Technophobia

Friday, October 10, 2008

I was told to expect the FIOS technician between 8 and noon. He arrived at 8:15am. Awesome.

He is currently in the back working on installing their boxes to the house and then the work inside will begin. No internet at some point, but I’m working from home so I’ll report progress later.

[10:20am]: We have internet! Woo!

He’s hooking up the cable boxes now. It is all very exciting and now we need to save for an HD TV.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Again, I cannot access Gmail this morning. I get a 404 page, so there is definitely something going on. It’s frustrating.

Dad, I wanted to email you about your former employee - he pled guilty yesterday, is cooperating with the feds to find the kingpin, and will get a minimum of 5 years and I’m guessing will be deported upon release. Apparently he had 80Gb of data on his home computer, but his ISP turned him in because he tapped into a known sketchy IP address that was on a watch list.

From the Mommy Files, Beau and I were talking about the Duggar family and I said that as much as I love being a mom, if we were 20 years younger and I didn’t get so sick when pregnant I’d totally be up for having 4-5 kids. Not 18, but a nice large brood of kids. That said, I’m thrilled with our 1.3 children because I never expected to have any children at this age. I adore Jesse and I’m falling more in love with the little lemon in my belly every day. Thank you, Lord, for this unexpected blessing.

Nutella = French Vanilla Coffeemate + coffee (decaf) = deliciousness. And it’s way cheaper than *$.

I’ve got a case of the Thursdays.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Is Gmail down or am I just not able to get to it?

[4:20pm]: I’m in now. Thanks.

Friday, October 03, 2008

1. I remembered #5 from yesterday - just a general complaint that my lower back is already hurting after sitting for too long. I fear the pain yet to come as the baby gets larger. Oy.

2. On the debate, I am ashamed to say that we turned it off about 40 minutes in. I was worried because she kept ignoring the moderator questions to discuss her own agenda items. I didn’t think that would work well. Turns out that I was wrong and should have stuck with it, apparently. I think he was completely charmed by her, as well and I like that he openly laughed when she was funny, even at his own expense.

3. *$’s Signature Hazelnut Hot Chocolate is deadly good stuff. Just a subtle hint of the hazelnut with the rich chocolate - it reminds me of Nutella. Which reminds me, Beau was supposed to buy me a jar of Nutella. Honey, will you add that to the grocery list, please? [ADDED LATER] Also, please add hummus and pita bread. Thanks!

4. We get our FIOS installed on Tuesday. I’m very excited!

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Still no word on the promotion. The Chief has not made an appearance in the office yet. *sigh*

Beau’s mp3 player died yesterday. We tried to troubleshoot last night - the player won’t turn on, but seems to receive data. We reformated the thing and I was able to transfer a book to it, but it will not turn on. It is not a battery problem - it had a new battery in it and Beau did switch for a new one, too. It’s a stumper and a bummer. So he said that if I get the promotion that I can buy the one that I want for myself. I found it at Walmart for significantly cheaper than anywhere else, so I’m anxious to get an answer on the job for a couple of reasons now.

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to look at houses this weekend. We have a BBQ for small group leaders on Saturday afternoon and then church that evening. So if we go out to look, it’ll have to be Sunday, which neither of us wants to do. And it will depend on our realtor’s availability. If we don’t then we won’t see anything until after we get back from California. Man, we leave in a week for California already. I need to mail that package of Jesse stuff to Beau’s uncle no later than tomorrow so that it arrives on time.

We go to the Glenn Beck simulcast tonight and I’m very excited. He was talking yesterday about the special “The Twenty” pre-show thing that they’ve done for the theaters hosting the simulcast. Apparently, they were able to convince the theater chains to run his version for his show. So we have to get there at least 20 minutes early because I want to see that, too.

It’s a very nerve-wracking day. But in a totally good way.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Remember a few weeks ago when I said I wanted an iPod for Christmas? After doing some research with my library, I have decided that the better option is to get a Creative brand mp3 player (This is the model that I covet and have added to my Christmas wishlist). They are more compatible with the software used by libraries, and my library in particular. Wouldn’t it be awful to get an iPod and then discover that I can’t download audiobooks to it? I’m glad I did the research.

This morning I asked Beau if I could get a cheaper model now (and nevermind the other one for Christmas) so that I could use it on our trip. Because I had checked out three audiobooks from the eaudiobook part of the library website and after spending 30 minutes burning 2/3 of one book to CDs (11 CDs total took about 45 minutes to do the complete burn), I realized that it would be much more practical and cheaper to just buy the mp3 player.

At some point I remembered that Jaynee has an unused PDA now that she uses her Blackberry for everything the PDA used to do. I asked her about it and we agreed that it would work as long as I downloaded the books to my 2GB thumb drive since the memory on the PDA is small. She was going to mail that to me so that I had time to test it and work out kinks before our trip.

And then Beau reminded me that he has a small mp3 player. So he got it and we started a test download of the smallest book and less than 4 minutes later the whole book was transferred to his little Creative MuVo N200, which only had 512MB of memory. I then tried to transfer a second book and that one transferred completely in about 4 minutes. So there are 2 full novels on Beau’s little MuVo! The third is on the CDs and I’ll just use those since I have them.

And I just realized that the memory on the PDA may be enough for at least one regular novel after all. So Jaynee, if you want to bring that up with you at the end of the month, I’ll still give that a test, too.

I’m very excited. It’s days like today that I love technology.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

For years I have resisted the siren call of one beautiful modern technology item. I really have no need of it, except that I can think of one particular way I can use it that would make life slightly easier. It’s expensive and I just can’t justify the expense of it because in reality I don’t need it. But after all these years I am adding it to my Christmas wish list.

So what is it?

An iPod.

I’m leaning to the Nano, because I don’t think I want the full classic version, but I would like the viewing capability not available with the Shuffle.

My main desire is to be able to listen to audiobooks in places other than my car and not have to deal with the CDs if I am listening to a book in my car. Or I could listen to two books at once - one in the car and one on the iPod. Portability would be nice. Then there are sermons and other podcasts, Glenn Beck, and TV shows that I could watch, say, on my lunch hour instead of at home where it bothers Beau.

Anyway, it’s just a new thought I had the other day, but consider it officially on my wish list for Christmas.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

I won’t bore you with the details, but I discovered something about the comment page yesterday when I was poking around the template code and I thought I’d test my theory about it. It looks like I was able to fix the commenting problem. So I’ve turned off moderation and turned on the captcha again. After a test, it seems to be working now.

Please email me if you get an error message when attempting to comment (or if you need hints for some of the captcha questions).

Given that I can’t use the captcha for security against comment spam here until we figure out what’s wrong with the template code, I am considering requiring registration for commenters. I really don’t want to leave my comments open to spammers like they are now. So, my faithful readers, are you willing to register in order to comment? Please let me know if the for-now wide open comments.

[UPDATE]: With further thought, I may wait to implement the registration requirement until I see how long it take to get spammed. I was getting enough comment spam before the upgrade that it caused me to do the upgrade. So we’ll see if they come back now that things are a little more open to them.

But I’d still like your feedback on whether or not you’d tolerate having to register to leave a comment here, please.

[UPDATE 10:45am]: Just got hit by a spammer. Registration is being turned on immediately. I’m sorry to have to do it. I blame Algore, inventor of the internets.

[UPDATE 12:20pm]: Because nothing hard is ever easy, it seems that the registration thingy wasn’t asking for you to register. So I’ve turned that function off. Comments are now set for moderation, which means there will be a delay to your comment appearing until I release it. Supposedly.

Not that anyone is really trying to comment anyway, besides spammers. My blog has become exceedingly boring. I despair.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I turned comments back on but without the captcha requirement. We’ll see if that works or not.

In the meantime, go look at the pics of my kid I posted last week after our trip and talk to me over there, please.

This assumes you will be able to see this post in order to click the link. If I broke things again, then this is moot.

Got a quick response to a second note on my message to tech support this morning. Woo!

Now to see if the commenting problem is fixed.

Thanks to those who posted the alternate link for my new back-up blog - Lintefiniel Musing on Blogger Lintefiniel Musing on WordPress.

[UPDATE]: Meanwhile the comments link will not open the pages for commenting, so that’s still a problem. If you can access the comments page but cannot leave a comment, please let me know via email to jenspeaks AT gmail DOT com. Obviously if you’re able to actually leave a comment, I’ll see that.

[UPDATE]: The problem is definitely tied to the commenting - commenting is turned off until we figure out the problem. I miss you guys already!

[UPDATE (9:45pm)]: Updated to change the link to the new WordPress blog I created. I prefer WP over Blogger. Much easier to use.

Monday, June 09, 2008

I’ve received two emails lately from folks who wanted to comment on posts and couldn’t. It is most likely related to the upgrade from Friday, so let me investigate the problem.

Thanks for your patience.

[UPDATE]: Seems to be a problem with EE reading the server path for the captchas. Nothing has changed, so I have no clue how to fix it. *sigh*

[UPDATE 2]: I’ve downloaded and installed an alternate captcha/question plug-in that also is not working.  Yet. Still working at it.

[UPDATE 3]: Turns out it probably was not a captcha problem. I disabled that requirement and comments are still rejected. I’m stumped.

[UPDATE 4]: I’m getting no love from the support folks. Makes me slightly angry - they only help tech support issues in the forum. Makes me want to switch to WP except that I’ve invested $$ for the license to EE. Very frustrating.

In the meantime, I did discover a mistake in the installation that I may have made. I’m going to attempt a complete re-install in a bit.

Friday, June 06, 2008

I was previously running the blog on a really old version of EE and started getting consistent comment spam. I went into update the blacklist and was unable to, so it was clearly long past time to update the blogware. Let me know if things look wonky or if you get error messages.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

You have children. You have the internet. Chances are your children will or do surf the internet. Chances are high that your children will be or have been exposed to inappropriate content and/or predators when on the internet without their or your knowledge. So how do you add protections for your kids so that they can surf the web safely?

Shrek Browser looks to be a good tool. I know that we will install it when it comes time for Jesse to start playing on the computer.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

The printer, that is.

I was printing my jewelry hang tags when the printer stopped and the ink light came on. So I called Beau, who was out running errands, to ask him to buy ink, too. He did, I installed it, and the printer still won’t work. We replaced both of the ink cartridges.

I think I killed it because I use Avery business cards to make my hang tags. And I print them double-sided. But the extra perferation that Avery uses now, means that when they rolls through the printer the second time, they get hung up by the overhanging cover. So I was propping up the door a teeny bit to ease the paper through. It was working fine until the third page.

It’s an older HP hand-me-down from my parents, but it worked great. Actually, we had a bit of trouble with it a few weeks ago when I was working on my accounting/taxes stuff.

We really can’t afford a new printer. Of course, we can write it off our taxes next year as a business expense since I use it almost exclusively for the business at this point. So I’m on the hunt. Any recommendations for a good color printer that’s under $100?