Damn you Google!

Google Chrome OS comming soon

I say damn you with much love for Google. I mean, I use Google for everything at home (my employer has yet to see the light). Gmail, Reader, Maps, Earth, search...I even write most of my blog posts with GoogleDocs (as I am right now). Oh, and my blog is hosted on Blogger; a Google owned site. I even dropped FireFox for Chrome. That was hard, but I'm a full Chrome believer now. I know there are some more Google apps I use, but just can't think of them.

Anyways...Google announced last night that there is a new project in the words. Google Chrome OS. It's first going to be for net-books. But as far as I can tell, they will be going after full desk-top systems too. That means my little ol laptop would be included. And get this ...

    "The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." - Google Blog

That's awesome. Google + Linux = I want it. But this is the suck ass part. I just pre-ordered my copy of Windows 7. I guess the only thing keeping me calm about this is that I know it'll be a while before the Google Chrome OS will be available for a system such as mine. It's nothing fancy, but it's not a net-book.

4th of July - The most original title.

I never know how to start these things. It was a dark and stormy night... This post is really about me wanting to play with Google Maps and see if I get myself to embed the map without much hassle.


View July 4th in a larger map

The start of my day wasn't much to crow about. Oh, speaking of crowing, my wife selected her next two tattoos. Both including crows. Anyway. I got us Subway, putted around at home for while and continued to refine my ID3 tags in iTunes. With 12,038 files, and adding more almost weekly, it's a never ending task.


Later on H started to text back and forth with her brother to arrange what they called: Operation Brother Drop. He can't drive yet, so their father had to drop him from their middle of nowhere camp site. The park your trailer/camper and leave it year round kind, not tent. So it was set. Grab the brother and give him a good fourth of July. He was having no fun with the camping. I've been up there before, bore fest I tell ya.


On the way home H had the great idea to hit Culvers. We go there so little and it's a shame. We love the place, and we live really close, and we drive by it at least once a week. We eat there and I completely stuff myself. I'm even told by H and a complete stranger to have the root beer. Weird. We head home where we wait for the sky to darken. Our cue to head out to see the fireworks.


Now the fun begins. We make our way to Target to use their parking lot. I know that you can't park there unless you're shopping. But what are they going to do with every car in the area parking in their lot. Nothing, that's a what. We make our way to the soccer fields that Blaine uses for the big ass soccer tournaments every year. Right as we get situated, H start to not feel good. 30 minutes until the show starts. I race my way back to Target to get a bottle of water so she can take her medicine.


From our location I could see two other firework shows. The real fireworks (the show I went there for) was pretty cool. Sort of lackluster finale though. Overheard some fella say it's because of the recession. Not sure if I buy that, but I don't have a better answer.


Now here comes the grand exit. A couple thousand cars all trying to use the same three two-lane streets to get to the highway. And it's barely a highway. 4 lanes, but stoplights every 1/4 mile. Local Minnesotans of the north metro know my pain of highway 65. It took us about 35 minutes to travel 1.3 miles. Not cool. For most of the trip I had my eyes glued to the gas gauge. It was on E when I got to the lot to begin the night. And I knew all this time idling in traffic would be an adventure in its self. I should have turned towards the highway the first chance I had, but no. It was just a tiny bit backed up so I decided to keep going straight; thinking it would get better the further away from the event I was. Booooo me. That would have saved me big time I think. I heard plenty of booming cars with rap, 80's and country music. Somebody trying to direct traffic from their own idling car. Another person throwing out those tiny snap firecrackers out of their car window. We got hit with a sprinkler thru our open windows. We first thought it was some ass hitting us with a super soaker or something. I round the corner and can finally see the intersection. Yes! We’re going to make it. Just as we cross the low fuel light turns on. Even though we were 10 feet from the gas station, that light still panicked me for a second.


We make it home fine and vow that we are not doing this again next year. I suggest we just take bikes. Or we could just walk. It’s not that far away. I’m quickly shot down. So, I had a good fourth. I’ve missed out on the last few for just this reason. The hassle of coming and going to such an event.


Holy crap. Would you look at that? I didn’t expect to be so long winded. But it is what it is right? If you don’t like it, copy and paste it into notepad and edit away. Delete all together if you want. Whatever. And after proofing it, I realize it's a shit written tale too.

Stupid new computer issue.

This is just copied and pasted from one of the four boards I posted this issue to. Sorry if it reads funny.

I bought a new HP desktop about two weeks back. It came with a 640g hard drive but I needed my 500g from the old computer as well. Both are Western Digital SATA 3G 7200 rpm drives. The computer seems to run fine, until I start using the 500 drive. It will work fine for about 30 minutes, then everything will either come to a crawl, or just freeze. The only thing I have found to cure the freeze is to close explorer, and start it up again. After I do that, the drive (and most other things) is pretty much useless until I restart the computer. I’ve even tried to move everything from the 500 to the 640 while I try and trouble shoot, but even that is impossible.
And just a though, the 600 (the Windows installed drive) drive is plugged into SATA1 on the MB, DVD drive on SATA2, and 500 on SATA3. Any chance that makes a difference?

CPU: 2.2GHz AMD Phenom™ X4
RAM: 6GB PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM
Graphic: NVIDIA GeForce 9100
HDD: Western Digital 640GB SATA 3G 7200 rpm
HDD: Western Digital 500GB SATA 3G 7200 rpm
MB: Pegatron M2N78-LA
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit

It a bagman, in trees.

I was bored, so this is what happened.

Computers and Money - An update to some posts...and some new stuf

New stuff --

 

After month’s and month’s of talking about it, it’s finally done. The HMorgen shop (NSFW by the way) is up and running. I guess it’s more of a place to buy some of her prints. A shop seems more like a place with many different items. That may come in the future, but we’re going to see just how well the prints sell first. This is a blatant, not-so-subtle hint to go buy something from her. The main delay was I had no idea how to set up an online store. Then I got wind of this magic payment processing site called PayPal. They made it too easy. After setting up my account and figuring out the little quirks, I was able to make an add to cart button, add the code to my page, congratulate myself, done. I think that’s a weird sounds and structured sentence. I don’t care, I keeping it. So, go check it out if you’re into creatively done nudes, horror, or just good old erotic photo’s. Plus, she a female photographer, so you know it’s not all gross and creepy.

 

Updates --

 

After the computer meltdown about a month ago, H broke down and let me get her a new computer. She was a bit apprehensive at first, because she didn’t feel she needed one. But I couldn’t stand watching her try and edit, and falling asleep at the desk while she waited for Photoshop to catch up. She also couldn’t play her new The Sims 3 game because our system was not up to speed. Plus, something went wonky when I tried to repair the computer after the crash. As I mentioned, none of the Microsoft items installed. But other little things, like you couldn’t drag n’ drop items anymore. So now we got a beast of a system, compared to our old 6+ year machine. A nice quote from yesterday “Whoa, it deleted them all already?” I was happy at that statement. I was afraid that she would start using the new computer and not notice a difference.

 

Did I tell you we got our $800 back? We haven’t heard anything from the police about it. I guess I could have H contact them, but I don’t see that happening. The bank says that after 90 days they don’t find that it was fraud, they’ll take the money back. I don’t see that happening though. This couldn’t have been any clearer case of fraud in our eyes.

 

Afterthoughts -- 

 

And thanks to @sandentotten for mentioning my blog to me in a tweet. It was just enough of a push to get me back to writing it. I sort have forgotten about it. Mostly because I don’t even find most of what I have to say interesting, so it’s hard to put it our there for others.

 

And here’s something else weird. I hate Blogger.com’s WYSIWYG editor so much that I’m writing this entry, as I do most, in an email at work, to be sent to myself, to be redrafted in GoogleDocs and posted from there later this evening. It’s 2:50p CT right now. Let’s see when I really post this. 6:35p.

A man, a pizza and a bus on the news.

I was coming up from the first floor of my apartment building with some finished laundry and I noticed a guy sitting on the outside steps. He was just sitting there with a pizza box (and I assume a pizza inside) and a 20oz of Hawaiian Punch. Once I made it up to my place I could see him from my window and he was just sitting there, eating away. Then I noticed a bike (a bike, not motorcycle) parked on the street, just like you would a car or whatever. I had nothing better to do so I just watched. Pizza man finishes up, hops on the bike and takes off. Now, I’ve never seen this guy before so my deduction is that he was hungry, needed an address and chose the first building he saw. I guess pizza joints don't deliver if your address is the bike parked on Main St. Weird stuff.


Also, I may have made it on the local morning news. The WCCO morning news is set up much like NBC’s Today show, where there newscasters sit in front of a window and you can see the city happening behind them. There is a ton (yes, 2,000 pounds worth) of road construction going on in Minneapolis so my bus had to detour. It just happen to do it on the street that passes by the news window. My luck they were on a commercial break.

I want my money man!

If you haven't gathered from my Twitter posts, or you just don't follow me, let me explain a bit more in detail for you here in 2,298 characters. Some fuck face stole our money. Over $800 worth.

H just finished shooting a local punk band and was leaving the parking ramp. She was paying with her bank card but the diy machine wasn't working. The shifty clerk said that he could do it for her. She gave her card to fuck face and he ran it through. H and her passenger both noticed he was a bit shocked when she asked for her receipt. He gave it to them and they were on their way.

About 5 o’clock that evening, she got a call from Visa, telling her that there has been some suspicious activity on her card and would like to go over the pas transactions with her. Most of them, we not hers.

Fuck face (or his fuck associates) did this:
Shoe store $350+
Gas station $100.00
Another gas station $100.00
Back to the shoe store $250+

Fuck face (or his fuck associates) also went to McDonalds and a grocery store, but by that time the card had been shut down. And we can only assume that the $100.00 from the gas stations are phone cards, something of that sort. Or the fucker drives a Hummer.

So what I thought was going to be a nice lazy, video game Sunday, quickly changed to a fix this problem Sunday. We went to the bank, and told them about the situation. They were quite helpful and really knew what they were doing. That unfortunately means this happens all to often to other folks. They closed our account, and opened up a new one for us. Their fraud investigations team is also looking into this so they can return that $800+ back to us. In the meantime, my mother gave us $300 to repay some bills that were scheduled to be paid online on Monday. So far, every other company that we had to deal with has been pretty willing to help. Waving late fees and stuff like that.

Yesterday H filed a police report. Police person said that because she filed, the bank almost has to waive all fees, and pay us back the missing $800+. At least, that's what I hope I heard. If the police can find this guy, she is most defiantly going to press charges. She's going to get all Michael Douglas on this fuck face.

Today is better. Our new account seems to be fully active now, so bills can start getting paid again.