tigertoy

With some assistance from Jackie, I ordered a new memory stick for my laptop, and I managed to put it in. I misunderstood the procedure, so the first time I took the cover off I couldn't get the memory in, but at least I didn't break anything, and after Jackie pointed me to a website explaining the procedure, I tried again and got it.

With 8 GB instead of 4, surfing the web is now much less annoying. (I like to leave any web page that I'm at all likely to look at again open, so I frequently have 50+ tabs open. This seems to me perfectly natural, the whole reason browsers have multiple tabs, but the performance is so bad that it's apparent that the average computer user either doesn't do this, or has a lot more RAM than I expect for a low end machine.)

Can anyone recommend a cost-free, ad-free Sudoko game for Windows that doesn't crash all the time? One that meets the first two requirements came as part of the preloaded crap on my computer and has me hooked, but I'm sick of the fact that it crashes so much.

Same symptoms this morning as last night -- I was apparently logged in but no pages other than the login page itself recognized this.  Same behavior from my phone browser, so I don't think my computer is the problem, but I used the default Windows solution -- if it doesn't work and you don't know why, try rebooting.  I rebooted the computer and the phone and connected with my backup (dialup) connection, LJ was fine, so I connected through the phone and everything now seems to be working normally.  I sure hope this is a one-off, but if anyone could actually explain it, that would be helpful.

This is somewhat painful for me to admit, but I've never owned a smartphone and I don't know enough about the market to be able to make good choices.  I'm looking for advice, in the hope of being able to get something that will actually help me with my problems rather than just wasting a lot of money that I don't have to spare.

I am hoping to get something that will let me connect a computer to the Internet at home where I have lousy dialup as my only option.  I am worried about whether that's actually a viable option, but as dialup is working less and less well for me, I am becoming more and more desperate.  So I'd like to learn what I could really get, what I'd have to do to make it work, and how much it actually costs.  (Which I do know enough to understand is more than the big print in the ads wants you to think.)  I need to learn: which company is best to deal with, what phone and plan would work, does it actually work at my house, and what do I have to buy in addition to the phone and the plan to get my ancient Windows XP box to talk through it.  My big problem here is that I want this to be my primary Internet connection, not just an occasional supplement.  I'm really hoping to hear from people who have actually made this work.

If, after learning all the details, the verdict is that it's just not economically useful to use this as an Internet connection, my fallback position is that I'm looking for the cheapest option that allows me to do basic phone things (very few voice calls, but I need the option, a few dozen or a few hundred texts a month) and also lets me surf the web, take pictures, and maybe run an app or two.  Is there a prepaid option for an Android phone?  Has anyone actually used it?

So, yesterday, when I got up, I went over to my computer to dial up to the net, and nuttin' happened.  After breakfast, I got out for a walk, and the utility locator guy was down at the end of Rebmann lane talking to the construction crew.  They'd broken a phone cable but they were hoping it was an old one.  No such luck, I told them.  I got my own trouble ticket in after the walk.

I spent a nice hour on the beach at Sportsman's Lake, and another couple of hours walking around up in that area.

After breakfast today, I got out.  Met the alternate garbage man coming up the lane.  He'd actually gotten my garbage once, a few months ago, but I never got a bill or any other mail acknowledging that I was officially a customer.  He only comes once a month and I wasn't sure which day it was supposed to be.  But he assured me that yes I was on the route, and he did get my garbage today.  I don't produce much trash (since I live alone, I recycle everything I can, and I try to avoid excess packaging), but after at least 3 months, it was definitely time.  Then I got out to the road and the phone company crew were actively working on the splice.  It was interesting to watch the process, so I stood around and chatted with them for probably an hour and a half.  They told me that the reason the cable had been cut was that it had gotten buried in the wet concrete the last time they'd worked on the storm drain there (which was probably over 20 years ago), so that even if the cable had been properly marked (which they claim it wasn't) they couldn't have taken out the old drain without breaking the phone cable.

The tech doing the phone install really knew what he was doing, and I got to watch pretty much the whole process.  Every step of it made perfect sense, but it was still pretty impressive that they have such a smooth process.  This was a 50 pair cable, and they were actually splicing a loop into the main cable so that the construction people could have enough slack that they wouldn't have to build it into the concrete structure again this time.  Two spices means four cable ends; each cable end was punched onto two 25 pair connectors.  The tool he used was a solidly built stand that the connector fit into, and a hydraulic punchdown tool that fit over it.  After slotting each of the 50 wires into the plastic connector (I've done similar work myself, so I know that it's easier than it looks to get it right, but this guy was *fast*, he put 25 pairs in in the time I'd take to painstakingly do about 3), he slotted this tool over the slot in the stand and pumped it about 6 times until it went kachunk.  Just like a hand punch tool, but 25 pairs at once.  Then, with the connectors on both ends of the splice, he wrapped it in sticky plastic, mixed a two component rubber sealant, poured the sealant into the bag made from the plastic, wrapped it in clear tape, and then covered the whole thing with sheets of a self-adhesive black plastic material half a centimeter thick, and sealed the package with a dozen super heavy duty zip ties.  He had another cool little tool that ratcheted down the big zip ties to make them super tight.

So, my phone works and I can connect to the net again.  And I feel pretty confident that the splice job will last until the next backhoe comes along, even if that's several decades from now.

What is the simplest/best way to control the line spacing of HTML lists?  I'm specifically talking about putting a list in an LJ entry, so I don't have a separate style sheet I can reuse and I want something concise.  Specifically, I want to avoid having any extra blank lines before and after the list and between the items.

( example behind cut to spare your friends page )

Also: do best practices include a </li> at the end of each item?  I thought all tags were supposed to have ends, but the examples on the W3C web site don't use </li>. Hah, I answered a part of my own question: if I leave out the </li> it doesn't put a space between the items, but it still puts extra lines at the beginning and end. But I want to know if leaving out the </li>s is going to screw up somebody else's browser. Or if putting them in does.

Yes, I did spend some time trying to look this up myself, but I don't want to spend all day learning HTML.  So please don't point me at a reference web site unless you can point me to a specific page on that web site that answers my question.

So I'm borrowing birder2's laptop, and beggars can't be choosers, so I'm not complaining. But it doesn't have anything installed, so I just downloaded and installed Firefox 3. It was the simplest, least painful install I've ever seen for an important application -- between the broadband connection to download it quickly, and the installer that Just Worked, now I have a web browser. (I tried to do a custom install, and it didn't have anything to ask me.)

I'm such a Luddite when it comes to software that I haven't installed much software lately and I tend to expect it to be a pain.

I didn't have time to write this entry yesterday, precisely because of what this entry is about.

Sometime in the middle of last week, one of the folks at work emailed an announcement to everyone in the building that there was a computer recycling event this Saturday.  Since I have been tripping over a dead 21" CRT monitor in my living room for months and I have a couple of dead printers lying around, this seemed like a good idea.  Unfortunately, nothing in the announcement mentioned that what appeared to be half the population of Champaign would also think it was a good idea and the folks who were going to be accepting the junk would be utterly overwhelmed.

( too much detail about a really long wait )

I'm glad that I am rid of the junk and that it's in the hands of someone who's at least purportedly going to recycle it rather than just landfilling it.  I'm glad that the governments and volunteers who made it happen did it.  I hope they can repeat it on a semi-regular basis.  But I also hope they can find a better system so that hundreds of people don't have to sit in a queue of cars, or at the very least that they can provide some warning.

I wrote a comment in pleonastic's LJ that I should actually make as an entry in my own blog.  I'd like to be able to actually capture all the trains of thought that this has set off in my mind, but to begin with I'll just repeat what I said in that comment.  Hopefully soonish I can expand on some of this.

Upthread from this comment I'd mentioned that there were some things holding me back as an on-line photographer.  I then expanded on that to say:

What's keeping me from posting pictures on a reasonable regular schedule is that it takes me so much time sitting in front of the computer before I can actually post something, and secondarily that it's such a chore.

I need:
(1) a reliable broadband Internet connection;
(2) a software solution to organizing pictures so that I can pull the memory cards from the cameras I used that day, stuff them in the card reader, and not have to use my brain at all to get the files copied
into the file structure *I* want them in;
(3) a software solution to organizing, uploading, and presenting as a web page the edited pictures I want from that day.

(2) and (3) are things I ought to be able to do for myself, but I'm so damn burned out on software and computers that I've made zero progress towards those goals in the more than 3 years I've known I need them.  I have a tremendous aversion to paying commercial software prices, but if there were a package that would just do what I wanted, I'd be willing to pay for it. What I'm not willing to do is to pay huge wads of money for something that I then have to deal with learning to use, hoping that I can actually get it to do what I really want.

Physically unpacked, software installed, printed one photo, looks good.  Printing one photo didn't make the ink levels drop enough to notice on the status monitor.  Scanned the photo again and with its automatic settings the scan was not so hot.  No more tonight, must sleep.