Category: General

From a very nice get together.

I scared the hell out of the dogs because I set the alarm off accidentally. Poor babies were no doubt sleeping on their cushions and out of the blue the Alarm starts going off, sounding very much like the fire alarm. 

They don’t like those noises any more than I do,  It’s going to be a major number of bones tomorrow. Tonight will require endless cuddling before I’m forgiven

I screwed up using the remote disarm, but in the process discovered that the system is not programmed as I thought it was.

Guess I need to contact the alarm company tomorrow. This will test if they’re really there 24 / 7… If I wasn’t so dang tired I’d call them tonight but I’m really looking forward to hitting the hay.

I’m still keying down from the trip home. so my head is a bit random. 

Oh! The party… Nice people, great food, fun conversation even comparisons between earthquakes and hurricanes. East Coast people will in general take a hurricane or tornado without batting an eye but put them somewhere where the ground shakes and well… “Katy bar the door”!

Oddly, the West Coast folks will take an Earthquake over a Hurricane or Tornado. I guess it’s just about what you’re used to.

Since I grew up in the East and moved out to the West… I’m a bit of a strange duck. I’d rather not have to deal with any of the  dang things at all. But… I prefer Hurricanes and tornadoes. You can usually see them coming and get the heck out of the way earthquakes sneak up on you. I don’t like being snuck up on at all.

Random click in my brain…

I’ve been fighting with my Time Machine backup utility for the past few days. I was just about to turn the dang backups off when I stumbled across the fact that my “Exclusions” file had been somehow deleted.

I have no need to back up my music files to the Time Capsule, and I have no need to back up imap mail, Nor do I need to backup my virtual machines. The estimated backup size was 270 GB.

I reset the exclusions to omit the files listed above. 

The reason is this, IMAP email files are already on the server, the music is backed up on my media server, andthe virtual machines are backed up on another drive.

That reduced the overall backup size to about 14 GB, that’s still too big given the changes that I’ve actually made to the system. But it’s way better than 270 GB every time the machine tries to backup. 

We’ll see if this fixes the problem. I’d love to know why the exclusion list suddenly was missing. 

I’d also like to know why the backup utility doesn’t count the backup file size properly when no files are excluded but when files are excluded all the sudden the count is correct.

Seems like the Time Machine bigs that have been plaguing Apple since Lion are still alive and well.  Sad too, I’d really become completely dependent on having the Time Machine backup working in Snow Leopard it was so dang reliable I honestly never thought about it.

This most recent version is … well annoying would be an understatement since I was fully planning to disable the system and find something else that worked.

That’s why I’m now using Outlook on my Mac instead of the built in application. I simply got tired of the new version of Mail doing things that made no sense. For example leaving ports open to IMAP servers when Mail was finished checking for mail. Or not using the account that I’d received an email on when I hit reply.

Easier to use a program that works as expected even if it wasn’t written in 64 bit code, and occasionally crashed.

At least it works consistently.

Off to training on Monday, don’t know how much blogging time I’m going to have. So It’s possible that there won’t be any posts until Friday.

If that’s the way it works out. I hope everyone has a great week.

Have been finishing chores that I’ve been trying to finish prior to going to training next week.

I’m probably going to be commuting at least part of the week so I wanted to get things squared away before I got busy with the training, studying, and commuting.

This is of course a long explanation to say that’s why I haven’t updated the blog for the last few days.

Very little new is happening here.

Been working on the seasonal things, cards, sorting some of the decorations. 

I’m planning to set up the tree next weekend. It looks like the weather is going to be a little more Christmasy. I honestly don’t know what it is, this year it just doesn’t seem like we’re anywhere near the holidays.

Over the past few years I’ve had more and more difficulty getting into the spirit of the season but this year is completely different.

I’m not only not In the Spirit… I don’t really care.

Call it over commercialization. Call it economic depression. Hell, for all I know it’s the whole end of the world thing.

What I do know is that it just doesn’t “feel” like the Holidays are upon us.