Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

It’s hard being an adult

I just yelled at the 4 year old because he was ignoring my pleas to go upstairs and leave me alone. To him, it’s just a beautiful Saturday and he’d like me to be playing Mouse Trap with him. I sure wish I could. I’d like nothing more than to be spending time with my children. My wife wants progress made on the house and yard. I’d love to be cleaning out the garage, landscaping, plumbing, and getting the ants and the squirrels out of the house.

But I can’t. Today is terribly important. Programming must take priority above all else. It’s a beautiful, sunny Saturday. The birds are chirping. And I’m locked in the basement with heavy guilt.

A child arrived just the other day.. Came to the world in the usual way..

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Drowning Out the Decibels with Noise

My house is noisier than yours. I know this because I think OSHA would require hearing protection in this place.

Our house it has a crowd
There’s always something happening
And it’s usually quite loud
[Source]

I have some wonderful noise canceling headphones but they don’t completely isolate me from the noise. That is, until I decided to pump some white noise through them! http://simplynoise.com/ has some downloadable white noise clips. You can down 30 seconds of white, pink and brown noise that you play in a continuous loop. You can also download a one hour thunderstorm! This works so well I thought I was home alone!

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Left mouse button becomes right mouse button

Not long ago, I took a computer that was passed onto us, reformatted it, installed a fresh copy of Windows XP, and passed a shiny "new to her" computer onto Cathy. It was faster than her old computer and should have been completely problem free. It was for awhile but it’s developed an odd behavior. Every now and then, the operating system will appear to hang. For instance, this morning her menubar was visible, and I could move the mouse, but clicking on anything did nothing. I could not bring an application to focus. I had Computer Management open to the event log and left clicking on one of the event viewer items, instead of opening the item, showed the context menu (normally seen by right clicking). But unlike right clicking, once the context menu was open, clicking an item in the context menu such as "open log file…" simply closed the log file. The machine has been thoroughly scrubbed of malware, spyware and viruses. All software is updated with the exception of not yet installing Internet Explorer 8. The way I regained control of the machine was to close an open Skype chat window.

The slow downs seem to correspond to this error in the event viewer (\Device\Harddisk1\D refers to the Seagate external USB Freeagent drive):
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.

This is bizarre.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Happy Birthday Nanny!

My grandmother on my father’s side was born on this day in 1918 making her 91 years old. Last I asked, she still drives…well…still has her car and license…she remember birthdays and ages better than I do. She is socially active and a woman to be admired. She’s not Twittering or using the Internet but I haven’t given up trying to get her there! I love my grandmother! She’s been an incredibly positive influence on my life.

Posted on by — 4 Comments

DeadRising Wii Feedback Needed

dead-rising-wiiNoah just upgraded from 12 years old to 13 years old. He went into Target with his birthday money and came out with a Wii game called "Deadrising – Chop Till You Drop" The kids play first person shooters but Tommy brought one home from a friend’s house once that had so much foul language that I had to ban it from the house. I like to keep violence in check with the children. I am realistic about it. Play acting or gaming violence is part of being a kid. Today’s games do have the opportunity to be far too graphic. This one is rated M for mature and says 17+. The element are "blood and gore," "intense violence," and "language." I have more hesitation on this one because the Wii is in the common area, it is likely to be seen by the 4 and 7 year olds.

So, my gaming friends, do I let the 13 year old keep this game or force him to return it and buy something less violent and graphic? Having the Wii spewing out profanities is probably my biggest concern.