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*sniff*My sweetheart is gone for an entire week to attend a wedding and see relatives in Miami. I have to work, so I couldn’t go.
All I have to say is 
Don't invite other houseguests when it isn't your houseMy mommy did a faux pas. I got an email from her on Sunday. She said my sister (who lives in Houston) had sent her a plane ticket to go visit her and the kids, and would I like to go too? My first instinct was, “Nahhh, plane tickets are expensive.” However the email went on to tell me about a deal that Southwest was having, which was ending that day. Curious, I looked up this special, and found that it would only be $81 each way. Nothing like a hard-to-pass-up deal to make you go visit your relatives.
We’ve been meaning to go visit her and her new digs, but the occasion just never came up. So why not? It’ll be like a reunion of some kind. Plus I’ve never been to Houston and it’ll be nice to see a new city. So I went ahead and bought the tickets to arrive the same day my mom was arriving, so they could pick us both up at once.
The next day, my mom calls me to tell me that she suddenly remembered that my sister’s in-laws were also going to be arriving that day… and staying at her house. Oh geez. She may have a large house, but it isn’t a mansion. “Oh, and by the way,” she said, “I havn’t told your sister yet that you’re coming, so you should call her.” Doh! Mooooom, how could you invite someone to stay at someone else’s house without even consulting them?? I wasn’t going to go if I was going to have to shell out for a hotel. I’d rather visit Seattle instead.
Lucky for me Southwest makes it easy to change your flight plans online. I changed it to arrive the day the in-laws left. Hopefully nothing else unexpected will come up. And for anyone else out there who doesn’t get it, when a home owner says, “Mi casa es su casa,” don’t take it literally and invite people without telling them. That’s just rude.
Dominique needs some humbling, and other Top Model commentsIsn’t it funny how I have a bunch of posts about laptops, and suddenly I switch gears to talk about America’s Next Top Model? Despite my geeky tendencies, I guess I do still have a few girly vices. I am totally hooked on this show. Anyway, I watched my Tivo’d episode from Wednesday yesterday. I just have to ask, why is it that the more arrogant a person is, the more they refer to themselves in third person? Dominique has definitely been taking annoying bitch lessons from Jade (from Cycle 6).
Another thing I find annoying is how a lot of motor-mouthed arrogant fools, who just happen to be a person of color, will toss up the race card whenever they are being challenged by a white person. In this case, Whitney (who also likes to run at the mouth at times) was telling off Dominique. I honestly can’t recall what the argument was about, but it certainly wasn’t anything race-related. They were basically two brick walls squaring off against each other (you can tell all the other girls are bored to death of this same conflict over and over). When Dominique ran out of comebacks, she decides calling Whitney a racist would be a great retort. Really it just made her look like more of a fool because there wasn’t a single remark made about her skin color or her cultural background. Well, her education was challenged, heh. But you can be a college graduate and still be an idiot.
Anyway, good show. Poor Marvita. Shouldn’t have given up on herself so early. Though she was a little mouthy too. Good riddance. Go Claire. Peace out.
A few tips for future laptop shoppersIt’s been about 8 years since I last bought a brand new laptop. In researching for my recent purchase, I learned a lot of things. The best brands will always be up for debate, but there are a few universal gems of information that might come in handy for you when it’s time for you to go laptop shopping.
Wrestling with VistaThough I was extremely reluctant to have Windows Vista on my new laptop, it’s kind of hard to avoid. All the new laptops come with it. If I wanted a different OS, I’d have to install it myself. I was a bit too hasty about it.
The first thing anyone notices after using Vista for a little while is it prompts you for permission to do every. little. thing. Are you sure you want to visit that site? Are you sure you want to rename that? Are you suuuuure you want to use Vista?? Seriously, what a pain in the ass. Everyone hates it. Luckily it’s easy to turn off. You go into the Users item in the Control Panel and uncheck the checkbox for User Access Control. I had to research online to find it. I also had to research online about how to turn off all the other annoying features, because Vista doesn’t exactly make it intuitive to figure out.
Perhaps it would be somewhat intuitive if I’d had no experience with Windows at all. But coming from a Windows XP and Windows 2000 background, I expect things to be in certain places. So when they aren’t, it’s frustrating. They completely scrambled things around. I’m getting used to it now, but it took awhile. At one point I said screw this, reformatted the whole thing, and installed XP on it. It was easy. Unfortunately I completely forgot about drivers. It booted up quickly like a dream, and then I found the screen resolution was crappy, it didn’t recognize the wireless hardware, or any of the other special features the laptop came with. Crap. Stupid me. Luckily the laptop came with a recovery DVD and I was back to factory settings in 15 minutes.
The moral of the story here… If you’re going to flatten Vista in favor of XP, make sure you have two important things: 1) All the drivers necessary to make your machine fully functional in XP, and 2) a way to revert back to Vista in case you completely botch the XP job. I decided it was way too much work to make this thing fully functional in XP, so I’m going to stick it out with Vista for now. It actually isn’t so bad now.
Afterthought: One thing I really like about Vista is I can now plug and unplug USB devices without having to “stop” the service first. Plug, unplug, and all it does it beep to let you know about it. No more annoying popups telling you that you “unsafely” removed a device - sometimes it has consequences and sometimes it doesn’t. It was so annoying and weird. So glad they fixed that. Finally.
Shopping for a new laptopI’ve been shopping around for a new laptop because the one I have can only display a maximum resolution of 1020x768, and the colors look washed out at numerous angles. Not sure how much time I’ve spent moving the screen up and down trying to determine if the color displayed is actually the one I want… not very helpful for web design.
I take good care of my stuff and tend to keep things for many years, so I wanted to make sure the laptop I got was reliable. Needless to say I also needed the screen to show colors accurately and at multiple angles. I also hate the super-shiny screens that most laptops seem to come with these days. The ability to display brilliant colors is great, but having the screen double as a mirror is not. I don’t want to see what’s behind me while I’m working. Finally, it has to be affordable, like under $1000 if possible.
Those were my requirements. My “nice to haves” include a volume knob (I hate pushing buttons to adjust volume), and Windows XP (I’ve heard awful things about Vista and have no need for it). Not a whole lot, really. Unfortunately I got neither of them. Oh well, on to my shopping research and decision…
At the start of my shopping around I immediately ruled out Dell laptops. In one of my past jobs, the bosses and sales people had Dell Inspiron laptops. Those things had nothing but trouble. There was always something wrong with them, and they were always being sent for repairs. I hear AlienWare is nice, but they’re kind of expensive and I’m not using it for gaming.
At first I thought Toshibas were among the best, but after doing a lot of Googling it seems the Toshiba Satellite models, their most popular line, seems to have a lot of people complaining about problems. Even worse are the stories about the awful customer service. Very disappointing, because most of the Toshibas have the volume knob I like so much. I decided that a Toshiba non-Satellite model would be great. Unfortunately all the electronics stores I went to—Circuit City and multiple Best Buy locations—all the Toshibas were Satellites. Phooey.
Sonys also seem to have a good reputation, but all their screens are ultra-shiny, I hate ‘em. Acers were often recommended by people as a good value, but there were also some complaints about hardware reliability. A lot of people love their Acers, and there seemed to be an equal number of complainers with bad Acers. Asus is a brand I had never heard of, but a lot of people seem to think they are really good. They’re supposed to be pretty reliable laptops, however I’ve never seen any of them in any of the stores. I could order them online easily enough, but I need to see how the screens are before buying. I’m very particular about that since I rely on that for my web design work. Lenovo and IBM were mentioned as really reliable laptops as well. Those two brands confuse me because I’m not sure if they are the same company or not. Whatever the case, I never saw any Lenovos in the store, and IBM Thinkpads are a bit expensive (like Sony).
I started to lose hope that I would ever find one that would fit my requirements, because I was limited to the ones I’m able to see and test out in the stores. Finally today I went into Fry’s Electronics and browsed around there and ran into multiple Fujitsu laptops. I’d totally forgotten about that brand because I hadn’t seen any in the other stores. These laptops looked good, and when I compared them to some of the Sony models, which are well known for their vibrant colors, I thought the Fujitsus were better! The screens weren’t so shiny. They were glossy, but not to the point of distraction. I found one Fujitsu Lifebook that was red-tagged at $699, with 2GB of memory, DVD burner, 120GB of hard drive space, and a bunch of other goodies. It sounded like a really good deal.
I was unsure of Fujitsu though, I hadn’t heard anything about it. Is no news good news? So I went home and did some research. Turns out most of the user experiences have been very positive, with glowing reviews. Apparently Fujitsu is one of the few laptops that are still built in Japan instead of China. Not just assembled in Japan with parts from everywhere else, but I think the whole thing is manufactured there. This translates into a more rock-solid product, and may be why there aren’t as many of these as there are Toshibas and Dells. Actually I have no idea where Toshibas are made, but that’s beside the point. So even though it had no volume knob and came with that bastard of an OS (Vista), I decided to go for it. I went back to the store and said I’ll take it. They had one left! Lucky me!
So here I am testing out this thing. I spent most of the day and all night fiddling with it, which is a whole other story. Windows Vista… what a time-suck.
I'd like to propose a new lawAnyone wearing enough cologne to choke a rhinoceros should be banned from entering an elevator. Seriously.
How I completely missed Daylight Savings TimeI woke up at 7:30 this morning, like I’m supposed to on any workday. Then I thought I woke up at 6:30. Then, after some Googling, I realized it really was 7:30 and that I had missed the switch to Daylight Savings Time altogether on Sunday. Here’s how it happened…
Most Sundays are stay inside and spend quiet time with each other days. It’s my favorite time of the week. Most of the time I hear some word on Friday from coworkers or the radio or something about the upcoming time shift. Not this time. Saturday was my sweety’s birthday (I got her the Best Cake Ever, also known as “Berries and Cream” from Lido Bakery in El Segundo). Family showed up and we chatted and watched movies, and time was never really an issue. Sunday came around and I took her out to breakfast, then we came back to snuggle in front of the DVD player. Again, time was never an issue. It felt good.
The first bit of strangeness occured at bedtime. We watched a movie until 10:45, then I had to go to bed since it was Monday the next day. We did the usual puttering around, brushing our teeth, moving things off the bed, and other night-time before bed things. We snuggled and talked some, and then I happened to glance at the time on the ceiling from the projection clock. I was astounded to see that it said it was 12:15am. I was all, “Wait, what? How on earth did we manage to waste an hour and a half doing what we normally do??” It was so weird, but I never thought about Daylight Savings.
This morning when I woke up, the clock said 7:30, so I thought, “Well, time to get up.” I took a shower, got dressed, and as I was heading to the kitchen, I glanced at my watch to see how I was doing on time. I was baffled when it read 6:50am. Believe it or not I still hadn’t thought of Daylight Savings. Instead, I thought, “Dammit that stupid clock shifted time zones again.” The bedroom clock is one of those digital things that stays in tune with some atomic clock somewhere in the country, and it also has a button to change what time zone you are in. That button is all too easy to hit accidentally, and that’s what I thought had happened.
Then I glanced at the big clock in the living room, but it was agreeing with the bedroom clock. I looked from it to my watch several times, feeling like my brain was moving in very slow motion. It was kind of pathetic actually. That living room clock also stays in tune with the atomic clock… sometimes. It’s not as responsive as the bedroom one. Finally, it clicked. Sort of. I was still in disbelief. Was it Daylight Savings already? I don’t know why I found it so hard to believe. I went to the computer to Google it and find out exactly when it was supposed to be. Second Sunday in March, it said. Was it the second Sunday of March? After staring at a calendar for much too long, I finally decided that yes, indeed it was, and it really was time to spring forward. Damn, and here I thought I had an extra hour this morning before work.