I'm a dinosaur to some, perhaps most, of those who will read this. I enlisted in the US Army in 1984, when fighting a nuclear war in Europe seemed likely. The Army, as an institution, was scared. We had good reason to be scared: although we (believed we were) better-trained and better-equipped, the simple fact was that the Warsaw Pact nations' ( Read more... )

So, the homework for this semester will need me to run M$ Access 2007. I have downloaded the homework problem for Chapter 1, and confirmed that Open Office doesn't even know how to open up the file. And Access 2007 requires a later version of Windoze than runs on the M$ partition of my desktop.

For several unrelated reasons, after watching how laureth's ( Read more... )

So, laureth is considering a netbook. Being the household geek, I began looking into them last night. For various reasons, my benchmark for advice will be based on comparing various a netbook's expected performance against how her current tower performs. In trying to get a handle on that, I found a CPU benchmark site that suggests the lower-cost Intel ( Read more... )

I bought Civilization III in, oh, 2002 or 2003, I'm no longer sure which. Between that and a copy of Master of Orion III (that I swapped a hardcover book for), I was set for gaming for a number of years. When technical issues forced me to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, MoO didn't handle the transition well; instead, it will crash, usually ( Read more... )

For most of the week, the phone here hasn't worked. This normally isn't a problem, as most of our calls come from those who (feel they are, and sometimes really are) exempt from the telemarketer Do Not Call law. However, it's a bit annoying to pick up the phone, and have there be static or a dead line instead of a dial tone ( Read more... )

So, Saturday morning, while I was cooking our usual weekend breakfast, laureth put some clothes in the washer. Which proceeded to fill, but then fail to do anything else. The washer itself turns out to be so old that Maytag doesn't admit it was ever made ( Read more... )

So, after attempts to start the furnace consumed New Year's Eve, I attempted to obtain a replacement for the flame probe on New Year's Day. The nearest thing to a useful store I could find open was Home Depot. The older and clueful guy working what passes for a heating department suggested that I try Stadium Hardware. Since they had been my first ( Read more... )

So, remember my fun and games with the furnace? Until tonight, when I needed to clean that flame probe, I'd clean it once, then it would be good for a day or three. Tonight has been different ( Read more... )

So, about 25 hours after the furnace guy got it working on Saturday, we noticed that it wasn't running. I figured I'd take a look for myself ( Read more... )

So, the furnace guy came and left. There were only a few things he did ( Read more... )