Month: August 2006

Lots of Stuff

Lots of times this week I’ve wanted to write about things in my LJ, but never did. I’ll see if I can remember them all now.

  • Windows XP on a Windows NT4 network with Clean Slate running has proven to be a real PAIN IN THE ASS. I’ve been working my butt off at work getting student accounts out to them, and finally on Friday, most kids had their accounts. The business lab was returned to Windows XP (we’d put Win98 on it last year because I wasn’t ready for the transition. We’re only going to XP because the newest machines cannot run Win98 at all. Blech) this summer. And when the students logged on Friday? Microsoft Word didn’t work (wasn’t “installed”), they couldn’t get out to the Internet, their Quick Launch bar didn’t display, and load of other issues popped up. I had removed all of these problems with my test account before I set up the student accounts. So of course, they didn’t work as planned. When I thought I finally had the fix, it worked with one student but not another. I left on Friday angry with Windows XP (and Clean Slate, but for another XP-related issue that still isn’t resolved). So today I popped into the school to try again. I discovered that Clean Slate had prevented Windows from clearing out the local profiles (copied from their network profiles) and that second student had originally logged on with the bad profile. Once I deleted the profiles, they worked! So I pointed all of the students to that profile folder and tested another random student. It worked – yay!

  • Clean Slate is a program by Fortres Grand Corporation that erases any changes made to a computer when someone logs off or restarts. It’s been a godsend for preventing spyware & adware and viruses from filling up our PCs. I don’t have to reinstall Winders part-way through the school year anymore. However, it still has issues. We’ve cleared up most of the Win98 issues (except for the Daylight Savings Time bug – so I’m now telling Win98 machines to not change at DST – they get their time from our server anyhoo). But now with version 4, we’re experiencing all the bugs with WinXP. The main problem? When students log off, it locks up. Sits at the “saving settings” portion. Why it’s even hanging up then, I’ve no idea. I’ve already told XP to NOT save settings back to the remote profile folder. I’ve got the developers working on the problem – we’ve still got some testing to do. Until then, students will have to hold the power button in 10 seconds until it turns off. Thanks Clean Slate.

  • The kitties are growing. They’re so damn cute! I don’t have any recent photos of them, however. But now when I sit to watch Lovejoy (currently in season 3), Linus climbs onto my chest or shoulders and Lucy sits at my feet. They love to play with each other and with me (sometimes when I’m trying to play City of Heroes/Villains – often to judiang‘s dismay. They’re last check up had them both still healthy (fewer ear mites) and growing nicely. Linus was 2.2lb and Lucy was 2.3lb. Considering Linus always tries to prevent Lucy from eating, it’s good to see she’s holding her own and then some. 🙂

  • It looks like it’s going to be a good year with my students. I’ve been having fun so far (and I hope they have too). I hope I don’t keep channeling Monty Python while I’m teaching physics, however. Thankfully a few of them knew what I was alluding to. I hope I can get a handle on the tech job so that I can work on improving my science curriculum. I wanna do some new stuff and want to find out where I can speed up some topics (or maybe even cut some) in order to cover more material.

  • With regards to the tech job in general… Each year, I get a little more behind. There just isn’t enough time for me to do the job in 3 periods a day and 200 hours in the summer. And as such, I’ve been getting more behind each year. This year is the year I’ve hit the wall. I’m just so frustrated with being behind and getting behinder. I love doing the tech work, but the frustration is disguising that fact from me far too often lately.

  • Yesterday I helped mom’s cousin with her laptop and printer. Using some floppies and a USB floppy drive (from school – heh) I was able to transfer her fonts from her old machine (Win95) to her new laptop (no floppy drive). She has a brother printer, which I’ve never worked with before. After finding the Quick Setup Guide (on the disc, not on paper) I was finally able to get it working with her laptop. I didn’t get to stay there as long as I needed to (she had some more questions that I need to help her with), but I needed to get home. After all, the folks and I had two weddings to go to.

  • The first wedding was a cousin on my mom’s side. His second attempt. She’s Catholic, so the wedding was held at the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Chapel at Lehman Catholic High School. Definitely the first time I’ve been to a wedding in a high school. It was a very pretty chapel and the service was only 25 minutes long, which was greatly appreciated. I hope Gregg and his wife have many happy years together. L’chaim!

  • After the wedding, we tried to find the reception at the Sidney Airport (no, that’s not a typo – Sidney in Ohio), but couldn’t find the road the airport was on. Well, I couldn’t find it on the map. Would have been interesting going to a wedding reception in an airplane hangar, I must admit. A short trip to Kohl’s so I could get a wedding gift for the next wedding (the one I was actually invited to), and then the folks and I had supper at Applebee’s. Very tasty meal. And I had an amaretto sour.

  • The next wedding was a cousin on my dad’s side. His second attempt too. This wedding took place at her sister’s house in the spacious backyard. Dad was disappointed no one fell in the pool the whole time we were there (he’s such an optimist). The ceremony was shorter here, but I was actually able to hear it (Gregg’s was harder to hear). We stayed for the reception there and had some yummy food (Greek pastries with cheese, meatballs, chicken salad, Pepsi). Then we hung around for the cake, but they kept putting it off to have people dance. Well, watching the hokey pokey and some of the Greek dancing (she’s from a Greek family, aparently) was entertaining, but I wanted cake! The cake was yummy and full of wonderful sugar. With the 2 cans of Pepsi that sugar kept me awake until after 3am. Heh. I hope Mick and his wife have many happy years together. Nozdrovye!

Well, that’s the stuff that I can remember that I wanted to say. Hopefully I’ll not store stuff up for the next time. 🙂

First Day of School 2006

Hard to believe it, but today was the first day of school already! After working my butt off all summer trying to get caught up on the computers, I got to relax today by teaching some chemistry and physics. It looks like I’m going to have some fun classes this year. And best of all, once it was time for my tech duties, I got some stuff accomplished. I hope to get done with my summer work by Christmas. 🙂

Happy Birthday, Elsa!

Today marks the birthday of my oldest Internet Friend, elsaf. Happy birthday, Elsa! It’s been great fun being friends with you all these years (going on 11 now) and I hope for many more to come!

Um, I promise to get your birthday present off to you toot sweet!

Books, Cats, Life is Sweet

Edward Gorey is Da Man.

Anyhoo, I’ve been working with my books lately, trying to get them (a) inventoried and (b) packed up so that I can figure out how I want my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to go in the reading room. Man, I have a LOT of books. So far, I’ve got 427 books into my inventory. That’s over 6 boxes of books. (I use the letter/legal cardboard boxes from Staples – full of books, they can still be lifted, somewhat.) I have 2 more boxes to inventory, and loads more books to pack & inventory.

I’ve noticed that far too many books have a different barcode than their ISBN number. This is very aggravating to someone with a nice barcode reader. I did discover, however, that the New Adventures of Doctor Who and many of the Target Doctor Who books have proper barcodes. That speeds up my inventory considerably. Roald Dahl books also tended to sport the right barcodes. Nice to know my most favorite books are nice to me. 🙂

I’m curious to know how many books I’ll end up with in my inventory. If I were to cross-reference them with the ones I’ve actually read, however… I fear it’s less than 50%. Well, maybe I’ll surprise myself.

One thing this has been doing is showing me some books that I’d forgotten that I had. I have many books now that I want to put on my “To Read’ pile right now. I’m not actually putting them in the pile, because then I’d be killed under a huge tower of books that would fall on me when the kitties rushed into the reading room playing.

The kitties really seem to like the place and me. It’s fun to watch them play. And watch them sleep. And they seem to be putting fewer scratches on me (though I resemble a pin cushion right now). They’ve found interesting resting places in my house. My favorite place is behind the albums. Sometimes when they sleep in the den, they get behind my stack of albums and sleep there. They also like sleeping UNDER the bed. Though at night, they sleep with me part (sometimes most) of the night.

LOL – I just went to check on them. They’d managed to shut themselves up into the bathroom. I saw that the bathroom door was closed, but after a bit, I realized that I hadn’t shut it. Sure enough, I opened it and the two little kitties popped out. Silly kitties!

More Home Improvement

I’ve just realized I haven’t taken a photo of my freshly paved driveway yet. So I shan’t be able to post that tonight (you lucky so&sos!) But in addition to a new driveway, I also got new outdoor carpet for my front porch & back stoop. The green outdoor carpet was looking pretty manky, so it needed to go. I replaced it with a tan/green/maroon mottled carpet which I rather like. Home Depot did the job (well, contracted the job). And, as often happens, they buggered things up. I explained a few times that I wanted both my front porch and my back stoop done (plus steps). For some reason, that never seemed to compute. When their contracted measuring guy came, I explained to him as well, front AND back. He duly measured and gave them the measurements. When the contracted installers arrived, they only had the directions/measurements/carpet for the front porch. ARGH!

He called Home Depot who later called me to apologize. They were able to book the same fellers to install the next week, which apparently was unusual. The fellers arrived the following week & installed the back stoop. And I’ve got tons of carpet left over cuz Home Depot are idiots and didn’t listen to the contractor when he told them he had enough for the stoop and only needed 5′ for the steps. Home Depot = idiots, I’m afraid. Still, the job is done, the cost was reasonable, and my front & back look all the better for it.

Want Proof?


The Front Before.


The Front After.


The Back Before.


The Back After.

As you can see (for those of you who peeked), a vast improvement. Oh, and if you looked carefully in the back pictures, you probably saw Linus & Lucy looking out the sliding doors. Heh.

More Cute Overdose

The kitties are finally used to my house, I believe. They’re eating like birds (ie 10 times their own weight in food), they’re doing their business in the litter boxes, and they’re exploring every nook & cranny they can get their claws on. Yesterday was “spend as much time in the reading room as possible” day. The day before was Lucy’s “hide in the pink chair” day. Today seems to be Linus’s “play with the feather/ball toy for 20 minutes at a time” day. It’s been quite entertaining.

Of course, I’ve got a couple more pictures to display. In the course of my home improvements, I intend to put floor to ceiling bookshelves in my reading room, so I’m going to need more bookends. Well, I was certainly surprised when I looked in the reading room yesterday and saw a pair of bookends I didn’t even know that I had.


Linus & Lucy (or is it Lucy & Linus?) as bookends.

While exploring the reading room, Linus discovered another wonderful place to sleep. On the bottom shelf of one of my bookshelves are my collection of Elmos (except for the life-sized Elmo in the living room). They make for a wonderful place to cuddle.


Linus & the Elmos.

While the kitties were playing in the kitchen yesterday, I used my camera to video them. My camera doesn’t do sound like some of the later models, but they really weren’t making any sounds anyway. So I thought, “Let’s try that YouTube thingy” and created an account. I uploaded the video to YouTube and now you can see the 15 second video as well.

http://www.youtube.com/v/bD3Wha2sOLU

Tonight, the parental units will get to meet their new grandcats. I think they’ll be delighted by them. They are, after all, delightful! 🙂

And the Vet says…

No Feline Leukemia – yay!

I was afraid to get too attached to the kitties for fear they’d do the feline leukemia test on ’em and test positive. They have to put the kitties down when that happens because it is so infectious to other cats. So when I took the pair to the vet, I was a little leery. But not only did they graciously donate blood (not a peep from either of ’em), they tested negative for leukemia. Phew!

They didn’t pass every test, however. Both suffer from ear mites and ringworm, but they sold me some medicine that should knock both out. He suggested to wait a week to be sure they were older than 6 weeks. Due to them being 1.4lbs apiece, the vet pegged ’em for between 6-8 weeks old, leaning towards the 6-week side of things. So officially, the babies were born on June 15th. Happy belated birthday, kitties! 🙂

I had thought I might wait until after the vet visit to name them, but no, last night while judiang and I were playing City of Heroes, I finally decided on their names. I think Linus and Lucy will work out just fine for them.

Heh – the vet said they might be lethargic after the visit and the booster shot. Lucy’s anything but. First she was picking on Linus, now she’s playing around on the sofa next to me.

I love kitties!

More Kitties

I’m liable to go overboard on kitten cuteness, so I apologize in advance. I’ll try to make judicious use of LJ cuts to spare those not interested (or already OD’ing on cute).

I’m still trying to decide on names for the little ones. I call them Little Boy and Little Girl for now. The girl is the most adventurous, but also scared of noises (she doesn’t like Samurai Jack playing on the TV, for instance, and ran away from the flushing toilet). The boy is a little shier, but isn’t afraid of any noises. Of course, as soon as I started typing this, they came to bug me. 🙂

Anyhoo, here’s a photo I took of me and the kitties back when I was writing that earlier post.


The little boy is looking at the camera for once. It’s usually his sister.

And here are individual photos of them.


Here’s the little boy. He’s got more tiger-style stripes on his back and is black with grey.


Here’s the little girl. She’s got darker markings on the back and has bits of brown where he has grey.

They were sleeping in an almost yin yang form earlier, so I had to take a photo of it. That’s the LJ icon for this post.

Awww, I think they’re worn out again. So cute!

Floor & More!

Well, before I left to visit Amy & Rachel, I actually got the carpet all pulled up. So I thought I’d post a couple of pictures with it.


As you can see in this photo, the floor looks lovely for the most part. There are a few places where it’s dark cuz of Leo peeing on the floor. 🙁

Here’s a closer shot for some more detail:

Nice looking, isn’t it?

Oh yeah, about those kitties… They’re here! Yay!

As a matter of fact, they’re laying on my chest now & sleeping while I type. Well, the girl is figiting cuz of the noise of my keyboard, but she’s just purring away.ghyofhooooo5]\9888889// LOL and then she had to investigate the keyboard.

I’ll post another photo later when the kitties let me. 🙂

Back home to the Heat

Ah, it’s good to be home. I really had a great time with Amy & Rachel this weekend – no question about it – but it’s always nice to get back home. I seem to have brought the hellish heat with me, unfortunately.

Yesterday was a pretty easy-going day. Rachel had to go off to work for the morning, so Amy & I had breakfast without her. Cereal, toasted sour dough roll with butter, and a peach was my breakfast. Yummy. (No, not extravagant like the rest of the weekend, but even breakfast gurus like Amy need a break sometimes.) I was very sleepy during the morning and didn’t move around a lot But after my shower, I woke up. Unfortunately, I then got captured by a video game on the BBC site. As Amy said to Rachel when she got home “she just sort of disappeared.” But I successfully completed it, so we all went off to lunch.

We walked out into the near 100°F weather to the New Delhi Bar & Restaurant. Mmmmm, Indian Fud! We had the buffet and enjoyed it. But then we had to walk home in the heat. Gah! Still, we managed it and then crashed. We did get the energy to play Trivial Pursuit, however. Amy whupped our butts. Heh, I came in third. Amy had made us cosmopolitans (easy on the cranberry juice cocktail) and we had those & chips and the last of the sesame sticks. Worked for me for supper. Heh.

Amy drove us to the airport, and I was there by 6:30. Everything went smoothly. So smoothly, we arrived more than half an hour before the scheduled time. Mom & Dad, thus, were a bit late in picking me up. But they arrived & took me home. Yay!

Today was back to work. And eep! There’s only 2 more weeks before the place is inundated with teachers.

ETA: URL for the BBC game.