Memnison Journal

Some time ago, Susan’s aunt gave us an old PC that was too wimpy for her use, and I set it up as a house server under Ubuntu Linux, but I’ve just had a myriad of problems with it.  The burner doesn’t work.  The Samba setup is damaged beyond repair and you can’t connect to [...]

To access the office’s intranet and server stuff, I have had a lot of trouble with using their VPN access system; I can’t go into details about it, but the old system was crude, impossibly slow and prone to total collapse.   The new system is a ton simpler, and less technically problematic. There was two [...]

I was off work all of last week, trying to keep my foot out of action and let it heal.  Not sure how much got accomplished on that part, but the swelling is gone, and I’ve thoroughly gotten sick to death of the Bactrim side-effects. The podiatrist a week ago  and my family were pretty [...]

I am unbelievably happy to be *done* with work-work for the week; incredible drag and endless stuff to zig and zag and do. Now, to shift over into HOME work.  Aaaaaagh. Susan is off with Mere seeing HANNAH MONTANA, THE MOVIE.   Apparently, since Mere had today off from school, her idea of what to do [...]

Today’s been a horrendously busy day from several accounts; Wednesdays usually involve a lot of telephone conference calls with work – it’s the one day of the week that *everyone* is in the office.    So the morning, at least, is soaked with these calls, and I pray that they’re over with before my office phone’s [...]

The office is apparently going to MS Office 2007 this spring. My sounds of joy and laughter are vastly muted. It could be, perhaps, that after 25 plus years of being a computer geek, I’m thoroughly convinced that Microsoft is a hack company, and given my druthers, I’d avoid it all over the place – [...]

I was nervous about the new worm stuff on computers until I caught the part about the patch for this going out from Microsoft way back in October, and that the computers affected never bothered with the security patches since October … since I keep my household stuff a whole lot better protected than that, [...]

Anything Particularly Surprising To Me. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts… One member of the White House new-media team came [...]

My internet access on Wednesday went to heck in a handbasket for a while.  The Netgear router that is the hub of our house network (4-5 PCs, 3 TiVos and a partridge in a pear tree) has been acting up a lot recently; won’t hold settings and so on.  Finally, I got mad and decided [...]

Case Number one: I have been having all sorts of burning problems for a while.  I’m an absolute rat bahstahd about backup stuff, and first the old burner coughed and choked over any media I put in it, getting picky to the point of unusability.  Replaced it with a new Sony DRU-180A.  After a while, [...]

I tend to use Open Office anymore, partly because I want to help in the no-thanks-Microsoft universe, but also because I really hate Office 2007.  I really hate the new interface ribbons, because you simple cannot find things anymore. My workplace uses Office 2003, but one of the people works at home a lot and [...]