninstalled, rebooted and reinstalled to no avail.)

Used a program called “NLite” and created an autoinstall Windows XP .iso file. Works great unless the disc you want to install to hasn’t been fdisked. Tried it out (with VMWare) and it worked quite good. Now I gotta figure out how to have it install my drivers and the programs I normally use. That’s 500Gb of stuff! No, I think I’ll leave it as a generic XP system for when I upgrade my computer (which I do about every 2 years). Of course, I could Ghost my system; but I’m not sure it would fit on one dvd for storage. Think I’ll check that out…