Doing More Before 11am Than Most Do Before 2pm

Some days it's a bad sign when you forget to turn off the alarm and wake up thinking you have to get up for work. This was not one of those mornings.

Around 5am we grumbled if we should sleep in or go crowing. Mr. C told me all about his wacky dreams. I mostly slept through his story telling.

We ended up sticking to the original plan. I set the coffee robot to make us our tasty beverages and started putting on my gear. Today I rode the motorcycle on the highway for the second time. I took the scary offramp that's a 270 degree turn with a posted speed of 20 MPH.

Epp! I knew my jacket was big on me, but I didn't realize that it poofed out to make me look like I have a big belly! Oh well. It's really comfortable, pink, and had reflective lines.

We didn't see many crows, but we discovered a new bird that we're calling the red-shouldered dog fighter.



Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell only wishes he could fly like these little guys!

When we arrived home we did some chores and then back out for errands. Overall, a very fine morning.

Sunday Adventures

Today brought another adventure.

We drank coffee at the shop again. They're very busy on Sundays. We sat out front this time. It was nice, but just a bit cold.

I did more programming, learning loops for the first time. Exciting!

Yesterday I wanted to ride our motorcycle. It's been a while, I've been trying to get over the fear and back into the "I love it!" feeling. The bike won't start. Our neighbor and I agreed that it sounded like the battery. I looked up instructions online on how to jump start a bike. Turns out it's the same as jumping a car. If you're jumping from a car battery, you don't start the car. It will ruin the bike's ignition system because the car battery is more powerful.Today I got out our jumper cables, figure out how to expose the battery on the bike and hooked it up. No love. So I went down to Escondido Motorsports and bought a battery charger. I spent the next 30 minutes following the instructions in the manual on how to remove the battery. I think I've conquered a bit of my fear of electricity. Progress!

The battery is now charging in the "mud room"/laundry room.Every weekend I also try to do a little house work. Yesterday I figured out how to change the code on the garage door pad outside. It wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought. I just needed to find the make and model and Google it.

The internet is amazing. You can find anything from how to jump a motorcycle to how to change your garage door passcode.

Rock on Internet!

Weekend Adventure

This weekend we're trying something new. Since moving to Escondido we've switched coffee joints. We'll sometimes go to our old drive through coffee joint in Rancho Bernardo, but more often we'll make our own or we'll go to Safari Coffee. Today we're camped out by the window playing on the internet and I'm working a bit on my programming homework. They recognize us here. We're trying this "social" thing. It's interesting.

Being social has never been a strong point for us. If we have kids, I don't want them to inherit this tendency from us, so I want to break the habit now. We'll see how it goes.

Maybe working on the computer sends the wrong signal, but "Progress Not Perfection."

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.

March Weekend Adventure

Peter and I had an awesome adventure this weekend.

Every year Campus By The Sea allows registration for Family Camp to be post marked March 1st, and no earlier. Last year I mailed the forms from San Diego so they would reach the Avalon post office sooner than they would from Seattle. This year Katy had the awesome idea that Peter and I should take a little trip over to Catalina Island and deliver them to the post office. March 1st fell on a Saturday, so we did it.

We woke up nice and early and hit the road at 5:30am. Our normal drive through coffee place was not open yet, so we hit Starbucks for our morning java. After the gas station and bank ATM, we were off. It was a peaceful 2 hour drive to Long Beach.

One of the best parts of going to the Catalina Express ferry is the container yard. So many shipping containers!

We caught the 8:30am ferry over to Catalina Island into Avalon. We walked around. It was a cloudy morning but still beautiful. We had breakfast in a cute little cafe there, right on the beach. We looked at a few of the shops while waiting for the post office to open.

We saw some awesome crows. We even saw what looked to be a mated pair that were preening each other. Love was in the air! According to a crow book Pete received for Christmas from Katy and Alex, crows do mate for life.

At 11am we reported to the post office. I was on the phone with Katy at the time, but Peter spoke with the clerk. He bought a 41 cent stamp, and asked the clerk to deliver the letter to the Campus By the Sea post office box while he was there. Success! We had to have been the first group to have our registration delivered this year.

For the cost of a stamp, a letter can be sent from Maine or New York or some state on the east coast and delivered to this little post office in Avalon on Catalina Island. For the cost of a stamp, this clerk delivered the letter 10 feet. Most expensive stamp ever.

On the way back to catch the boat we saw another crow just walking along the sand, ignoring all the people the way that crows do. We stalked him for a while, then headed back to the pier.

It was a quick one hour trip back to the main land. Then another 2 hour drive back home.

Excellent adventure. I give it 5 stars and two thumbs up.