The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • Construx

    Thursday morning I sent a few letters out regarding Construx and their inability to get our sump line buried. One went to the Vice President of Residential at Construx, one to the company we purchased the house through, and one to our real-estate agent. I didn’t expect any of the letters to arrive before the week ended, but yesterday afternoon I received a call from the realtor and she sounds like she’s going to try and help us out. Wooo!

    This weekend is going to be uneventful; so far we have cleaned the house and watered the grass (mowing later probably). Still need to go get a Father’s Day gift too.

  • Laptop Battery

    You may recall that I had my laptop repaired and when it came back, the battery was wrapped and labeled defective, with a warning saying that any damage caused by it would void my warranty. Well I’m sick and tired of being tethered to a power source, and don’t want to spend the money on a new battery. So tonight I unwrapped and plugged the battery in and, as expected, everything’s working fine. Whee, no more power cord.

  • Weekend’s over

    This weekend sure went fast. We didn’t do much, which was really nice, but it has flown by. I’m sitting in bed wishing I didn’t have to work in the morning!

    Chronicles of Riddick turned out to be a very fun movie, despite most of the reviews I read boforehand. I’m actually glad they left it open for a sequel.

    Ana received Big Fish on DVD from her sister last weekend for her birthday, and although Ana’s a huge Tim Burton fan, we hadn’t seen it yet. I tend to not really care for Tim Burton flicks, but we tossed this one in on Saturday afternoon and discovered that it’s a great movie.

    Today was fairly uneventful, did a little coding on Chef, nothing big – just some mindless buf fixes.

  • Dinner and a Movie

    Sitting here in Cheddar’s, having just ordered… shit just got notified they don’t have guinness on tap anymore- no black and tan for me. :(

    anyhow we’re heading to see Chronicle’s of Riddick later on. Pitch Black was awesome, hopefully this won’t disappoint.

  • Carillon Festival

    Ana and I went to the annual Carillon Festival in Washington Park this evening. We were there for about 2 hours – had a picnic and enjoyed the music. If you are interested in what the bells sound like, I have two avi files up at here and here (3MB and 16MB respectively). A few other pictures were also taken.

    And a note about removing my capslock key – no I haven’t gone crazy, I was just getting annoyed today with it. If it behaves on the top of my monitor I may think about putting it back on. Only time will tell.

  • CAPSLOCK…. BEGONE!

    I’ve had enough, and after being inspired by anticAPSLOCK.com I have ripped my Capslock key from my Microsoft Natural Keyboard at work.

    No More!

  • Happy Birthday Ana!

    Today is Ana’s birthday! Wooo!

    We celebrated with her family in a large party held for her, her grandparens’ 60th wedding anniversary, and her cousin’s graduation from high school. Now we’re sitting on the porch relaxing from the long day.

    Last night was Melinda’s graduation and following that Ana and I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie. We arrived at the theater just over an hour early, and it was a good thing because it was packed. Overall, I enjoyed this movie a lot more than the prior two.

  • Photo Blog

    Thanks to a script from David and a little work figuring out exim, I can send pictures from my phone and they get uploaded into my photo gallery! Forget Sprint and their $5/month for essentially the same thing.

    Anyway, it’s here.

  • Sprint Bill and Julie

    I logged into Sprint’s website yesterday and discovered they are still mischarging me for Sprint PCS Vision usage. In short, their computer system doesn’t recognize me as having a Vision plan, so all of my data traffic from the phone is being charged at a pretty high rate. This time around it was for $118. Not too shabby. A quick call to customer service (who have been great, btw) got my account credited once again. I guess I’ll keep checking the bill every month until I know I’m recognized properly in their system.

    This morning when I woke up there was a truck out front with a couple guys sitting in the cab. The truck looked as if it belonged to some utility company and after a few minutes it drove away. I first thought it had something to do with the moron who cut our power on Friday so I didn’t think much of it. When I was leaving for work I went out and noticed they had placed a little green flag in the yard marked “Sewer”. Hmmm, ok..whatever. When I arrived home after work I took a walk around our wonderful trench and noticed some brand new spray paint on the grass, indicating where the power line is! So it looks like Contrux may have actually called Julie before digging but forgot the little detail of actually waiting for the utilities to be marked before starting to work. I couldn’t help but chuckle at that.

  • Comfortable Seating

    I am writing this as we sit out on our porch in a pair of new chairs. We picked them up at Lowes today, along with a small table (also for out front) and a bench for our deck on the back of the house.

    Other than that, today has been pretty uneventful. Assembling the bench took a little while and after that I mowed the grass, watered it, and grilled dinner.