Domesticity

I just got back from the dentist. I finally have had the three most unsightly of my rotten front teeth drilled, filled, and rebuilt. I already look at least 80% better. In about three weeks I get the others done. I can hardly wait. Now I’m sitting here with a numb face, waiting for the novocaine to wear off so I can have something to eat.

Okay, I’ve reintalled a fresh copy of Windows XP Home (service pack 2) onto my desktop, and it’s downloading a bunch of updates (including I suppose Service Pack 3) as I type. My next task is to install my printer and camera software, all my other programs, and then go into a three year coma. When I come out of it maybe they’ll have invented a computer operating system that didn’t feel like major surgery without anesthesia to install.

Make that a three-hundred-year coma.

Sudden Onset Windows Sinus Headache: that’s what I call what I used to get every time I would start reinstalling Windows. Since it’s actually been a few years since I’ve had to do a Windows reinstall (for whatever reason — this time is because I just wanted a clean install), I had forgotten I get this way. Ouch.

Maybe some more coffee would help. Coffee is the everything cure for computer stuff, right? Including pouring a few ounces of the boiling stuff on the motherboard if it doesn’t work after this.

Green Valley Book Fair

And then to Vietnamese food in Harrisonburg.

Later, my children.

Update: today’s book fair loot:

Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, by Charles Brockden Brown (both in the same volume).

Dickens’ Bleak House.

The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies.

Airman’s Odyssey, which is comprised of Wind, Sand and Stars, Night Flight, and Flight to Arras, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (I never had much use for The Little Prince, but these books, his accounts of his pilot exploits in the early days of flight, sounded interesting.

A nice Everyman hardcover edition of The Tale of Genji.

A hardcover set of The World of Short Stories, selected by Clifton Fadiman, which was only $1.99 perhaps because unlike most of the other hardcovers there it lacked a book jacket.

Except for Dickens and The Mabinogion, I’m quite unfamiliar with everything I bought. (Well I’ve heard of the Tale of Genji, but I’ve never read it.) We’ll see if I’ve expanded my horizons in any direction in the coming weeks.

I’m on my laptop. It seems to currently be working. I think the trick is to not use it all the time, or for anything too serious, and to keep blowing the dust out of the vents with canned air. We’ll see how things go.

Later today, I might wipe my desktop’s hard drive and reinstall Windows. It needs a clean.

Well, I’m not lazing around on the sofa with my laptop anymore. I’m back in the desk chair at the Windows computer, squinting at the tiny screen. You know why? The laptop did one of those total freezes that laptops I own do from time to time, when the only way I could get it to shut off is by pulling out the battery. (The Thinkpad used to do that too. All. The. Time.) Oh it loves when I do that — I’ve probably destroyed it again. I haven’t turned it back on to see — it had been getting pretty hot (which is why I decided to shut it down) and I think I’ll let it cool off for the rest of the night and tomorrow. I did some searching around online for Dell Inspiron 1150 issues and it seems they do have a tendency to overheat, but opening them up and cleaning out dust might help, if there is no permanent damage. But I’m not opening the laptop — if a blast of canned air into the nooks and crannies won’t help then I’ll put it to one side until I can afford to take it to a repair place. So that’s yet another computer issue I’ve got. On the other hand, the desktop is working fine even though I couldn’t get the second memory chip accepted. Maybe I’ll just keep it the way it is. I’ve about had it with electronics altogether. Maybe that’s why I had the urge to go to Staples and buy some pencils. Time to start writing in a paper journal again…

I almost didn’t recognize you, what with the fact that it’s snowing again and all. Yep.

Update: I posted this just before noon. It’s now almost 4:30 — it’s been snowing all day. But only about an hour ago did some of it start to stick; it was mostly doing that melting-when-it-lands stuff. And oh hey, I got a phone call and I get to go early into work tomorrow so I’ll get a whole day. I am glad I invested in an ice scraper because I’ll bet there will be a layer of ice on my car tomorrow morning.

Gotta stop looking out the windows at the snow. It’s hypnotic.

Okay, I’m back playing on the laptop again. I have the feeling that I will either need to get new glasses or a new monitor soon — squinting at my desktop’s tiny monitor was making my eyes hurt. It will probably be a new monitor, as the kind of glasses I have to use cost a fortune, way more than a monitor, of which you can get a decent model for around $100. Also, my back hurts, and I can use the laptop while sitting on my sofa. My cat just jumped up here next to me — I have all these black clothes (black jeans, black fuzzy jacket, black shirt — I was all in black yesterday for some reason) piled up in the space next to me where she usually likes to lie down. Oh, but she loves the fuzzy jacket — she’s kneading it right now.

Things I did today: since I was in a fooling-around-with-computer-stuff mood, I dragged out my old laptop (not this one, the ancient Thinkpad) to see if it would start up after not being turned on for about a year. But it still did the same sad thing that made me stop using it: it refused to boot, and all I could hear was the fan making this busted whirring sound. So I packed it away again. I searched around for some info on dead Thinkpads of that vintage, and found that a lot of them had a thing where this tiny part in the motherboard would break and have to be soldered back on. Well there’s another thing that’s beyond me. It would be nice if I could get it fixed and have a third backup, or at least get the stuff off the hard drive.

Then I unpacked my little HP Jornada handheld. It’s got Windows CE on it, but it’s an ancient, obsolete model. Still, it does work, and I even had a backup battery to replace the one that a warning message kept telling me had died. What I don’t have, though, is the cable that connects it to a computer serial port, so I can’t sync it with my desktop. (The Dell doesn’t have a serial port or a parallel port, but the desktop has both.) This kind of makes doing anything on the handheld sort of pointless. However, some searching around did reveal that there are places where I could still buy one of the special HP cables — for around forty bucks. Yikes. So it’s not a priority. I used to take notes with the handheld when I was going to college a few years ago. Then I put it away in my graveyard bag of obsolete computer gadgetry.

So anyway, that was my day.

Okay, now I read an old (well, about a year old — my desktop isn’t exactly new) forum entry over on the AOpen site that seems to indicate that my type of motherboard can only accomodate 1 GB of RAM. So maybe that was the problem. But the paperwork that came with the thing says it can be upped to 2 GB. The AOpen website support area seems to be staffed by people for whom English is a second — or third or fourth — language, so I could be reading it wrong. Anyway, what I read is here.

So far the computer seems to be doing well on 1 GB of RAM though. It’s definitely responding much faster, and any slowdowns are probably due to the fact that I really need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows. That will take quite a few hours if I recall the last time I had to do that to a computer, so I may put that off for another day.

And hey! I’ve put my Paypal logo back up in the sidebar. The woman I was temporarily replacing at my current job is back part-time, so they’ve cut back my hours, and I get the feeling I’ll soon be looking for another job. So any help you can give would be much appreciated.

Well, I finally managed to upgrade my plugins and my Wordpress install to the latest version. That’s that for this blog for now. In other news… yay, I finally managed to find a cheap corded keyboard for my desktop — the Walmart in Waynesboro had a pile of them on a lower shelf in their electronics department — all the boxes were damaged in some way; they looked like they’d fallen off the back of the proverbial truck. But they were only ten bucks what the hell. Anyway, I plugged it in, it seems to work just fine, so now I won’t have to worry that my battery will die when I’m in the middle of typing something.

But I’m not typing this on the desktop, but my laptop — I’m in the middle of backing up files off the desktop to my tiny flash drive, preparatory to the upgrading of my memory. Yes, the memory chips came in yesterday via Amazon. I can’t wait to open up the desktop and load its nice new brain. Then I’m going to do a total wipe and reinstall of Windows XP and those programs I want to use. And… one of these days I’m going to invest in a new monitor, if I can keep myself employed. You can get a nice widescreen monitor these days for under two hundred dollars. The little one I have works fine, but it is little (smaller than my laptop’s — I think it’s a fourteen incher or less) and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. But that’s for the future, assuming I don’t break the computer when I install the new memory.

In other news, I’m getting my teeth fixed, finally! As in, I’m getting all the horrid cavities drilled and filled, so maybe I will be able to go out in public without a bag over my head. It’s a bitch to drive in those things… I also need bridges and things but that’s for the future — right now I have to keep the teeth I do have in my head. I have an appointment in less than two weeks for a cleaning, and then one a week later for the worst of the front teeth. And so on. I can’t wait. (That should show you how badly I need this done; normally I hate going to the dentist, but am paying for that irrational hatred now. So now I love the dentist.)

Um… there was more, but I can’t remember what it was. I’ll update later if I feel like it.

Update: argh. I installed the memory — or rather, attempted to do so. Only to find out that either something is wrong with 1) the second memory slot, 2) the second 1 GB chip, or 3) me. I did have trouble getting the chip to stay in the slot — and when I finally did, turning on the computer resulted in that appalling sustained beep computers make when you do something wrong to their innards. So I removed the second chip, turned the computer back on, and it worked fine, albeit with only 1 GB of RAM not 2 like I wanted. The offending slot, by the way, is the one that wasn’t used — there was only one memory chip (a 256 KB one) in the other slot that works. So I’m thinking either that slot has something wrong with it — like it’s dead — or else it needs a jumper switched somewhere on the motherboard and that’s beyond me at the moment. (Well, like ever — if motherboard manipulation is needed I’m calling in an expert.) I suppose I could have switched out the other chip just to make sure the second new one works and I haven’t destroyed it by touching it all over (“only hold it by the ends,” shyeah, right), but I’m too tired. Still on the laptop — though the desktop does work and 1 GB is pretty fast for Windows XP. But I want 2 GB! Frown.