Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
It has been long, long overdue. I bought a new laptop at Sam’s Club of all places last night. It’s the HP DV2047CL which has an AMD Turion 64 X2 (64-bit, dual core) HP DV2047CL.
Jay created an OS CD for me last night so I could wipe all the preinstall crap off of it, and I spent the next couple hours getting all the drivers reinstalled.
It’s a fast machine, I hope it lasts the 4.5 years my Sony has.
A while back I installed the trial version of TechSmith’s SnagIt software. I remember asking myself why on earth I would need a utility to capture screenshots – seriously, what’s so hard about alt+PrintScreen, pasting into an image editor, cropping, and saving to a file?
This afternoon I purchased a copy. I grew to love the 2 seconds it took to get a screenshot taken and saved. It also has a bunch of other screen capture capabilities (regions, scrolling windows, to PDF, time delays, including cursor, etc.) that are very useful. Most of the other screen capture utilities I’ve tried in the past were shitty little apps that were just clunky to use and didn’t speed up the process. Way to go SnagIt, you have replaced MS Paint.
A side effect of this purchase is most likely going to be an increaesd number of screen shots/clips. I don’t know yet if that’s a good or bad thing.
Today our wait for bedroom furniture ended. It looks like we did a good job in selecting our paint color.
I have poison ivy. I got it a few weeks ago at the work picnic at Lake Springfield. I was dumb enough to chase after a baseball or two into a nice patch of weeds that happened to contain the ivy bastard.
The rash took a while to develop, and I’ve had it on my legs now for two weeks and just Saturday showed up on my hands and elbows. It’s not terrible, but damn annoying.
I took Jay’s advice and tried scrubbing my hands with bleach a few times. The first couple times didn’t hurt, but this morning’s scrub left my hands burning for well over 2 hours. After deciding I’d had enough of that, I went into the doctor’s office (an “express” office just down the road from work) and got a shot and some medicine (read, steroids) to help it move along. I wish I would have done it sooner, as the itching is almost completely gone. I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep once I get off this computer.
I took a nice bike ride today on the Lost Bridge Trail to Rochester. Ana went shopping with her mom so I figured it would be good to get some exercise. It was a 21 mile ride, which is longer than I’ve ridden before. I made a mistake and didn’t eat any lunch before riding (and only having half a bagel for breakfast), but I made it just fine. Initially my legs were hurting a little bit, but they just feel a little tired right now, 3 hours after the fact.
Today is also the 5 month mark of regular exercise for me. That’s 5 months of weekday weight lifting and bike riding (lifting on MWF, biking or leg weight training on TuTh) with more bike riding on the weekends. I’m happy to report that, while weight loss is negligible, I’m much stronger, I gained 3-4 notches on my belt, my clothes fit better, and I feel all-around better.
I may have mentioned that our yard had grubs earlier this year. They moved in last year sometime and began destroying the back yard. We have since sprayed for them, and the grass startd to recover – but there was/is still a lot of areas devoid of good, thick grass. Not suprisingly, weeds found these areas great for growing. (Not to mention my watering laziness which hasn’t helped the front yard…)
So I spent 3.5 hours pulling weeds and mowing on Saturday! I had no idea I would almost fill one of those tall yard waste bags.
I need to stay on top of the yard like I was the past couple years, but it’s so hard to be motivated when it just doesn’t look as good as it used to.
Just in case we forgot where we live and what time of the year it is, nature just reminded us. It’s August in Central Illinois. We are forecasted for a humid high of 99 degrees with a heat index of a whopping 105.
In order to try to fix my wireless problem, I decided to give Windows’ System Restore a shot. I picked a restore point from about a week ago, let it do its thing, and bingo! I’m connected again.
Friday was a very busy day. My coworkers and I were given the day off to spend at a park on Lake Springfield. The event wasn’t until late morning, so I was able to do the following:
The festivities were fun – very good food, beer, and playing catch make for a fun afternoon that beats the heck out of sitting in a cube.
After the picnic I then had to run back to the bike shop and pickup the newly-serviced bikes.
We were on a bike ride last night when I noticed I was getting suprisingly tired and going slower and slower than normal. We didn’t go riding last week due to weather, so I thought it was just because my legs had a week off and were simply struggling to get going again. Nope, after a while I looked down and saw my extremely low rear tire!
We were about 2 miles from home, so every couple minutes I would hop off the bike and pump up the tire. Ride for a few minutes, stop and pump. Oh what fun.
Our 30 day maintenance checkup is slightly overdue, but this will push me to get it into the shop much quicker.
The Johnson Blog 