Category: Fail

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People are unbelievable

DSC 0887Weekend two of the snow players.

Sigh!

Yesterday wasn’t too bad, but today as been a mess. One of the local forums describes the current condition of the snow, as “Ghetto Snow”.

Ghetto Snow is snow that’s a nasty combination of ice, dirt, and god only knows what else.

I know my dogs have added their own unique colors to the snow. <ahem>

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Today things are going too far. We’ve got people driving up into our neighborhoods onto side streets, (Streets that we’ve cleared in many cases BY HAND) then they start loading the snow, (OH, NOW YOU WANT TO HELP?) from our yards into their vehicles.

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Yeah, they park half off the street, half in our yard, then start digging randomly in our yards with absolutely no idea what is under the snow, of course they’re only interested in the clean snow from the middle of our yards.  All the while their kids are making snow men and having snowball fights elsewhere on our property.

WTF?

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The sheriff and CHP are apparently hanging around just waiting to write tickets.Their response time has been absolutely astounding!

Either of those LEOs are welcome at my place anytime. I’ll happily make coffee, hot chocolate and whatever other yummies I have on hand for them.

That’s not an offer of bribery, that’s me saying THANK YOU to folks whose jobs must be really tough to do, and me demonstrating my heartfelt appreciation for them doing that job.

I was standing on my deck taking pictures of yet another carload of morons who flew up my DEAD END street.

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They race up the street only to slam on their brakes when they realize that they can’t go any further and are in fact sliding backwards on ice into some random obstruction.

I’ve come to enjoy the distinctive high pitched whine of tires spinning on ice punctuated  by the equally distinctive “clunk-crunch-tinkle,” of plastic and/or glass connecting with rocks or trees.

This particular car load of morons was lucky, their front tires found purchase on a small portion of pavement exposed by the last 25 morons spinning their tires in the exact same spot. But I made sure that the fat nasty chick who got out of the passenger side of the car could hear me laughing.

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Anyhow, as I’m standing there, I see someone else snatching a shovel from my neighbors yard. They didn’t ask, they just took it. I called out, they ignored me, I called out again and then my neighbor came out and started yelling too.

First, these people tried to act like they didn’t know what we were talking about while holding the shovel then they acted like they didn’t understand English. My neighbor stepped out the door and started down off the porch.

The shovel was run back over to the spot it had been removed from.

My neighbor grabbed it and locked it in his garage. The people all hopped in their car and drove away.

This is why so many of us are wanting access to the residential areas restricted. The problem is that it would take a ton of man power to prevent the snow players getting to the residential areas because almost every street opens onto one of the main arteries through town. The main arteries all connect to two bigger arteries that lead to the freeway.

While it would be easy to block off those streets, once people got past those choke points we couldn’t control them throughout the town.

I love what happens when the Sheriff’s Deputy pulls up. All these people scatter like cockroaches in a cheap apartment.

It’s going to be a very long winter.

We wouldn’t mind so much but people are just so damn ill mannered. They don’t need to be in our neighborhoods or yards. There are places all over town specifically set aside for play.  The only reason people are up here is because they don’t want to deal with the crowds in those areas.

I guess I could start charging for parking and assistance getting unstuck from the ice.

I wonder how much of a profit I could turn before an officer made me stop? I wouldn’t be mad at the officer. After all, they’d just be doing their job and technically, I don’t think I can charge for parking on a public street. Or for people to play in the snow that is on country property.

I wonder if I could charge what amounts to a toll? After all the street my house faces is a private street and since the county won’t maintain it and the residents pay to have it paved; can I charge for people using our street? (I should ask some of my cop friends.)

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That was interesting – But a complete waste of time

DVD

Been meaning to try out a thing in the Mac OS called BootCamp. BootCamp is Apple’s tool that sets up the ability for Windows to run on a Mac.

I’d been meaning to do this for years, but since I’m a VMWare Fusion user, I never really had a reason.

Until last night.

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After doing battle with glaciers on the road in front of the house. (Global Warming… MY ASS!) Two days with a trenching tool, snow shovel, and a pick! Only then was I able to get the 4” of ice cleared from in front of my driveway.

We had a county worker fall on the street and injure herself earlier in the week. She turned her ankle so severely that if she didn’t break it she’ll have gotten off lucky.  Thank God she wasn’t in front of my house when she fell. Our street has a long and colorful history some of which I’ve documented in this blog so I won’t retell it in this post.

To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone had been injured

Ironically, the lady was a county employee, and since the county refuses to take responsibility for the road by maintaining and plowing the road perhaps it’s a bit of Karma. Had the county plowed the road, there wouldn’t have been ice 4” thick for her to fall on.

The ice was caused by snowplayers, driving up a dead end road (mine) so that they could play in the abomination the county calls a flood control project. (Another story!)

When you have vehicle after vehicle slowly crusing up the street, then backing down the street spinning their tires, you get ice. This is especially true when the cars and trucks are coming up before we’ve had a chance to get out to the street with snow blowers.

I digress!

After two days of manual labor, my shoulders and the rest of me was pretty sore. (I’m much better today, thanks for asking.)

So I resolved to plant my ass on the couch and do nothing last night. Then I happened to go into my office and noticed a Windows 7 installation disk peeking out of its storage bin.

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Hum, “Oh why the hell not? It should be pretty mindless and I’ll be curious if I don’t…”

At this point my tech friends are all saying to themselves, “Uh OH!”

To be fair, BootCamp is really cool. It provides any Mac user with a reasonably powerful machine, (ie Most Macs) the ability to create a disk partition on their Mac, then install and run Windows.

boot-campIt works well and even provides the ability to boot up in the partition you’ve created (Windows in my case) OR Mac OS by default. I’m not sure why you’d spend the money on a Mac then only use Windows or another operating system, but I’m sure there are people that do exactly that.

I could see a diehard Windows fan attempting to transition to Mac OS and failing, then continuing to use the Mac running exclusively Windows. It would be a bit of a waste but at least the person would get some utility out of the Mac

Anyhow, BootCamp works and it works well. Windows installed and worked like a champ. I installed the printer drivers I needed and was planning on giving this partition thing a whirl to see if I wanted to perhaps abandon VMWare. So I tell Windows that I want to install an instance of Office.

… and that’s when it all went to hell.

Grrrrr

Unbeknownst to me, Office 365 has some kind of problem with one or more of the HP printer drivers.  Office will install then get to about 90% complete and HANG. To get around this you have to restart Windows, go to services, disable the print spooler, make sure; In my case, that the firewall and Microsoft’s Antivirus were offline, then restart the Office installation procedure.

It was at this point that things went seriously off the rails. Office claimed it was installed but wouldn’t let me sign in, nor would it reinstall.  As I was fiddling with it I started getting a message that Office couldn’t access the internet, but I was looking at webpages FROM Microsoft’s Office installation help and my accounts page. Then I rebooted Windows again and things went from bad to worse.

After a couple of hours I realized the Windows installation had been damaged in some unique and interesting ways. I threw in the towel.

I have a perfectly functional installation of Windows in VMWare, I don’t NEED a BootCamp partition. I especially don’t need to go through the whole Windows installation process again, then wait for Office, etc, etc, etc.

I learned some things I didn’t know before.

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BootCamp works really well.

Note to self, Install Windows, Install Office, THEN install HP printers.

Probably, not a bad rule of thumb to hold off installation of printers in general until after Office is installed and online. I have the suspicion that HP isn’t the only printer manufacturer that’s got some kind of “blocking” bug with Office. This begs the question if you’re installing Office on an existing installation of Windows, should you maybe remove the installed printers then reinstall them after the installation?

On a Mac with Bootcamp installed, the 2nd (Windows) partition is shown on the desktop.

That’s something I don’t care for. I’d like the ability to have that partition hidden unless I explicitly mount it. I know I can hide all hard drives from the desktop, but I’d prefer to have the ability to have user selectable hidden partitions.

Since the Mac OS is, at its core a UNIX system,  I’m fairly sure that I could hide the partition… maybe fstab? Humm, I wonder…

In any case, I’m sticking with VMWare for my Windows needs. The single major reason is this, I can COPY a VMWare container. That container could be Windows, Linux, or other operating systems. Restoring that container is simple and VMWare doesn’t care.

Effectively, this means that I can corrupt the hell out of a VMWare Windows container and lose only the most recent changes (Or bad installation of something).

VMware is not noticeably slower than running Windows as a stand alone partition. So as the doctors say, the benefits outweigh the deficits.

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This could easily have been worse. I could have trashed my Mac OS installation in the process. I briefly considered that as a possibility. I discounted the potential danger for 2 reasons. 1) I Have a couple of complete backups of my Mac OS X installation. 2) I suffer from that terrible arrogance that comes from the Mac OS being so robust.

Yes, occasionally something really bad happens, but issues I have with my Mac are generally caused because I’m monkeying around not because the OS itself is bad.

So for all of you who’ve not used BootCamp, you can continue to not use it.

If however, you decide to give it a try, you can do so with a bit more confidence. Depending on your needs, you might still consider VMWare or Parallels as options.

PunishmentIf you’re looking for a way to spend an evening…

 

There are far more interesting things you can do instead of experimenting with a computer. I can tell you even BAD sex is more interesting.

Your milage will no doubt vary.

 

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SCRATCH!!!!

Brain falling apart

I was working on a post. Then my brain just stopped…

The entire point fell apart and I was left here with my hair blown back and no clue what I was doing.

I didn’t smell toast so I know it wasn’t a stroke but nonetheless it’s annoying.

I’m giving up. 

I’ll try again tomorrow.

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Earthquake!!!!

While the local news people were losing their minds over a 4.x that was more of a roller than anything else. The dogs didn’t even look up.

The glass ornaments on the Christmas tree didn’t even tinkle together.

In other words Big Deal! So What?

When I first moved here 4.x was not even anything to bat an eye about. But it’s been so long since we had regular quakes folks are easily freaked out about it now.

Good! maybe there will be an exodus from California and the freeways will open up.

The REAL issue is the weather in the middle of the country.

Their llittany of problems reads like Elmer Fudd’s lyrics in What’s Opera Doc.

Norf winds bwo, Sowf winds bwo, Storms, Thunder, lightening strike, SMOOOOG!

It would be funny were it not so unbelievably tragic.

Those folks went from rain and being in shorts, to tornados, then sleet, then snow and their neighborhoods were wiped out.

Merry Christmas!

Meanwhile our talking heads blather on and on and on about a little shaking that may have done a little damage.  As always California newscasters need to have a little perspective.

For New Years all I want is newscasting that is factual, accurate, and not spun for entertainment.

I’m not holding my breath!

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One of those days.

I started looking for a job, and then it’s noon.

Filling out the fiddly bits in the online application process is time consuming. I’ve known that for a long time.

I was reading postings and filling out applications then suddenly 4 hours was gone. I had other things planned buuuut.

Eventually, the dogs got their walk.

The day was gone before I knew it.

I swear I’ve been looking around for a TARDIS. I don’t feel tired and I don’t feel like the day has gone because I was sitting in front of the computer. It feels like I blinked and suddenly the sun was going down.

It has to be a time distortion.

I hope your day was more productive than mine.