depressed to tears

I could use some good news.

I got a phone call from my older sister that has left me depressed to tears and I don't need that right now.

I was waiting for a phone call but from a prospective job possibility.

I need help so bad.

So have the hang up phone calls stopped finally?

I don't know if it's due to the snow or what, but I haven't gotten any
more hang up phone calls since some time around Thursday. I know who
they're from, basically, and I sent off a letter a while back explaining
things. So the letter must have finally gotten around to the proper
people it was intended for, and a stop was put to the harassment.

Of course, I won't be surprised if I get some other sort of letter like
my mom did years ago that sparked this entire tragic journey of bad
decisions and a refusal to assume responsibility. If something like that
arrives, it'd better have the right person addressed on there and sent
Certified so I can laugh at it and have it sent back unreceived.

People don't know most of what I went through these last 11 years. I was
there as it unfolded right in front of me, and nobody listened to me as
I made pleas about what was going on and nobody helped. And I've never
been thanked for what I did, one of those was preventing my
grandparents' house from exploding due to incomplete combustion of
propane and spending an entire week waking up each day in the basement
with a massive headache because the pressure of the gas had gone up due
to a new tank being installed and nobody checked the damn furnace until
I got the idea that something was horribly wrong. If I hadn't figured
out how to adjust the fuel pressure in the furnace, we would have been
dead and the house would have been on the news. Someone freakin' thank
me for that!!

I took care of my mother with the help of the ladies from Caring Hands
that she was able to have come in, and nobody has ever thanked me.
Instead I get indirectly told that people blame me for what happened.
Well, my mom's wishes was for not to be shut up in a nursing home,
tossed aside along with her dignity. She saw what happened to her
parents and she could get around to some degree and she didn't want
that. It would have been disgraceful to not honor her wishes while she
was still able to voice her decisions.

If anyone has a problem with me stating my view on that whole mess, too
bad. How about helping me now while you still can and while I'm trying
to figure things out? Hypocrisy is a bad thing.

Should I rename this blog?

I've been thinking that maybe I should name this blog "My View of the
World" because obviously some people don't agree with my view.

To them, I say: Too BAD. Suck it.

I reject your reality and substitute my own in its place.

These opinions are fictional. Any similarity to real opinions is merely
a coincidence.

Also: Get a Life. You have more important things to worry about instead
of the random pen scratchings of one person. Go Away and GTFO. If you
don't like some of the things I have to say, don't read my blog. Calling
it libel will get you laughed out of court by not only the judge but the
bailiff and everyone else there. I do not post lies or falsehoods, only
opinions and things as I see them. Anything that affects me and how the
world treats me I consider fair game, so if you don't want something to
end up here, carefully consider how to word things and how I might end
up taking the general context of your words.

Thank you.

FAIL

Installed the DVD burner

Last night for some reason, I decided to just go ahead and install the
DVD burner I finally ordered. It's a Super Writemaster branded burner.
After a brief install in my mom's Dell, I knew it at least worked a read
CDs. Now it was time to test it as a DVD burner.

I arranged DVD Flick to make a disk with 2 24-minute episodes and then a
short clip after that. I set it up to use my 16G thumbdrive as an
external "scratchpad" drive as I had envisioned. While DVD Flick bitched
at me because the 16G Cruzer was Fat32 and therefore limited in the size
of the files it was to create (claiming some files might get as big as
2Gigs), I still had it go ahead and use it.

The program went through and created what I asked it to do. The longest
steps were encoding the video and then combining sources. After the
sources were combined, it just needed to copy the files over into DVD
naming structure.

For what I had it work on, it took about 3 hours, and that wasn't a full
disk of 4 or 5 episodes. I know the processor on this P4 tower is kinda
slow, but I didn't think it was THAT slow. The thumbdrive could be the
bottleneck in the process. I should look at the comparative data speeds
of a high speed 2.0 thumbdrive compared to the IDE Seagate hard drive.
It might be a good idea to maybe get a 2nd HD in there just for using as
a DVD Flick scratchpad, as I call it.

Oh yeah, about the tower. During install, I had to move the included CD
burner to another bay in the case. I noticed it was also set to Cable
Select. Who the hell keeps doing that? You can't use Cable Select unless
you have the special cable made for that, which would have holes punched
in the ribbon cable on the Drive Select wires. My burner went in set to
Master and plugged into the end of the ribbon cable on that channel (IDE
cable ends need to be terminated anyway), and while I can plug in the CD
burner as Slave, there's an issue with power plugs. I need to get a
Y-shapted extender cable. It seems whoever put together this tower used
a power supply with really short 4-wire power plugs.

Anywho, DVD Flick finishes making the files. I load up my burning
program. Even though I have the speed set to 4X, it takes only 5 minutes
to burn what I asked for, which is about right since a full disk would
be about 10 to 13 minutes. I'll check it soon for errors.

Also, I finally got to see my imported HK DVD of the 2nd Cardcaptor
Sakura movie in widescreen aspect for the first time! I bought that at
Anime North in 2001, if I remember right. I would like to rip the video
off the disk, extract the subtitles, and fix the aspect ratio of the
video to play on regular TVs.

And now I'm looking for the data DVD some guy wrote out for me a while
back, instead of the CD I hoped he would have done.

Lost sleep = more done?

Been working on getting my mother's Dell up and working and think I
finally got an updated stable install with what I thought I wanted on
there but had to reconsider. Like I wanted to put back on it Norton
Internet Security 2004 and the associated Antivirus (you can't just have
one) but it kept conflicting with AVG Free, so out went Norton with its
removal utility. Then an attempt to put in a free Personal Firewall met
with no success after removing it (incomplete install anyway) and I
don't know why I didn't go with Comodo's free firewall because I've used
it on friends' computers with much success. Which is what I ended up
doing.

With the problems, I kept getting Stop Errors which never happened on my
mother's computer, or at least extremely rarely. Now I know it's
possibly from conflicting resources or drivers.

And Windows Updates help a lot, too. I also found out there was a new
video driver for the motherboard, as well as a 2007 updated driver for
the network controller!! That made me mad I didn't know about checking
that sooner. Maybe it won't drop Road Runner like it used to.

Mom's computer back on the web

Though I kinda miss seeing my slow P4 on the web, I may figure out what
I need to put them both on the DSL modem (an ethernet hub / switch of
some sort). I don't want to have to keep switching the cable back and
forth.

Anywho, I kinda got Norton Internet Security back on her system as it
came installed with it when she first got the Dell. But the thing is
there was no install CD or product key given for Norton AV 2004, and I
didn't think to see what it was before the original hard drive decided
to act up. It's one of those Trialware thingies, and so far I have been
unable to obtain a working product key, and I tried searching the
exported registry file but don't know where it would be. But the Green
ball for NIS 2004 is there again, so at least it looks OK. But I still
put AVG Free 9.0 and Spybot S&D back in.

Just a few more thingies to download and install, like Java.

What's interesting to me is at one point the system developed an odd
shutdown stop error, but after applying 56 updates, that problem was
fixed! I remember one December when I kept getting the message that
Windows just recovered from a serious error, and after updating, the
message stopped appearing. Updates do fix system problems.

But still, in the end, I ended up sobbing in front of the computer
because Mom's not here to benefit from my work getting her system back
up and running again. She's not here to impress anymore, so now my
achievements don't feel they way they should. There's a big void I feel
because of the stuff I had on there. I will try to see if her original
HD still works. I wonder if the jumper for the drive went bad or
something. I wonder where I can get those.

I need to get a new CD burner for her system though, so I can put Record
Now! and InfraRecorder back on it. I'm sure the original burner was bad
from the moment we got it since it did nothing but act up a lot. It
would do things like flash the LED constantly and not respond, or its
drive letter would disappear from My Computer, or if you tried to use it
after the computer was on for about an hour it would cause problems. At
first it was great, but after having it around a while, you learned of
its cantankerous nature.

So her system now has 1G RAM, fast 80Gig hard drive, reinstalled
drivers. It just needs the burner, and I have no idea how to pick a good
CD burner. Why not a DVD burner? I just don't need one on there at the
moment. I have another system for that.

I hope I can find all her install CDs for the games she put on it.

Dammit, Mom. I'm taking good care of your computer. I try to convince
myself that you're going to be coming back at some point otherwise I
feel I'm just going to lose it.

Pics off my mobile

From December when we went to raid at our friend's request his storage locker.

Akron's erection

Grr... Slow install

I don't know what the problem is. In a way, the new hard drive sorta acted like the old one, but it did format under XP Setup. The problem now is that the copying of files from the install CD to the hard drive is taking way too long. Already I had one prompt of some file that didn't copy and had to retry. Maybe the CD ROM drive is wanting to act up? We've always had a problem with it. I think I have the one that came out of the Win98 box. All I know is that it shouldn't take this long to copy XP setup files to the hard drive. I really do not know what's going on, if a setting in the BIOS got changed somehow or something went bad on the motherboard. GRRR....

Additional: I pulled the HD out and set the jumper to Master. I also grabbed my new Toshiba Super WriteMaster DVD burner and installed that and am using it in place of the CD burner. Setup is going much faster!

OMG! It booted and is continuing the install!!!

Checking more in Mom's 'puter

I get her system upstairs to begin putting in the new hard drive, an
80Gig Seagate Barracuda. Brand new. After I figured out once again how
to get the case open, the next step was getting the HD out.

It was mounted in a bracket that attached to the case by one screw in
front of the drive on the inside and one on the outside. I can't explain
well with just words, but once I had those 2 important screws out, the
HD came out in the bracket really easy. Then I see a buncha dust.

It might not have killed the drive, but that much dust behind the front
plastic face isn't good, but it at least shows where the dust has gone
since there's not a whole lot inside the case.

I also don't like how the HD is mounted. It's inside the front, standing
up on end. I like my drives horizontal. I don't think I'll be able to
remount the Seagate this way, since the Western Digital blocked a lot of
dust coming into the case when it was vertical.

Also the drive is set to Cable Select, and the way it's in there, the HD
ribbon cable is currently set up for only 1 hard drive. No provision
made for a 2nd without getting another bracket and a new cable. I find
it odd that it wasn't set to Master.

I managed to pop off the front of the case and saw a crapload of dust.
It's never been popped off and vacuumed out before. At least there was
some air flow in spite of this.

So my plan of attack is to vacuum the dust and then install the Seagate.
I might have time tomorrow to work on reinstalling Windows XP. I don't
know if I should partition the drive like I did for one lady.

I would imagine that if I ever wanted to work on Mom's Dell again, it
would mean a 2nd hard drive and / or a 2nd monitor card, or maybe a new
CD Burner. I dunno. I don't see a second AGP in there, but maybe there
are PCI monitor cards? I haven't looked.