Another Opinion Among Many

I can’t decide which. I must applaud you for sitting through the game in that frigid weather. Its here, now! I was wondering when we were going to have real cold again. I guess that was today. This is the first time that our car had trouble cranking over. This morning, I went out about 6 times just to get it circulating enough to spark itself up. I managed to get it going (under much protest), even without being plugged in. Thank you to the jerk who stole my 30 foot exterior cord, by the way. I hope that it cracked and left you to freeze somewhere!

But, seriously, folks! With the wind chill, its -29°C outside right now (-20°C without - but its a little windy). I know that you sat through that kind of cold for hours! You’re dedicated. Naw, you’re nuts!

It’ll be nice to see the nice balmy temperatures that Toronto has, like -6°C!

Who am I kidding? The weather forecast is for 15-30cm of snow and high winds, causing “white out” conditions. Nice. Perhaps the departure may be delayed for a day. We’ll see in the morning…

It’s morning and we’re still here…click the images for a larger version.

So, it looks like its departure Jan 3rd! So, now I have a day off and time to get to the tire shop before they close! That is, unless he’s closed up due to weather…

Before I started working in my present job, I’ve not seen such a thing.  So, when I see it now, I wonder whether I’ve just been dim or whether its just strange behavior after all.  Our building used to have a bowling alley in it.  In the area which I believe to have been a staff area, there are two individual washrooms.  There  are public washrooms in the building as well.  These individual washrooms are side by side and clearly labeled “Women” and “Men”.  I’ve noticed on about six occasions that a woman will go straight into the “Men’s”, even if there is no one in the “Women’s”.  I’ve never seen a man do the same thing.  As a man, I would never dream of using the women’s washroom, as its been set aside for women.  I’d go elsewhere if I had to and I don’t know of a man who wouldn’t do the same, out of respect.

I’m not trying to start something big here, but I’d really like to know if this kind of thing is common.  Ladies, would you do the same as those I’ve experienced? Guys, have you seen this? Would you waltz into the “Ladies” if you had to go? Or would you hold on until you found a “Men’s” somewhere?

I bought a prepaid long distance phone card on Friday, October 5, 2007.  You’ll notice that today is October 31 of the same year.  The card came from a company called Smartel.  I usually buy this type of card when I travel, as I don’t have a cell phone and its the cheapest way to make calls from a payphone, usually.  Normally, I had gotten a $10 card from my local gas station, which would usually net me 15-20 reasonably long calls.

This $5 card got me one 3 minute call! Why? I called the toll free number on the back of the card when the system advised me that my account had no money (and told me to call customer service).  It turns out that my “account” had $4.10 in maintenance fees.  I found out that a domestic call costs me $0.39 if I use the toll free access number (which I did since there was no local access number) and $0.30 per day after the first call was placed, which was explained by the call center rep that it covered the cost of running the call center!  The card did not come with this rate related information attached to it, so I advise that if there’s no fine print, then they’re hiding something!

So, now I have to try and make my call from home, during business hours.   If I’d have only plugged quarters into the payphone…

Here I go reinstalling Windows XP on my other computer for the second time in as many months. I don’t think that this “upgrade” is going to work, but I have to try to get it to pull out of super slug mode and accept the drivers for my printer that had been working fine up until last week. What a pain!

And, its not like an install of Mepis or Linspire, where you have about a 10-15 minute install and your hard drive’s full of goodies. My well-known components will require drivers installed to work properly because the support won’t be there “out of the box”. Oh well. At least its not ‘98 or BeOS.

Update

I’ve not been successful in doing an “upgrade” so a chkdsk and a few corrupted file later, I think that I might have something that’s workable. We’ll see. At least I got the printer/scanner working. That’s a start.

Update

Rebooting causes changes to the video driver to be lost.  Since there’s no easy configuration file to edit, it sure looks like a reinstall of the OS.  Lovely.

Crawl away, ye search engines! coreythompson.com is back! It takes more than a shitty host with slow service to keep you down.

If anybody still has this site in your feed reader, or if you visit daily to see if I’m around, then here I am. Sorry for not being around for the past few days. I really wasn’t my choice. Really.

I’ve got some things to work on and restore but its coming along alright. Expect the site to be back where it was (but not where it was, likely) by the end of the week. Until then, if there are missing features, I apologize, as I thought that my paid host’s back ups were a normal archive file, but they won’t open for me. This database doesn’t have the most recent entries, either, but perhaps I’ll go to Google’s cache and copy/paste the content. I’ll splog my own blog!

Anyhow, I’ve got more to do before this is over.

So the deal is that I have this in-wall Venmar apartment ventilator. I plug it in and turn it on and it draws electricity, all while making a small whoosh sound. I have not figured out whether it does anything useful or not, so I’ve been keeping it unplugged. But, its damn hot and humid and yucky in here and I’d like to know if this thing will help move the air.

Does anyone have one of these and do you know how to use the controls? I’m sorry that I cannot be more specific, but there is nothing on the front, back, side, top, bottom, or inside, that indicates what model it is and I cannot find anything like it on the internet.

The best that I can do is a picture or two:

Click on the images to make them bigger.  Sorry about the night webcam shot.