Averygoodun's Personal File

I think I am beginning to wake up. Seeing as I've been out of bed for the last five hours, I'm viewing this with a fair share of surprise. I had lost hope for the day.

Of course, this means that I need to start in on my homework now rather than later, but, well, needs must. It's either that or vacuum out the computer, and really, cleaning doesn't need wakefulness. Well, not really, anyway. Not that I now know not to remove the CPU. ahem.

( Television: BSG )

( Obligatory weather update )

( A possible new school for Page )

( Computer woes )

Heh. Totting everything computer-related that I want/need in the next year or two, I'm thinking I'd better go do my homework so I can get a job closer to a year from now rather than 18 months. Modern life is expensive.

Hope you all are well, as are your families.

My finger slipped and I bought a Chromebook (Samsung version) for a song on Amazon. First a cell phone (a smart phone at that!), and now a netbook? I do believe the end of the world might be nigh.

Though mostly it's all just for convenience. Page needs to start learning how to code, and, well, combine that with my increased computer needs over the next twelve months, and I came to the conclusion that more than one computer will be needed in this house. (It also means that I will be able to move to a different room and still be able to do my homework, if necessary. Or send the distractor to a different room with it.)

As for the cell phone... I've conceded that it's rude to not have one nowadays. And, well, I'm not going to be sharing my number widely, so I'll know that if I do get a call (in class, say), it's really quite important.

( School-related kvetching )

Page, meanwhile, is doing remarkable well. Today, as we were driving back from dropping Geoff off at the airport, he said his stomach hurt but that it might just be from the anxiety of not having his dad around. !!! O_o !!! If he keeps this up, he will be a very centered, self-aware person, which would be awesome. (As long as it doesn't result in egoism, that is.)

He's actually been really great lately. I think it's the whole gamut of things we're doing - physically, mentally and emotionally - not just one or two things, but whatever it is, it's working. Hmm. Not being in school is almost certainly one of the elements... :-/

But, I mean, not taking into account when he's super hungry or tired, we can ask him to do something, and he'll do it! This is monumental! I just hope it continues for this entire developmental stage!

But now I've stalled for long enough. Need to go get a midnight snack and head to bed. Too bad the most pleasant part of the day is that which is designated for sleeping...

and not exceedingly happy about it. I need to figure out a way to finish my associate's faster so we can move closer to family sooner.

Ah well. 'Tis simply the regrets of a lovely vacation.

One thing I noticed with having spent a whole two hours on the internet over the past two and a half weeks is that I had a lot more time, energy and patience for everything else that makes up life. So I think that I shall be trying harder to stay away from the internets this year. Including lj. And *expletive* fb. This will be a challenge, seeing as so much of the stuff that makes up life now requires the internet, but, well, we'll see.

Anyway, in regards to that, I am going to admit that I am not even going to try to catch up with your posts. Please let me know what's up with you, tho. I don't not care. ;-)

Happy new year.

This time my hotmail account.

Please trash any emails from me. I haven't personally emailed anyone in the last... oh, I don't know, year? Certainly not from my fandom email accounts.

I guess it's time to do a major sweep of all my accounts. Bleh.

Well... The rage of yesterday has passed, which is good. What's bad is I think the rage was a reaction to my asthma acting up. Of course, if I had taken my waking dream as omen/advice, I might have been able to bypass the massive temper tantrum that resulted in not being able to breathe properly. I woke up as I was on my way home to get my inhaler because I had an asthma attack at a friend's house.

Humph.

( More whining )

And in other news, I miss my computer with my bookmarks and programs. Hopefully the net card will come this week.

Grump: I had to cook yesterday.

Good: I ate my nine cups of fruits and veggies.  Granted, about six of them were kale, but, hey, I got in other good things, too!  Like a good quarter squash (failed squash chips are still pretty yummy) and blueberries.  And lettuce.  Mustn't forget the lettuce.

Grump: Page was "ill". That is, he said he was ill, had a sore throat and doidn't want to go to school. He also napped for long enough yesterday that I allowed him to stay home, sacrificing my painting day.

Good: He felt enough better to go out with Geoff on a much-longer-than-expected errand.

Grump: He came home with a rash all over his torso. He is asleep now (probably due to the dose of benadryl I gave him to rule out allergies for the cause of the rash) so I can't check his throat for strep. *wibbles* (Please don't be scarlet fever!)

Good: The errand, while fruitless on one hand, ultimately turned out to be successful!

Which brings me to the biggest grump: The computer was acting up, as in, the fan was running on high under no stress whatsoever. I decided that the only thing other than a virus (which kept coming up a no) that could possibly be a cause was dust. So, I watched a video on how to clean the CPU fan and turned off the computer. That was at about noon.

Good news - I was right about the dust. Oh. My. Lord, was there dust. It was packed onto the heat sink, fan blades, and then there were the dust jackals just lounging around randomly. So, I did as the video instructed, pushed up my sleeves and got everything clean.

( Cut for the expected, or at least tedious, story of a computer ignoramous at work )

And that is why the good things win.

Oh, that and I made another batch of pumpkin gingerbread.

Okay, the computer is still messed up, but there are two more clues.

One is that the fafsa review page wouldn't open because it said adobe acrobat was open. Acrobat was not open according to the desktop (and task manager, as far as I can guess at this point... though right now task manager is showing a lot of programs running that aren't, like two open office programs (one .bin, one .exe), plugin-container.exe, HPAdvisor.exe and about a dozen others...).

Second clue is that I was watching a youtube video and navigated away in mid stream. The sound continued. Even after I closed that browser tab.

What the hell is going on? What settings could be messed up? Could it be that flash is completely fubar and I need to uninstall and reinstall adobe?

If you have any ideas about what's wrong, please send them my way!

Right. I'm having technical difficulties, and I have no idea what the problem may be.

( Nevermind. It's that stupid noscripts thing. I hate that no scripts thing. So. Much. )

Hours of pod racing and fighter planes shooting and attention mongering have destroyed my good mood. Perhaps because it was beautiful out, and the little bugger refused to go outside with me. Or perhaps because my good knee hurts. Or perhaps because I've had a few good days and now I'm good-mooded out. *shrugs*

However, we now have Windows 7 installed and running, which means I can play with GIMP again. Yay. And I'm only a few hours from finishing the main stage of last week's art project, which hopefully will be successful once I add a bit of subtle interest. Blah.

So far I like 7. It's far less obnoxious than Vista, although one of these days when I'm particularly bored I'll need to play around with it a bit to figure some things out and tweak it to my liking.

Geoff and I are figuring that our next major purchase, assuming nothing breaks in the house, will be a computer. One that doesn't take two to five minutes to think about opening any program, let alone completing a request/order.

We are not gamers (except for crosswords and the like), so we're not looking at high-end stuff. My main requirements are that the computer can run firefox, open office/Word and gimp, preferably all at the same time, though I'm willing to do two out of three. I'd also like a faster internet connection (maybe 100Mbps? Geoff's laptop has that...) and a decent video/graphics card so that I can watch youtube videos as I listen to them and such.

And it has to cost less than $500.

This looks good to me. We don't need a new monitor but for an extra $30, I'm willing to splurge on a flatscreen! (If that deal still exists when we have saved up the money.)


So my question: Do you, oh knowledgeable flist, know good or bad things about this computer, company or its components? I've looked through the reviews, and it seems like the good outweighs the bad, especially as we are NOT gamers (or working on insane mathematical models) and don't need a spiffy spaz of a machine. But if you know of a better computer for about the same price, I am all ears.

Thank you!