Saturday - Went to yard sales with
friends in the morning. Took everyone out to Fire Island Grill for
lunch, as I'd 'found' some money disbursed by Chase the other day.
So I talked to the teenager about the issues with T's Nook.
He said that you could (a)
use the little open office clone as a file browser, or (b) directly
hook up the device, via USB, to the computer and move the files around
that way.
T came by again this afternoon and we tried them both.
Method (a) only sort of
worked - you could see the files on the external SD card, but you
couldn't move or copy them over to the internal SD card {kind of
confusing nomenclature there, Android).
Method (b) worked, after a
fashion. You could see
files on both the internal and external SD
cards, but the copy failed from one to the other, without any message
about why. However you
could copy from one, to the desktop, and then back to the other, which
makes me think it was some sort of file permissions issue. Actually,
^A^C and then ^V failed too, but drag-n-drop worked. Go figure. I was
using
the Win7 VM, and it would have deleted any UNIX style file permissions.
I sort of suspected something like that, which is why I didn't use the
OSX partition.
I was going to put ASTRO on, but decided that things were good enough.
After
that we had another little lesson on email and facebook. She had a lot
of emails from barnes&noble and from facebook - hundreds. The
hotmail app on the Nook doesn't allow you to create email folders, so I
needed to log on via the desktop to do that. Only T had forgotten her
password. After a while she was able to talk to her daughter, who had
done the initial setup and remembered the hotmail and facebook
passwords, so I went in and put the B&N stuff all in a folder, and
created a folder for the Facebook stuff. I didn't move it all in there
because she wants to look at the various 'friends' and whatnot first.
Then
we looked at Facebook. I'm not much help there, never used it myself,
but I showed he the basics, and how to click on 'friends' and see their
stuff.
In the evening headed over to R&S for some pizza and Veronica Mars viewing.
For a change of pace today it's a Farmall Tractor Grill!
Friday
6
September2013
Friday
- Not much going on. Warm and humid again.
Riley seems to be on the mend. He is certainly using his litter box again.
I
took the morning to go through a bunch of mortgage stuff. Everything
looked OK, though I had to call the homeowners insurance company and
get them to put the right policy number on my house.
Also a
couple of checks, from closing out the old escrow account and such. Not
really additional money, as I already funded a new escrow account....
I
helped a friend, T, with her Nook HD. She got it for Christmas, and
hadn't used it much. When she brought it over it immediately started
doing a massive download and update, to the new Google-Compliant
version. She had a bunch of pictures on her phone to put on the NOOK.
Ideally one would simply use a blue tooth file transfer, but that
didn't work. Everything paired, and the devices could see each other,
but the file transfer failed. So the next path was to take the micro-SD
card out of the phone, put it in the NOOK, and discovered there is no
file manager utility. Huh?
I also
discovered that my tags are missing from the Explorer. I'm pretty sure
I put them on, and the new registration is in the glove compartment.
I've heard that people steal tags sometimes, to keep their old clunkers
on the road. My sister K says it happened to her once, in fact. I tried
to go on line and order new ones but the DMV website appears to be down.
If
I drive to Vegas later in the month I'd like to have the new tags. Mine
are good through the end of September, but why ask for trouble?
I
should also take the Explorer in and get the radiator flushed, have the
belts checked, get an oil change, and maybe even and a/c charge. It
still works, but sometimes it is a bit anemic.
Did
I mention I returned some books to the library earlier in the week,
including the water damaged book on Blender? Oddly they didn't seem to
care much, no fines are replacement fee's needed.
International Harvester Tractor Grill No. 3
Thursday 5 September2013
Thursday
- Still hot and humid, though not as bad as a few weeks ago.
Riley
was a little better. He ate and drank a bit, but not as much as I'd
like. I did smear some more Petromalt on his paw, for hairball
purposes. He showed some interest in going outdoors, but didn't stay
there, and then wanted to stay in the garage under the car. It's a
favorite spot, warm and dark and he can smell the outdoors through the
vent, but cats sometimes seek dark places to huddle in when they aren't
feeling well. Phoebe was like that towards the end. I guess time will
tell. I left the door to the house open enough that the garage kept a
nice 80-85F, not a dehydrating 90-100F.
Not
much else going on. Did a bit of work on this and that. My hands are
still sore - not as crippled as they were, but I don't dare do any
heavy or even moderate labor with them right now. I'll probably have to
get help to finish the paver stuff.
Hard to believe it's September
already. I did a bunch of bills, found that I was late on the boat tax
bill, so I owed them another $20 on top of th $175 they get every year.
Gahhh.
Looks like I might be off to Las Vegas later in the month for a class.
I
have a bunch of mail from Chase - literally dozens of letters - about
the new mortgage mostly, that I need to work my way through. I think
there are a couple of close-out checks in there, yay! Plus stuff from
the country, and the insurance company, the title company, and so on.
Time Warner is still supplying me with cable feed. Guess I'll call them up a third time and tell them to stop. I'm not going to pay for it, in any case.
International Harvester Tractor Grill No. 2
Wednesday 4
September
2013
Wednesday
- Riley is still pretty subdued, didn't eat or drink much, and about
midday vanished to some hidey-hole that only he knows about. Later in
the evening he came out, and ate a few food pellets. I did give him
some hairball medicine, spread on a paw. He wasn't too happy about it,
but did lick it off, so hopefully things will get better.
T
came over to check on the little guy, and helped me wash his hindermost
parts a bit. He's too old and stiff to do a good quick job of cleaning
himself, and it's definitely a two person job applying water to a cat's
back end, so....
I picked up S
from her house, and we went out to lunch with T, over at 'A Touch of
Europe'. A good sandwich, as always. I also dropped off a tray with
some of the grass seed I'd ordered a few days ago growing in it, about
six inches long. A hour later, when we returned, only stubs remained,
the cats had devoured all but about an inch and a half of the grass!
International Harvester Tractor grill No. 1
Tuesday 3 September2013
Tuesday - It was a pretty traumatic day
for Riley. He was clearly in distress, so I called the vet and took him
in late morning. He complained all the way over, and in the office - he
really doesn't like that carrier and travel. The vet had to take an
X-ray, and he indeed had a very full bowel, and probably a big
hairball. I left him there for several hours while they did a cat
enema. I guess he passed a lot. I finally went and got him in the late
afternoon, and took him home. He was pretty subdued, and found a little
hidey hole and stayed there for most of the rest of the day, with an
occasional foray to the litterbox. Not mad so much as just a bit out of
it.
I was supposed to give him some hairball formula, but it
turned out that I was out of the goop, and no place in town (open in
the evening) seemed to carry it. It will have to be bought at PetsMart
tomorrow.
Looks like the old Critter Country store at 40th and L is gone. Too bad.
About $260, by the time I was done at the vet.
Anyway,
I'm supposed to watch him for a day or so, and make sure he starts
eating and drinking again, so I won't be heading down to Ventura, where
the contractor is still causing issues. Nothing Dave can't handle, but
I still feel bad.
Tim and Dave have been working to come up with
a scope of work for some levee inspection that the county needs soon,
and maybe we'll get some work there.
Apparently CNET has gone from being a little annoying with their adware to actively deceptive and malicious.
Tim had to spend significant time removing crap from his system after
he installed Core FTP via them. Too bad, it used to be a good site.
Monday 2 September 2013
Monday - Running around, doing various
errands that I was just too tired/lazy to do Saturday and Sunday. My
"to-do" list is getting longer and longer. Nine days on the road in the
last two weeks hasn't helped matters much. Tim called, was having issues with FTP and Windows Explorer opening IE10 for that. I recommended Core FTP,
and he said it worked, but some adware was attempted to be installed as
well, which sucks. C/NET used to be a good place to go, but a few years
ago they started sliding. I think I got it from Tucows, or maybe the
manufacturer.
Riley
looks to be a bit under the weather. He was perky on Friday and
Saturday, but I noticed some lassitude on Sunday, and today I saw him
straining to take care of business, without success. He was obviously
in some distress, and huddled under the furniture most of the day, and
not eating. He did come out and greet Taeko when she stopped by, but
then went and hid away again when she left. By late evening he hadn't
had a successful bowel movement, that I could tell.
I'll give
the vet a call tomorrow and bring him in. Cats can get constipation,
and that's probably the problem. They no longer sell over the counter
feline remedies for that, so it'll be an expensive visit to Smith's
Veterinary, I seem to recall X-rays are over $100 now, but so it goes.
It's been about six months since we were in there anyway.
Taeko
wanted to get some pictures off her cell phone, but it had just a
non-standard connector port. She remembered that Costco had opened it
up once before to print some pics, so we did the same and I discovered
it had a 4GB micro SD card in it. I had a micro SD to standard SD card
adapter, so we copied the pictures up to the laptop, then burned a CD
with them, and checked that the CD worked OK on my DVD player.
Sunday 1 September2013
Sunday
- A quiet day, not much going on. Warm and humid.
I had run out of space on my 32GB card in the T3i. It showed no files
on it, but also only 3MB of space, not enough for a single picture!
Talking about it with N last week she had
mentioned that this was a common effect of deleting files while the
card was inserted into the laptop. The fix was simple, to reformat the
card in the camera. I did this, it took only a few seconds, and it
worked. It also deleted all the photographs (I backed them up first) but kept the numbering sequential.
Her mother has been working with the images from the AV Fair, making a border for the app.
This
all inspired me to back up the MacBook. It's been a few months. My big
Iomega drive, 1TB, was full - 8MB left. Most of it is duplicates, but,
as I have said many times, the duplication find/delete programs just
suck, so it's hard to know what to throw away. I had a little Seagate
drive, that I thought was 250GB, but which turned out to be another 1TB
drive, nearly empty. I think I bought it on sale at Costco a year or
two ago. I decided to use that.
It has no external power
adapter and when plugged into the MacBook there was a dialog explaining
that it was pulling too much USB power, and it was dismounted. To save
power I then removed it and the USB keyboard and then plugged the drive
back in.
This worked, but there were still issues with the Mac
side seeing files. Finally I removed it, reattached it, but to the
Bootcamp (Win7) side. Now I could see the files, but I couldn't select
blocks of them. This was really annoying. After a bit of cursing at
Apple and Microsoft I realized that as I'd disconnected the external keyboard the "click-shift" routine was missing the "shift" portion, so far as the OS'es were concerned....
Duhhmmmbbbb. The solution to that was to open the laptop case and use the built-in keyboard.
Anyway,
I backed up the useful info from both partitions onto the new external
drive, and still have about 600GB left, so that's cool.
For some
reason I had to hand backup some of the Mac files/folders. In one case
it was apparently the fault of a period in a file name keeping an
entire folder from transferring, but in other cases I'm still not sure.
About 90% of it is junk anyway, early iOS programming efforts, so I
don't really care, but it'd be nice to know why for the future.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: Control
Lever on the side of an old piece of farm equipment, AV Fair, 2013.
