(no subject)

[stormdog]

I am impressed by Kinesis' tech support. I emailed them on Monday to explain the problem with my keyboard and got an email back yesterday. The tech offered me an RMA number, but he also said that it sounded to him like the left hand keywell had come slightly out of its mount and said that, if I was comfortable opening up the keyboard, I could probably reseat the connector. He even included a Word document with a nicely written set of instructions for doing so. I followed them, got a feel for how the things are put together (they're really pretty neat!) and found, after putting it back together, that it worked perfectly. I love a company that will tell you what's likely wrong and exactly how to fix it yourself; if you're looking for a good ergonomic keyboard (unlike those Microsoft things that I can't stand), I definitely recommend them.

Speaking of ergonomic keyboards, I have a GoldTouch that I'm going to sell if anyone is interested. If you have any wrist pain while typing, you owe it to yourself to look into a solution for it. When I was working at Ford and typing eight hours a day on a normal keyboard, I occasionally got to the point where I couldn't hold a glass of water after getting home in the evening because of wrist pain. Don't let that happen to you; wrists are too important.

I feel so organized today! I have an extension installed in Thunderbird that lets me export my filtering rules to a file and then reimport them in another instance of the client. With that little trick, I can read mail on both my laptop and desktop (and my tablet if I rebuild it) without worrying about having to manually synchronize filtering rules. Now if I could just figure out how to automate the process, I'd be doing even better.


As I noted before, I have Trillian on my laptop now and this morning I even put it on my desktop. I chatted with a few people last night and that was nice, even though the occasional distraction is frustrating. Hopefully I can stay in touch with people better that way and stay more connected. I don't have to worry about synchronization of IM contact lists too much; the messaging services, for the most part, hold onto a listing of your contacts on the server side of things and repopulate them when you log in. The completist in me used to be annoyed that there was no way to synchronize chat logs, but that's the same part of me that used to refuse to throw any email in the trash and would archive it all instead. These days, unless it's either something personal and important, something I know I'll need again, or something from Andrea, I just toss it. Ok, I archive my LJ comments too. I think my next step in email client synchronization is to figure out where Thunderbird stores it's offline folder set, put it on a mapped network drive, and start storing offline mail on my file server. That way I'll have access to them on all my computers, and if for some reason I need to access them while remote and I can't get to them by VPN, I can just copy them over to my portable before I leave on whatever trip I'm going on.

I got up at ten after six this morning and dragged all my garbage out to the curb. I have often been remiss in getting that done in the past, but with the house and yard mostly clean, I want to keep up on that too. Tonight I'm going to catch up a little more and get remnants of our weekend get together cleaned up. My parents and akreaveter assisted in cleaning up the leftover food when they were over on Monday, and I'm going to polish off the last of the pulled pork today (wow was that stuff good!).

Andrea and I both have Friday off; her because her whole company does, me because I wanted to hang out with my mate. She's planning to sleep in, but I may get up early, put the old motor oil in the garage into a covered pan I bought, and take it to the dump. Then, I might even change the oil on my truck since it's about due. Depends on how warm the weather is I suppose; that's really the primary factor in whether I do it myself and save twenty bucks or take it to a mechanic where I can sit in climate controlled comfort and watch someone else do it.

And on Thursday, since we don't have to be up early, we're going to go out to the Milwaukee furry coffee meetup! That should be fun; I liked the group of people last time. It's just tough for us to get up that way when we need to get up so early on Friday.

And this weekend, I have Man Day to attend, and possibly an arcade auction to go to with posicat and CJ. Despite the fact that my uncle has upwards of twenty stand up arcade games in his basement and goes to those things all the time, I've never been to one so I'm excited about that too. Then, of course, we have Easter Sunday with my mom's extended family. I have to bring my grappling hook and sledgehammer to show my grandfather, and I have to get a computer built for him too. I'll probably work on that a bit tonight too. I figure I'll give him one of the PIV Dells I have lying around and stick XP on it for him to play with. He's into video editing and has a lot of experience with Macs, but he's never used an IBM compatible before. Basically the opposite of me.

Yesterday, the three of us (Moira and Posi and I) checked out the car lot that Posi recommended. Unfortunately, we missed the owner and there weren't as many cars there as usual. The only one that looked promising from the outside had an overwhelming scent on the inside that I can't quite describe except to note that it gave Andrea a headache within five seconds; that one may be out. Instead, we all got Chinese buffet (yummy!) and Andrea is going to contact a few people with cars on Craigslist today. One that looks particularly promising is an '89 Volvo with only 130 thousand miles or so. It needs a new catalytic converter, but that's a ninety dollar part that I can probably put in myself.

Well, I'm nearly to work so I'll sign off. More to come on last weekend still!