Category: Geeky Chick
Sunday, August 17, 2003
I win! I win!
Whew!!
Holy Mother of God ... what a day. I finally took on the task of getting my Nucleus blog entries imported into MovableType. I did not know what I was getting into.
I finalized my layout last night. Nice, eh? I'm rather proud of that graphical achievement. But I was up until the wee hours working on it. I'm a typical Aries gal ... completing projects started is nothing less than an obsession. Sleep, food, potty all can wait ... must, must must finish this!! Heh ...
And then I had to get up early, despite today being Saturday, to pick up my daughter from her father's house. But no nap for mama! She's a cheerleader for her school's football team and they had a pre-season jamboree she had to be at. And I had to drive her because the bus was full. Did I mention that it was 95 degrees in the shade today? And the concession stand at the football field was out of any kind of diet drink ... blech! I hate sugared drinks!
The games were only two 10 minute quarters each, but there were delays and instead of my daughter's team starting at 3:30 like they were supposed to, it was almost 4:30. In the meantime, I was melting. I left to get something to drink and then couldn't find a parking space when I came back. But that was OK ... I was perfectly happy circling around in the car with the air conditioning on. Oh yeah ... did I forget the intermittent thunderstorms? But that was OK too ... I had my umbrella with me, which came in very handy when the sun came back out and was blazing on my back.
But I survived. After the game, the girls were still fresh as little daisies. I was drenched with sweat, hair hanging in my eyes and I just knew my mascara was approaching the chin area. We left and stopped at the nearest store for cold drinks. When we came back out to the car, the battery was dead. I had also just noticed that my left-front tire was very low on air. We were about 45 miles from home. And all I could do was obsess about this stupid blog!
Luckily, a nice fellow offered to help, even recruited the assistance of three teen-age boys to push start my car. Damn less than two year old battery giving out already! But soon we were on the road headed for home in the sweet cold air pouring out of the vents.
Back to the blog ...
It took me five hours to get it. Nucleus and MT are not very compatible when it comes to importing old entries. A couple of MT forum posters pointed me in the right direction and it took a lot of tweaking, cursing, fussing and banging the head on the desk to get it done. The formatting is off ... way off. Maybe one day I will go in and clean it up, but not tonight. I might start copying my sidebar links over. Maybe. I'm exhausted.
« Hush me up!
Posted by
LissaKay on 08/17/03 at 02:10 AM in
~ Geeky Chick
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Sunday, July 27, 2003
Kid Geek
I have a geek-girl in the making. My daughter Annie has been playing around with web site design and started to get pretty into it. So, I registered a domain for her and had it set up on my web hosting account. I installed a tagboard and Gallery for her. Now she working on filling it with content.
It's
coming along nicely. If I do say so myself.
Posted by
LissaKay on 07/27/03 at 05:34 AM in
~ Geeky Chick
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Sunday, July 20, 2003
Troubleshooting
About a month ago, I started having weird Internet Explorer crashes whenever I was on a page that had meta-refresh encoded. Very frustrating when one is trying to surf multiple sites, and when one's own web site causes the crashes (because of the tagboard).
I think ... I hope that it is all resolved. I uninstalled the keyboard and mouse drivers, CursorXP, the Google toolbar and Yahoo companion. With all that gone, the crashes stopped. I have now reinstalled the drivers and toolbars. I can live without CursorXP ... it's just eye-candy.
I also finally saved up enough Best Buy gift cards to purchase OfficeXP. I was getting them as bonuses when buying other stuff there, and I used to get them as performance rewards at my last job. With the $75 gift card I got for signing up with Earthlink DSL, I had enough to buy it without a major hit on the pocketbook. Now the learning curve begins, and getting used to all the differences between 2000 and XP. The installation went smoothly, but Outlook choked on my old account settings ... I had to reconfigure those manually. It's pretty slick ... Billy-boy did a good job with this one.
Posted by
LissaKay on 07/20/03 at 06:27 AM in
~ Geeky Chick
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Sunday, March 23, 2003
Geek Goddess
In part to take my mind off the Iraq situation, I decided to upgrade the computers. A co-worker had some damn nice hardware for sale, so I bit. They also need it pretty badly, especially the secondary PC.
I got a new 120GB hard drive and a Verto GForce4 Ti41200 graphics card. Those will go into my main PC - an AthlonXP 1600 system I built myself in December 2001. The secondary PC is a K6-II 500 that I built up from barebones four years ago. It's the one I let the kids bang around on. The hard drive is dying in it and the sound and graphics are barely adequate. The CD-ROM has bit the dust too. So, the 40GB drive and GForce MX200 from my PC will go into the kids' and I got a new DVD/CD-ROM as well.
This has been quite an adventure so far, playing musical computer hardware. For one, I haven't had a good chunk of time to just dig in and get it done. And then the logistics of moving parts from one computer to the other ... Whew!
The new drive is a DiamondMax Plus. It comes with software that says it will partition, format and copy your old drive to your new. It does have the caveat that it is better for WinXP users to do the partitioning and formatting using the Disk Management utility if possible. What a sweet little tool that is! I set up the partitions from within Windows and formatted each one. As long as I live, I shall never fdisk again!
However, the MaxBlast software does NOT say that it can't copy partitions formatted as NTFS! Argghh!! I did some price checking on Norton Ghost and groaned. Then I checked the Maxtor web site ... lo and behold, there is a new version of MaxBlast that specifically says it can handle NTFS. Whew! It's a simple looking program that creates a boot disk to perform the partition copying. It went really well, taking about three hours to copy about 25GB of data, including the system partition to the corresponding partitions on the new drive.
Next I run into some major trouble. I made a boo-boo when formatting the new drive ... I let it assign the drive letters. So when I tried to boot up from the new drive, it couldn't find the authentication file. Windows looks for the location of this file based on a registry setting. It was looking on C ... the file was on I. Not good. It would boot with the old drive in set as a Slave drive though, because the file still existed on the C partition there. Oy vey!
However, I did find a little gem of a tweak ... run regedt32.exe (Not the same as regular regedit) I set permissions to allow my User/Admin account to make changes in HKLMSystemMountedDevices. I quit and then ran regular regedit. Within that key, I changed the letter assignments on each of the DosDevices keys to the ones they needed to be. I got that fixed, unplugged the old drive and booted up with the new. System disk error. Egads! More time was wasted while I fiddled with jumper setting and cables, until I replaced the IDE cable itself. Booted right up. I guess it's not a real good thing to mess with those too much.
Ah well ... we're off and running. Next is the new graphics card. God I love GForce. The Detonator drivers make installing new cards a breeze. And now I have a nice collection of computer parts to upgrade the kids' PC with. That's a chore for tomorrow. They are now busily saving the files and things they want to keep from the dying hard drive.
I need to find a job doing this kind of work. I would be one happy camper!
« Hush me up!
Posted by
LissaKay on 03/23/03 at 01:01 AM in
~ Geeky Chick
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