The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • Cardinal Game

    Just got back from the yearly Cardinal game with work. We were in a luxury box along the firstbase line, had a great time. One thing’s for sure, large quantities of tequila = large headache. Been a while since I’ve had a hangover, time for large glasses of water.

    For an unknown reason, I had to hard reset my Treo today. It did the thing where you can’t turn Wireless Mode back on until you soft reset it. When I did this, it went into a cycle of boot, reboot, boot, reboot… really sucked and I wish I knew what caused it. I’ll have to keep my eye on this.

  • Rain, Rain, Rain

    Contrux dug our trench to bury the sump line on Thursday, but we have no idea why they stopped there and didn’t finish the job. So now we have a trench about 30′ long, 1′ wide, and 1.5′ deep (something like that) on the side of our house running to the easement in the backyard. With all the rain we are getting, it’s really looking like a moat.

    Ana called on Friday morning asking why they didn’t finish, and the secretary didn’t have any notes on the issue and told Ana that she had no way of finding that out. WTF. The lady said they would probably be there that day to finish it up. As soon as I got home and found it in the same state as Thursday, I decided to give them a call. Again, same thing – they took our name and number and made a note to find out what’s going on with it. I haven’t heard back so I’ll probably be calling again today, just to be a pain in the ass to them.

    I should toss some pictures up of it, it’s a real mess and the sod they dug up will most certainly be dead once they finally get back to finish things.

    Continue reading “Rain, Rain, Rain”

  • House stuff

    Yesterday, Ana called Construx (the company that built our house) about two outstanding issues. #1) We still have a ‘temporary’ sump line running out of the house, dumping water into what is now a small moat between us and the neighbors. #2) about a month ago the doorknob on the door going to the garage stopped working with our key.

    The sump line was gauranteed to be buried in the spring so I wasn’t too worried about it. But when Ana talked to a rather uninformed individual on the phone yesterday, she was told that they didn’t know about the sump line. Hmm… at this time I’m wondering if I should be worried. Luckily we have it in writing that they are going to fix it in the spring, that should help if need be.

    The doorknob was supposed to have been ordered a good two weeks ago, but this lady on the phone didn’t have a clue on its status. Supposedly the person that usually takes care of that stuff was out of the office.

    Continue reading “House stuff”

  • Install

    Damn Visual Studio.NET takes forever to install. It has been running for a good 45 minutes and it hasn’t even gotten to the MSDN Library (3 CDs).

    I tried out PalmVNC with my Treo. That’s some really cool software; I highly doubt I’ll ever have a need to use it, but it definitely has geek factor.

    (Disc 1 of MSDN now installing..)

  • Laptop Repaired

    My laptop came back today after a stunning turnaround time. Much to my delight, they did indeed replace the hard drive (serial numbers prove it). However, they said they didn’t find anything wrong with the CDROM. Odd, I haven’t been able to burn a CD in months. After booting I pop in the same CD that refused to burn while I was on the phone with their support guy, and it worked just fine. Don’t know what to make of that.

    They also returned my battery wrapped with tape saying it was defective and should I put it into the laptop and something goes wrong with it, my warranty is void. I’m suspicious, I think it would work just as well as it did before shipping but I’m going to start pricing them regardless.

    Now on to reinstalling everything, what a chore.

  • Apartment: Done

    We have finally finished cleaning the apartment. It’s spotless and we will be turning in the keys at the end of the week. Next up will be to go through the large pile of stuff we transported into a corner of our basement. There’s no real rush to do that though.

    While we had Ana’s parents’ truck, we decided to make a run over to the recycling center with some of our cardboard boxes from moving. I initially thought we just had two or three laying around the house and garage, but ended up with a couple dozen filling an F150. The garage has a lot more free space with that taken care of.

  • We lost, and other things

    As first reported by David, Ana and I turned on our TV during No TV week. Ana woke up and flipped it on for her typical Saturday morning viewing, and we lost. Better luck next year!

    We went to the apartment today for more cleaning. I sanded down the patched drywall and you cannot tell we had a large hole for ethernet to the living room. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take any more stuff to the house because it started raining and didn’t stop all day long.

    So today was a pretty lazy day, Ana did take another shot at cutting the mats for two new living room pictures. It was a unique idea and they turned out great, you can see them here, here, and here. I had the Date mode on on the digital camera so just ignore that.

  • Lawn

    Finally got the lawn mower out of the box tonight. Since I had gotten that far I figured I may as well cut the grass. The front yard went very smoothly, but the side of the house where our temporary sump line deposits was a pain in the butt. Part of the problem was the grass which had flourished and grown a good 8 inches, the other part was that the ground is super saturated and felt like a swamp as I ran the mower over it. It killed the mower four times it was so thick and wet. We’re calling the contractor tomorrow and inquiring about when they’ll be burying the line.

    After mowing, Ana and I went out to Lonestar for some steak and then to see The Ladykillers. It’s a pretty funny movie, albeit strange.

    I just looked up the status of my laptop shipment and it seems that Fedex has just now (at 6pm!) sent it on its way. I made the trip over to the distribution center last night thinking it would actually make a difference, but I was wrong. Expected arrival date in Vernon Hills is the 26th :(

  • Shipped

    Today I received the box and packing instructions for my laptop, so this evening I spent some time getting my laptop and accessories packed nicely before shipping it off to a place called MicroMedics for repair. Hopefully their work is better than their name and url make them look.

    Without my laptop I have had to struggle working on my desktop (500Mhz). Instead of doing more coding on Chef, I decided to get ASP.NET running on linux with Mono. Here’s the first page! I plan on using ASP.NET on linux for serving up the web frontend to Chef, should be fun.

    No TV is going good, although Ana is really looking forward to the end of this week. I think that if the TV were on tonight, I probably would have been too lazy to get Mono up and running.

  • Quiet Evening

    Went over to my parents’ house after work to help them setup a new entertainment center. It’s a very nice piece of furniture and looks great in the room.

    I mentioned to them about the whole No TV thing and yet again I was given looks of confusion. Personally, it’s been two very pleasant and quiet evenings and I’m enjoying it.

    Ana and I were discussing dinner for tomorrow night and we both have a craving for some BW3s. As a substitute for driving to Champaign, I found that you can order sauces online! Ordered 3 and found there is free shipping, such a deal.