I don't always love dogs

Our neighbors got a dog at the end of last year, or maybe the beginning of this year. Every night they put the dog outside, and boy, does he not like it. The barking starts at 7pm. Some nights it continues until 9 or 10pm. At first I thought, "Poor puppy, but he'll get used to the routine."

It's been at least 6 weeks. I'm going to start documenting when I hear the barking. I'm not sure what I'll do with the information yet, but I need to record it.

I know I should talk to the neighbors, let them know that it's bothering me, but I hate confrontation. I don't want to jump right to calling the police or animal control.

Being an adult is hard work.

Day 2 - As The Crow Flies

Source unknown. May be 'shopped, might be real.

As the Crow Flies?

Mr. Container and I find this phrase to be hilarious. Have you ever watched a crow fly?

According to The Phrase Finder "As the crow Flies" means "In a direct line, without any of the detours caused by following a road." The origin refers to "The allusion on this expression is obviously to the ability of crows to fly directly from A to B, without the encumbrances of roads and landscape features that man is hampered by."



The person that wrote the origin also spotted the absurdity of the idea. It continues, "Crows are perhaps an odd choice, as, unlike many birds that migrate over long distances, their flight isn't especially straight. Crows normally fly in large wheeling arcs, looking for food."

The aerial acrobatics crows perform are amazing, but it rarely results in a direct flight from Point A to Point B.



**Graphical illustrations courtesy of Microsoft Paint and a little too much time on my hands**

Super Awesome Crow Paintings

Physician, heal thyself

On a fairly regular basis I deal with a computer that has decided to take advantage of their 401k and head off to Florida. Sometimes the motherboard dies. Dell SX270s have a known issue with a bad capacitor. The brown goo you see below is not good. Dell even extended the warranty for a year. That time has come and gone.

Other times the hard drive dies. If it’s just a corrupt Windows system file, it can be repaired. If not, I can “slave” the drive to a working computer and get to the files that way. When it’s a hardware failure and the drive won’t spin, you’re usually out of luck. It is very expensive to send the drive to a data recovery company.

So I rant and rave for people to back up their data, if not a bit by bit image of the drive.

Yeah, you can see it coming already.

The weekend of January 31st my Vista laptop starts behaving badly. Freezing. Nothing I can do, I do a hard shutdown, killing power. When I boot it back up, errors abound. Despite my best efforts, it gets to the point where it passes POST, but nothing more, not ever getting to the Windows boot screen. Blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. Master Boot Record error that could not be repaired from the OS disk. It saw the Dell recovery partition, but not the C:\ drive. When I tried to use the recovery partition, that failed too. If I had my tools from work, I could have slaved it to another system, but I was lazy and did not want to go into the office.

This is the weekend I had to take my final Business Law test for my online class. And my online Visual Basic class was due to start on Monday. Sure, Mr. Container has his computer so I could work off that if I needed. This is a fairly new Dell Studio laptop. It shouldn’t have this kind of problem.

Guess who hadn’t backed up her data in over 2 weeks?

After a few hours, I gave up. I was getting tired and a little cranky. I slept for about 4 hours, than got up at 3:30am to tackle the problem again.

I reinstalled Vista from the CD provided by Dell. But I can’t find the CD with the drivers and Vista does not recognize either the wireless or the wired NIC. Major problem! Mr. Container also has a Dell and I know where his CD is! Pow! I install the drivers from that one and it’s close enough. I can now get a wireless connection and download the drivers from Dell’s site.

From there I install the other utilities and AV. Ah, it’s nice to be back where I wanted to be. A few issues to resolve here and there, but all good. It took several days before I could get the fingerprint reader to work, but it is happy now too.

Immediately I ordered Norton Ghost 14.0. Now I have a bit by bit backup of my drive. Never again.

I just have to remember to take an image regularly.

So many memes, so little time - 25 things

This is a FB meme. Cross posting for fun.

1. I was named for my paternal Grandmother "Serena Ellen (Wise) LaRue". My middle name is from a friend of my mother "Leah Marie".

2. In 8th grade, I graduated Jr. High with honors in Mathematics and Sewing. I had even sewn my graduation dress. In high school, I was awarded the “Cupertino High School Gold Award” in Computers for Business.

3. When I married, I kept my maiden name as part of my middle name. Serena Marie LaRue Araujo. Even though it started as a joke, I actually considered changing my last name to “Larujo”. For a few minutes, at least.

4. I am working on my Associates degree in Computer and Information Science. I want to get a Bachelor's from San Diego State University. Eventually I'd love to get a Master's degree in Library Science from San Jose State or U-Dub. I just finished a Business Law class with an A. Yay! Now I’m working on Visual Basic.

5. Mr. Container and I found the local roost for the crows. Around 5:20pm hundreds of crows gather in the Sears parking lot on Via Rancho in Escondido. They then go into Kit Carson Park for the night. At 6:15am they wake up and crow-mute to areas of San Diego, Escondido and San Marcos. It's amazing.

6. My first "real" job was working as a clerical assistant for the ROP office in Cupertino, CA, after school during high school. Other jobs included working in the Cupertino High School cafeteria while I was a student there, JoAnne Fabrics, Stacey's Books, Hollywood Video, a technical/mathematical book publisher in Sunnyvale, a company in Santa Clara that did ion implantation for chip manufacturers around the world, Global Village - makers of Macintosh modems (at&f1w2s95=44), Onsale.com/Egghead.com, Yahoo!, SimpleNet.com, and now a pharmacy benefits processing company in San Diego.

7. I have three tattoos, four if you include one that's been covered up by a bigger and better one. I’m thinking of getting another, but have to find the perfect design. That’s the hardest part.

8. I will no longer use any illegal or unlicensed software or music. As overpriced as I think many applications are, it's still stealing. I do enjoy many freeware apps, like OpenOffice, Thunderbird, FireFox, etc.

9. When I was in 7th grade, my little brother Ben and I were playing around and he gave me a hairline fracture in my thumb. It’s the only broken bone I have ever had.

10. When I was a little kid (4 or 5?), my big brother Nathan hit me in the head with a 4x4 he was swinging like a bat. I had to get stitches on the bridge of my nose by my left eye. I still have a scar.

11. When I was about 8, we were playing baseball. I was pitching. Nathan it the ball and it smacked me in the head. I think. Maybe it was Ben. Maybe I was 10 or 12 years old. Or maybe it never actually happened. I don’t remember too much about it. J

12. My first car was a 1986 VW Jetta (Burgundy). Nathan and I bought it together when I was 16, he was 18. Nathan crashed it before I learned to drive a stick shift. My next car was a 1976 VW Bug (Orange) that Ben and I bought together. Ben crashed it on a rainy morning while we were driving him to school. After that, my parents helped me get my 1998 Ford Escort (Blue-Green). It lasted +100,000 miles without being smashed.

13. I want to have a baby this year. Mr. Container is enthusiastic about it too. We’ll see what happens.

14. Did I mention I like crows? When we lived in the Rancho Bernardo apartment, I would put Cheez-Its out on the “patio” ledge. They would fly down and eat them. Very amusing. They also like baked Parmesan cheese rounds. They’re cheese slices baked into cracker like rounds.

15. I have passed IT industry recognized certification tests for CompTIA A+ (IT Technician), Network+ and Security+. Next I’d like to work on the Microsoft certification tests.

16. Mr. Container and I took 4 motorcycle riding training courses and both passed our DMV exams for a motorcycle license. We own a 2007 Honda Shadow. It’s very fun to ride. The goal is to get comfortable enough on it to ride it to work. I’m still working on that. It’s a slow journey.

17. I had my first cavity when I was in my early 20’s. The only major dental work I had before that was when I had my wisdom teeth removed at age 16. Dr. Pack, my dentist during childhood, let me keep my two wisdom teeth. They’re in a box in the garage.

18. I have only been outside the US once. I went to Puerto Vallarta in 2005. I have never been to Tijuana.

19. For 6th grade, I attended classes with 7th grade students at Hyde Jr. High instead of staying with my 6th grade classmates at Fremont Older Elementary. There were only 12 of us in that “Super Sixth” program.

20. During my Junior year of high school, I doubled up on English and history classes and attended classes at DeAnza College at night. I was able to finish high school in 3 years instead of the normal 4. Most of my friend in the class of ’95 had no idea I was graduating as class of ’94.

21. I really like the TV show “Sports Night”. I like to watch other shows Aaron Sorkin has written and spot characters, story lines, actors/actresses and phrases that were taken from “Sports Night”. For example, “West Wing” has many, including story lines about one character feeling responsible for the death of another sibling (Josh in West Wing, Dan in Sports Night). “American President” was the movie version of “West Wing”. I think “Studio 60” was an attempt to bring back “Sports Night” under the guise of a comedy show instead of a sports show. The potential love interest between Dana and Casey in Sports Night is seen in the relationship between Donna and Josh in West Wing, fortunately toned down. The close nearly mind-reading work relationship between Dana and Natalie can be seen in the West Wing work relationships of Donna and Josh or Leo and Margaret. And of course, Joshua Molina has been in nearly every TV series or movie that Aaron Sorkin wrote. I’ll need to watch Studio 60 again to be able to give examples with that show. Although I remember them making a big deal out of the Studio 60 building, as they did in West Wing for the White House, reciting the history and significance of the location and rooms. Studio 60 also did a story line about a kidnap and ransom scenario, as did West Wing when the President’s daughter was kidnapped.

22. Did I mention I like crows? It all started when Mr. Container and I noticed the crows scavenging around the drive-through coffee joint we frequented. The enjoyed the Carl’s Jr. food that was left in the parking lot or that they “stole” from the garbage can. They really like ranch dressing packets.

23. I enjoy crafts, including sewing, quilting, scrapbooking, cross-stitching, dried flower arranging and candy making. Last year I made candies using a mold from RSA VPN tokens. RSA tokens are little electronic devices about the size of a car key that display a six digit number that changes every 60 seconds on a little LCD screen. You use the number as a password with your computer to allow you to connect to your company’s network, to access resources like files or email at work from home. The candy version did not have numbers that changed, of course. http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=1156

An example of an older RSA token:

Newer RSA tokens look like this:

24. I love socks. I love warm socks, frilly socks, knee high socks, all kinds of socks. Some of my favorites include my newest pair – a hand knitted pair of original, one of a kind, Katy Araujo socks. I also love my knee high pink socks. Related to socks, I also enjoy wearing leg warmers. I was a child in the 80’s, after all.

25. I think “pants” is one of the funniest words in the English language. “So’s your face” is a funny phrase that can be used nearly any time. “Monkeys” are funny. (So’s your face.)

And a bonus, for those of you who stuck around to the end of this:

26. Mr. Container and I have two stuffed animals/plush toys on our mantel. The first is a raven we have named “Chile”. The other is an American Crow we have named “Wellington, New Zealand”. When you squeeze them, they make raven or crow calls (respectively).

And one more bonus, because I’m on a roll:

27. This weekend I learned that “livery” is not related to fish processing and canning. It actually has a number of meanings, including distinctive dress/uniform/colors worn by members of a particular group. For some reason, I had related it to the cannery in Monterrey Bay. Go figure.

One of the many things I love about my family is their grasp of language. Many of them speak at least two languages. Conversation is fast paced and interesting. I love how they express themselves.

Then I go in to work.

Here is an email exchange I had today with a Customer Service Representative (CSR), edited for read-ability:

Me: I have a request to replace your monitor. Please let me know when you are available for about 5 minutes to have this done. I can do it while you are on a break, if that is more convenient.

CSR: Yes I'll be here. My break is until 2:45

(Now I know that they don't get 90 minute breaks/lunches)

Me: So you're available now? Or are you available at 2:45?

CSR: Yes!

Uggh. I want Thumbs!

Thank you all for being awesome writers. You're an oasis in this world.