Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

It's been a year since I upgraded orac to XP Home (with Service Pack 2). It's definitely an improvement over Win 98. However, it's far from perfect. Here are the problems I've been having.

1) Even though I have "show volume icon in the taskbar" checked, it doesn't show up there.
2) Windows Media Player 9 craps out on me after about 90 seconds if I'm playing an audio CD.
3) Sometimes my browser (and other processes) hangs for a couple of minutes while it's allegedly doing something that I can't find in Task Manager.
4) The real grr argh: I still get the occasional BSOD with critical stop and core memory dumps, and I can't pick up where I left off; I have to reboot and restart from scratch.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. That it, other than "switch to Linux" or "buy a Mac". If you want me to start using a Mac, then buy me one. :-|

We have a construction crew working on our building today. There's a huge crane in front of the main doors. I think they're going to replace one of the building's air conditioner units, since I received an email from my boss to not mess with the thermostats until further notice. And so I'm spending a fair amount of time getting up from my cubicle and watching them work.

I look at the stuff I want to buy, and most of it is relatively inexpensive (<$100). I don't need to have a high-definition flat-screen TV; I'm fine with the one I have.

But there's a whole bunch of little stuff I'd like to get. Part of me says, "it's OK to buy, it's relatively cheap". Meanwhile, another part of me says that even though they're inexpensive, these little things will add up, like drops of water in a bucket.

I do like to shop. I like to get out of the house and visit places I want to buy from. But I rarely go for the sake of looking around. If I visit a store, I feel obligated into buying something from them. Otherwise the people who work there might think I'm casing the place or going to shoplift from them.

I suppose this is why dollar stores exist. People can go and shop, buy cheap things, and not feel very guilty about spending lots of money.

[Updated 14:20] Of course, I'll wait until I have the cash to spare. Some things are more important, like the mortgage, utility bills, and spousal support. Maybe this will be an incentive for me to get my taxes done.

Now that I've upgraded the hard drive in my laptop, I think that will be the last hardware upgrade I perform on it. I think I've pushed and hit the limit on what I can do with the laptop. While it's fine for email, web surfing, and downloading (via a wireless card), it lags behind in word processing and multimedia. (The processor inside is an Intel Pentium MMX 166 Mhz, and I have 80 Mb of memory.) OpenOffice crawls on it, and I hear Flash files before I see the associated video (which is jerky at best).

I'd like to upgrade the laptop with a new or used one, but the price is still out of reach, unless it's a free one.

There's one at work I have my eye on. No one's used it for over a year, and I'm waiting for it to be surplused. It's missing a hard drive and caddy, but I can get a replacement on EBay for a reasonable price.

Even after I upgrade to a new machine, I'll still keep the old laptop. Why? Because I still like old technology. I've had this laptop for over 6 years, and it's become a good friend. Besides, I doubt anyone else will want it. I still have its predecessor, an NCR 3180 Safari, stowed away. Nobody wants that, and I don't blame them. 33 Mhz processor, 16 Mb of memory, no USB ports or CD-ROM, runs Windows 95. It would make a good toy for my daughter.

Isn't is amazing how quickly we've become accustomed to new technology?

...which means I'll be glued in front of the TV on Sunday night watching the multi-million-dollar 30-second spots and rating them. At least I hope so. R and M may have other plans for me.

In the meantime, I saw one on New Year's Day that made me laugh out loud and cheer. Amp Energy (a product of Pepsi-Cola) featured one with Ryan Miller, goaltender of the Buffalo Sabres, and a goalie from the Los Angeles Kings, dueling with "your mama" insults. A Flash version is available on the Amp Energy website; click on NHL to watch it. And I'm sure it's on YouTube by now.

Just found out through many LJ friends in the filk community that Greg McMullan, aka filkergem perished in a house fire last night.

I'll post a longer remembrance later, as soon as I find a picture of him that I can post here.

Greg McMullan
Greg McMullan
Greg McMullan

I've been wanting to upgrade the 3 Gb hard drive in my laptop for a while.

( Last week, I bought a 6 Gb hard drive on eBay. The gory details follow. )

Lessons learned: 1) Make sure I start with a clean disk, including any hidden system files. 2) It's ideal to take out the hard drives and hook them up to another machine to perform the copy. 3) Give it lots of time.

Now I wish XP Home had an FDISK command to take care of disk work. It doesn't. And my copy of PartitionMagic doesn't work on XP. :( [Updated 22:23] PartitionMagic does indeed work on XP; I need to call the NT flavor and not the 9x flavor.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday calamitysam!

There's talk about the Government giving every taxpaying American a check for $800 in order to stimulate the economy. My reckoning is that in most cases, the money will be used to pay off debt -- credit cards, home equity loans, etc. -- instead of making new purchases.

On an unrelated note, I don't think Dr. Phil should have blabbed about Britney's condition. Just because one is a celebrity doesn't mean they lose their right to privacy.

I was just reading this story about how Time Warner is planning to try a pricing model based on consumption, rather than a flat fee. The test market is Beaumont, TX.

I remember Robert Metcalfe, in several of his articles he wrote for InfoWorld, advocated a pay-as-you-go Internet.

Can this be done? Do we finally have the technology to do this? And would you support such a billing paradigm (i.e. vs. free sites or flat-fee sites)?

Maila Nurmi, who was better known as Vampira, one of the original TV horror movie hostesses, has died.

Here's the obit from msnbc.com.