The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • 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.

  • Circuit City Support absolutely blows

    Today during my lunch hour I went to Circuit City to drop off my laptop to get its problems fixed. I was quickly handed a pamphlet and told they don’t do repairs like this anymore. In the literature was a 1-800 number to call. Uh oh. This could be bad.

    Oh my gosh. I’ve done the tech support calls before and they’ve been relatively easy to guide in ‘diagnosing’ the problems. What I experienced tonight was pain. I tell him that I notice very loud knocking when I’m doing work on the second partition of the drive. His solution? Let’s run chkdsk on the first partition, even after I told him I ran it on both the night before with no errors reported. I tell him about the entries in the Event Log, and he’s completely confused about what that is. I have to call back after 45 minutes of chkdsk running – I get a new guy and he tells me that I have to now run a system restore. I argue with him about how that will most likely just hide the problem (I won’t hear any noise/trouble when it’s done). He agreed but says I have to do it anyway…

    Continue reading “Circuit City Support absolutely blows”

  • Click, Click, Click

    As I write this, I am frantically copying data off of my laptop. Every minute or so a very loud clicking noise is followed by disk thrashing and a very sluggish OS. The Event Log reports bad blocks on the drive and explorer is crashing frequently with I/O errors.

    Click, click, click, thud. Ahh the familiar sound of a hard drive dying. Yay for the 4 year service plan I bought. Circuit City here I come.

    Since I’m going to be sending it in for service, I’ll also mention the horrible battery life lately (just over an hour at most) and the inability of the docking station’s DVD/CDRW to read or record CDR or CDRW.

  • New Toy

    This morning after coming back from breakfast, Ana and I stopped in a Best Buy to finally look at a new cellphone for me. I’ve been very reluctant because I like my old phone so much, even if the screen has gone out and it’s only about 10% effective as a phone. Anyway, Ana finally got me in and looking at new phones and I ended up with an awesome phone/pda Treo 600.

    From playing with it, it seems to be an awesome device. Ever since getting rid of service for my Motorola T900 text pager, I’ve missed being able to chat with David and others at pretty much any time of day.

  • Beautiful Night

    It was a very clear night tonight. Since I was too tired from cleaning all day to get the telesope out, I pulled out one of my astronomy books and the following text jumped off the page at me:

    “Children growing up in the final decades of the 20th century or the early years of the 21st century represent the first generation in the history of civilization to live in a world where the stars are almost certain to be the last thing noticed at night instead of the first.”

    – Terence Dickinson, NightWatch

    I cannot help but wonder if this will have an adverse affect on the desire to explore space in future. A large part of me thinks it won’t, but what if Galileo (or Kepler, Newton, etc.) didn’t have the night sky to inspire and intrigue him? I think it is safe to say we would be in a completely different situation right now.

    It’s pretty saddening to me.

  • Exhausted

    We gave it a valiant effort, but after 7+ hours of cleaning the apartment we still need to go back next weekend to finish it up. Ugh, that’s depressing.

    Visited Lowes tonight and bought a… lawn mower. Thrilling.

  • TV Free for a week? Not here

    Today on Slashdot an article was posted about National TV Turn Off Week which I found to be a good idea. Tonight as Ana and I were out and about I mentioned to her that we should go a week without watching TV. Well, that went over like a lead balloon… I was flashed a look of horror which promptly turned into a string of television show names that we just cannot miss. I then threatened to accidently cut the television cable which is still waiting to be buried outside, but then I realized that would kill our internet. Soo folks, it looks like our TV will NOT be participating next week.

    Tomorrow we have our work cut out for us. We are heading back to the apartment and hopefully will be able to get it all cleaned out and fixed up. We’re looking forward to finally being done messing around with it and can’t wait to turn in the keys at the end of the month.

  • Plone

    At work we are evaluating Plone for use as a KnowledgeBase. Out of curiousity, I set one up here at home. The software has some pretty amazing capabilities and I’m trying to find some uses for it – either for myself or Ana and her class projects. Recently I have started using phpWiki as a KnowledgeBase of sorts at home. Unfortunately, it has been working out well and I don’t need something as rich as Plone… It’s not bad to be simplistic, is it?

  • Better late than never?

    So I’ve found myself reading several blogs on a regular basis and figured I’d try it out myself. I cannot make any promises about the frequency of updates, it could go either way very quickly.
    I apologize right now for what may possibly be the most boring weblog in existence. If it gets to be too painful, don’t hesitate to fire me an email.