Day 238 – NYC

 Tagged with: , ,
Aug 262011
 

As seen from the lower level of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge

Thursday’s drive SUCKED!! According to the GPS it was 167 miles from where we were in Maryland to my sisters place on Long Island. The drive should have taken 3 hrs and 15 minutes.

FIVE hours later we pulled into my sisters driveway!  Take a good look at the photo, what don’t you see? Motion blur! Don’t let the very fast shutter speed fool you, it’s because we were sitting still, just like we were for portions of the NJ Turnpike, I-278 on Staten Island and the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn.

18-105mm lens at 105 mm, 1/1250 sec at f/5.6, ISO 800

On the bright side? Thursday night Veronica and I are sleeping in a room without kids. Friday we’re driving home, without the kids and we’ll be kid-free until Tuesday afternoon. We’re hoping to arrange some quality adult fun while we have the chance :-)

 Pictures  2 Responses »

Karma's a Bitch

 Tagged with: , ,
Jan 202010
 

And she kicked me in the ass!

Today our submissive unicorn friend was supposed to come over for a couple of hours of nekkid fun.  Veronica had arranged for the day off from work and I was going to work a half day, but not requesting to have the time off ahead of time.  Instead, I was going to tell my boss that we had a sick kid at home, but Veronica had some work stuff she couldn’t cancel or miss, so I would have to be at home for half the day.

You know where this is going, right?

Princess Persistent really is home sick! Tuesday afternoon daycare calls Veronica to tell her that PP has spiked a fever and needs to go home.  Which means she won’t be allowed back for 24 hours, so we had to contact our friend and cancel.  Fortunately, she’s a mom too and understood and we hope to reschedule with her soon.

So much for celebrating hump day with 2 hot and sexy nekkid women :-/

=============================================================================

To further irritate me [I'll admit, I was grumpy because of having to cancel with our friend], when I get to the day care center I find PP bundled up and headed outside with her classmates.  Let’s review a few facts, shall we?

  • She has a 101-point-something fever
  • They are sending her home ASAP and not allowing her back on Weds [per policy]
  • It’s about 35 degrees out and raining

Anyone else see why I was perturbed?  To the centers credit, they encourage at least some outside playtime every day, even if only for 15 minutes, and ask that kids have appropriate clothing to do so.  Plus, there is a 40′x40′ covered play area, so they weren’t necessarily going to be in the rain. So taking the kids outside is perfectly normal.

But our daughter is sick and I’m on the way to get her because they’re sending her home!  Why is she going outside in a cold rain?  If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen the angry tweet I fired off when I left.  Veronica saw it and promptly called the director of the center.  Fortunately, not only is Veronica calmer than me when irritated [I tend to yell and cuss at people who piss me off, which isn't exactly productive, or so I'm told...], but she also used to work for the day care company in their corporate office.  If nothing else, Veronica has maintained a good relationship with her former boss aka the CEO of the company, and the center director knows that.  She was very apologetic and promised to have a word with PP’s teachers.

=============================================================================

On the bright side, with no influence from us Darling Boy declared that he would like to donate some money from his piggy bank towards the relief efforts in Haiti.  Veronica is telling the story on her blog today.  I think it’ll make you smile, you should check it out!

 Misc.  11 Responses »

Bill Gates is Satan

 Tagged with: , ,
Dec 122009
 

The title of this post was also my Gmail status last night and sums up how I feel about Microsoft.

In September of 2008 Veronica and I bought a second computer for home.  This was just a few weeks after I started my own blog, and with just one computer and her own blog reading and writing activity, one computer wasn’t going to cut it any longer.  Against my better judgment, she came home from a big box electronics store with a Dell with Windows Vista.  All I knew about Vista was that people were complaining about how Microsoft re-arranged how a lot of features looked and where they were located, and that with Microsoft’s history of releasing bug-ridden software requiring patches, I wasn’t too excited.

Then in the last few months I heard that Microsoft, basically acknowledging how suck-tastic Vista was, was coming out with Windows 7.  Again, I was leery of the hype, but reading some reviews here and there, it seemed to be pretty well received.

Lately my computer was hanging up more and more often. [The new/Vista computer is "mine" and is also known as "the naughty computer".  That's where all of our pics, homemade video, and links to various lifestyle websites are located.  And it's the computer we hide when family visits!]  More often then not, when I’d opened the computer to take it out of sleep mode, it would lock up, the only way to get past it would be to hold down the power button and force a reboot.  Do that once or twice every day and the $120 pricetag to upgrade to Win7 was starting to look pretty good.

So I went for it.  You think I’d be writing this post if the installation went smoothly?  HA!

Step one is to run this compatability checker, which tells me that I should uninstall iTunes, McAfee VirusScan and the Dell Modem Diagnostic Tool.  Okay, no problem, I can do that.  Except I can’t find the modem tool in the list of programs to modify or uninstall.  So I skip in and proceed with the installation.

90 minutes later and 60% through step 5 of 5, the install freezes.  I leave it alone for a while, since one of the earlier status screens warned that the install could take several hours.  But then I return and it’s still stuck.  My only option is to force a re-boot and pray that it reverts back to Vista and I haven’t killed my computer.  Fortunately, it’s okay.

Lilly suggested that I run a disk clean-up, defragment, then run my anti-virus software.  Well, I had already removed VirusScan, so I just heeded her first 2 suggestions.  I also disconnected my external hard drive before trying to install Win7 again.  The external drive was originally connected because 1) I backed up my computer before starting the upgrade process [this is the naughty computer, with 1500+ pictures on it!] and 2) the compatibility checker utility directed me to attach any peripheral USB devices before I ran it.  Then I dug around and after a few minutes finally found the modem utility that needed removed, which I did.  I re-ran the compatibility checker and everything appeared okay, no errors or warnings.

But wait, there’s more!

I tried to install Win7 again, only to get an error message, something about a temp file that could not be created because it already existed.  Thinking, what could it hurt, I rebooted the computer, which did the trick.  Take two of my attempt to upgrade from Vista to Win7 is underway.

As I’m writing this [on the "family computer"], it’s now 12:30 am. I started this entire process around 7:00pm and am tired.

I just checked the status of the install.

It’s currently frozen at the exact same spot as 4 hours ago.

Fuck.

Now what do I do?

I’m going to bed, leaving the install program running.  Maybe it will magically un-freeze inself during the night and I’ll awake to an upgraded operating system.

But I doubt it.  And I’ll be back to square one.

So much for the hype over Windows 7, I can’t even get it installed :-(

UPDATE: Saturday, 4pm.  I gave up on upgrading, double-checked my back-up files and did a clean install of Win7, which went off without a hitch.  Documents and settings are restored and I’m working on re-installing the software.  That was entirely too painful to accomplish…

 Misc.  13 Responses »

Subscribe Via Email

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner