I have been battling with my HP work laptop for what seems like since the day I joined my company. Lately, it has gone through a few system boards, and a handful of tech visits. Nothing has been able to fix the latest issue. If I hibernate the system and undock it, when I go to spin it back up, about 50% of the time I go straight to a bluescreen. If I sleep the system, it goes into zombie mode...
From this awful laptop that is a hopeless pile of crap, to the core strength that was once HP, their printers, it is apparent how the mighty have fallen. I have posted before on the travails of my lousy laptop. Suffice it to say that it works, but the power management bits are pretty messed up (not sure if it is windows, or the hardware, and frankly at this point, I don’t care.) This post...
Not going to complain about ghetto behavior at the grocery store (although there is plenty to comment on there). One thing I miss about Tucson is the local Safeway store. Our local store had decent meats, a great deli, and a remarkably awesome wine selection. You could get some great splurge wines there (like Grgich Hills Chardonnay. Not cheap, but damn fine splurge). We moved to Chandler a year...
You know what I am talking about. The house with the smoker who only smokes outdoors. It seems to always be a man, perhaps his wife doesn’t smoke, and makes him go outside, or perhaps he is just considerate of his family. Or maybe they are worried about selling their house later. Whatever, they smoke out doors. Of course it is obvious which house has this person living at it. There are...
A little over a year ago, we moved to Chandler as I took a job there. We bought a good house in a great neighborhood. However, I knew there were some things to fix. I already had the plumbing nightmare where every step of the way in replacing a bad bathroom fixture, and replacing a hot water heater valve, and ultimately replacing the main water shutoff valve. The concrete in the side yards looks...
Yesterday I was toying with the idea to give up the iphone and possibly go phone-less. Hard to imagine, as i have been a cell user since 1998 or so, but frankly, I rarely use the phone at all anymore. Of course going cell free is a crazy idea. 15 years ago you could walk a block and find 4 – 5 pay phones. But the ubiquity of cell phones has pretty much made the old staple payphones obsolete...
Well, my contract is up with AT&T Mobile, and not surprisingly it coincides with an Apple product launch. New iPhones are in the air, and I am due for an upgrade from my 4s. But instead of diving in and getting the new 5s, I have been thinking a different way. Do I really need a cell phone? Since I haven’t been traveling much I haven’t really used many minutes on my plan. I...
You might recall my bitching a few weeks ago about my work laptop. I foolishly dropped it and it landed on my iphone charger and broke the screen. That was in May. Mid August they figured pout what I needed to do to order a new panel to replace the broken one. The local, on site tech got the panel, but then the backlight didn’t work, so he called the HP support team in. Oh boy, what a fun...
Sigh. This is getting tiresome. I have not had such issues with computer crashes since I first went to Windows Vista in 2007. I come in this morning and pop my computer on the docking station. It was sleeping happily, then I pressed the power button to “wake it up”. I get the familiar password screen, then BAM – blue screen. Fuck. Wait for it to finish the memory dump. Hmmm...
The local Fry’s Foods is a smorgasbord of people watching. A few days ago, I was in the mood for beer, so I maundered in the alcohol aisle. In front of the cooler with the microbrews and imports was a gentleman (and that is a loose interpretation) who was idling in front of the good US micros. I watched him hem and haw for a few minutes. I could almost see him thinking out loud: “I...