I’m sure you have all noticed my lack of posting over the last few days. There are many reasons.
1. I can only be on my butt for short periods and I cannot type in any other position so I’m limited to what I can do. For some of my limited time, I have been playing piano working on Bach’s Prelude in C Major. I saw it being played on a Mentalist rerun and it looked easy so I decided to learn it which I have. So now, part of my sitting up time is playing the Prelude twice and then return to lying on my back reading.
2. I’m having my master bathroom redone. Last week they did the demolition. It took three days. They had to jackhammer the shower pan and the tile in the toilet area and then level out the destruction with concrete. There’s a fine layer of dust throughout the house. They got the plumbing in. Today they are laying the tile and later this week, the new cabinets go in. Then, the granite guys can come and make their templates. Don’t know when they’ll do their stuff. Meanwhile, I have to use the guest bathroom which is nowhere near as accessible as the master bathroom. The shower is really a pain in the ass. That puts me in a foul mood. I hate home improvement projects! This one has at least two more weeks to go.
3. My desktop computer is on its last legs. I think it is 8 or 9 years old which makes it positively ancient. I’ve been backing up important stuff like porn and all my Turbo Tax files so I can put them on the new computer which I’ll prolly buy this week. What’s amazing is I’m able to put all the data on an 8 Gig thumbdrive. I remember when I used to have to use a 100 Meg Zip drive for this. I’m running XP and it is no longer supported and I’ve been getting malware from somewhere and have had to restore from a backup twice in the past two weeks. It’s really kludgy and slow.
So, between the sore, the bathroom project, and my PC I’ve had enough to put me in a foul mood and detract from my blog. Fear not. I’ll be back to what passes for normal in my world shortly. Bear with me.
Buy a good antivirus package like VIPRE Internet Security.
Also install Malwarebytes Free. The paid version of Malwarebytes is better as it will work with VIPRE as long as the scan time aren’t set for the same times.
I have been using both on my most used computer and have only seen one virus attempt in the past 5 years, the attempt was blocked. Also both watch for and block bad stuff from getting downloaded.
yes having your house ripped apart is very unsettling. we are sorta going thru that now, albeit on a much smaller scale
Get CCleaner too. That gets rid of all the BS you don’t want. I went through that bathroom remodel as well. What a pain in the neck, and I was working graveyard shift at the time. No sleep whatsoever. Hang in there.
Linux :-). You can dual boot if you have to :-).
Home improvement doth indeed sucketh, worse when you don’t feel good to begin with.
Get better soon and your house too!
Running Mint 17 (Quiana) here, boss. They’ve just come out with 17.1 which is even a little slicker. Download the iso image, burn it to a DVD and install as an overwrite or dual boot. It’s got all the codecs and comes complete with Firefox and Libre Office.
Best of all, it’s free!
Jesus Christ! Y’all is concerned about us? Look, we all got tons of shit on our plates navigating through Life 101 while Boehner and pussy McConnell keep piling on Obama helpings so, just rest up and get better.
Take care, bud.
When the house flooded last year during that unusual monsoon we had here in P’cola, we lived out of PODS for 3 months while the house was being put back together. We did most of the ripout and replacement of walls/painting by ourselves because of the price gouging that inevitably accompanies natural disasters and insurance payouts.
Figured we oughta have the tricky carpentry and flooring done by pros, tho, and that meant waiting ’til jobs ahead of us on the tradesmen’s schedules were finished. When the jobs started to finish up, the prices started to come down. Got the entire house tiled for right at $10K.
Definitely sympathize with the dust and accessibility problems. Had white dust EVERYgoddamplace from the sheetrock ripout and replacement. Guys who did the tile set up their saw outside, so that was no problem, but 9 months later I’m STILL diggin out dust from places I’d forgotten while the house was basically empty. (I slept on an old mattress on the concrete floor.)
One suggestion I can offer, since you can afford it — have some reliable A/C guys check out your inside heat exchanger and plenum, as well as the main feed duct. The good companies have cameras they can stick up in the vents to see if a thorough cleaning is warranted before they charge you for actually doing what might be unnecessary.
But you need to have somebody spray your inside coil to get the stuff off it. I got a really soft long-bristled brush and cleaned mine, then sprayed it with coil cleaner. The guys who did my vents say their company doesn’t mess with the A/C or heater units; prefer to leave that to air systems companies with better tools.
http://www.handymanhowto.com/how-to-clean-air-conditioner-evaporator-coils-part-2/
In fact, they didn’t even look at the coil, just the plenum and master feed duct that runs from the fan to the branches. So I hadda do it myself, or pay AirDesign a couple hundred to do it.
Inspection of my ducting system (company’s name is Doodlebuggers) was a hundred bucks up front, which is then knocked off the final price if you go ahead with the full duct-cleaning job (which I did). Total for the job — $795.
A little steep, maybe, for just a 5-hour job, but prob’ly worth it since the house is 30 years old and the ducts have never been cleaned before and we pumped all that dust into the air rehabbing.
Might wanna have ’em blow out your condensate gravity drain if the house is gettin up there in years. I put about a cup of bleach/water 50/50 in mine about every 4 months from April to late November, then check to see if the bleach smell comes out onto the soil after the system runs for an hour or so.
When I got my new furnace, they threw in a whole house air filter which I am sure has prevented a some of the dust. When this job is finally finished I’ll have my cleaning lady do some major league dusting. My house is no where near what you went through last year.
Glad to see your comments Denny, was worried that you might have been having issues with your wound. PC’s, a long way from the IBM 360 stuff we worked on huh. Take care
The big iron! Mainframes rule!
Glad to see you’re back to posting. If we get less free ice cream here ’cause you’re enjoying playing piano more, so be it. A happy Denny probably means more of the good ol’ rants, and those are the vintage GOC we all know and love.
Denny…..
Thanks for your health update , but your computer problems got me to thinking about my Desktop Dinosaur from 2001. I recently had to have it serviced due to virus attacks thanks to downloading of music by one of my Grandsons & since you put the idea in my mind with XP no longer being supported ….This year will be the dawn of a new computer for me as well. I don`t know whether to go with a standard offering or have the local Computer Service group build me one. Any thoughts?
I get my computers through a local company called Vision Computers. Great technical support! They also have a program that takes a snapshot of your system every time you power it up. If you have a problem, you can go to the last backup. This has saved me many times, especially in the last week or two.