Hello world!
August 11th, 2010
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Italy photos
May 8th, 2008
They’re finally up! Italy photos. I also have uploaded a zip file of all my photos; send me an email if you’re interested in the file.
Up and running
May 5th, 2008
Well, I’m back up and running. I’ve been having some computer issues recently, but I think I’ve got everything fixed. First, my photo gallery stopped working. I’m not really sure what happened, but I took the opportunity to update the software. After some serious fiddling I was able to get it installed. It looks like all my previous albums, photos, and customizations made the transition too.
A bigger issue, and one that I’ve been working on even longer, is my laptop. My laptop suffered an exposure to critical amounts of moisture… that’s right, I spilled water on my computer. The entire keyboard was soaked, and water dripped throughout the chassis. I quickly unplugged everything (the computer shut down immediately) and completely disassembled the computer. I mean I took out everything– I unscrewed the battery, hard drive, all sorts of compartments, I even popped off most of the keys on the keyboard. I dried it out as much as I could, and left it apart overnight. The next day I put everything back together, crossed my fingers, and turned it on. It powers up (yay!) and says “primary hard disk 0 not found.” Sweet. No hard drive, no operating system, nothing. In putting the computer back together I managed to loose the “return” key and break the “c” key connection mechanism. So I have two keys that are nothing but small plastic nubs, and my computer has no hard drive. Tina has an old laptop that stopped working, so I tried to salvage the hard drive out of that to see if it would work in my laptop. No go. So either her hard drive was also broken (I don’t remember how her laptop stopped working) or the actual hard drive connection or controller on my laptop was fried.
Luckily I had a copy of the Knoppix Live CD, and throwing that in my CD drive got my computer up and running. So the only thing that was really broken was the hard drive. And the “f” key. And sometimes “d” and “c”. But I could get online, check email, etc. But I couldn’t access our external drive with all our back ups, nor could I save anything– the operating system was just running off the CD. I had resigned myself to the fact that my computer was gone, that it was nothing more than a very heavy, old, internet terminal. Then two days ago, on a whim, I tried plugging in the external drive again– I really wanted to get my pictures from Italy onto my site. And the computer starts thinking. The drive starts whirring. And when I open up my file browser I see the external drive! Success! So I look closer, and what do I see? That’s right, my laptop’s original hard drive. I couldn’t believe it. So I quickly reboot my computer, and whaddya know, the hard drive is found and I’m able to boot back into my operating system.
I have no idea why it starting working all of sudden, but there you go. To make a long story longer, I went about trying to upload the rest of my Italy pictures but I kept running into problems. I had all sort of access and permissions problems, and none of my troubleshooting was getting me anywhere. Ubuntu, the operating system that I use, just announced an upgrade, so I thought, why not just re-install the OS? Now that’s a pretty aggressive troubleshooting fix, but I figured what the hey. I downloaded and burned the CD, popped it in, and set about reinstalling. I spent about 20 minutes staring at the “are you sure?” screen– I was terrified that this might re-break my hard drive. But, success!
So I’m now up and running Ubuntu 8.04. The only hitch was that my screen resolution was not correctly recognized, and I just wanted to post my solution in case anyone else has a 6 year old Dell Inspiron 4000 that they’re trying to hang on to. All the forums and how-to’s told me the problem was in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, but none of the fixes worked, until I stumbled upon luisito’s comment on this Ubuntu forum thread. I ended up copying the entries for device, monitor, and screen. When I restarted, everything worked like a charm.
Happy New Year!
January 11th, 2008
Welcome to 2008! Looking back over the past couple of posts, I don’t think I ever mentioned that I got promoted to the M Street Starbucks. The week before Thanksgiving, my new district manager approached me about the possibility of moving to a higher volume store; four days later I was in charge of the original M Street store, at the intersection of M and Wisconsin. It was a huge opportunity, and it’s been a lot of fun, and a lot of work too.
Anyhoo, Tina was home for Christmas, which was very nice. Although we didn’t have a tree this year, we did go to midnight mass and had a lot of great food. We tried to photograph most of it (the food that is, not the mass-going), although at a distance all food looks the same 
Check the side-bar for phone-photo updates. (By the way, I think the preceeding sentence has more hyphens-per-word than any other on this site)
Day off
December 11th, 2007
I had today off from work. Now normally, I don’t get much done on my days off– they are a chance to relax, watch some tv, and just hang out. Especially when I’m home alone. Today, however, was a different story. So far today I have: gone grocery shopping. done the dishes. cleaned the kitchen. done two loads of laundry. roasted a chicken (with rosmary, sage, thyme, onion, lemon, butter… delicious!). made mashed potatos. made gravy. baked peanut butter chocolate chip brownies– all from scratch! And I have yet to turn on the tv. Yep, it’s been a pretty good day.
It’s snowing!
December 5th, 2007
Posted by mobile phone:
I woke up today to see a light frost covering the ground. By the time I was leaving for work it was snowing! I decided to walk to work so I wouldn\’t have to worry about driving home, and now I have mixed feelings about that decision- it ended up snowing all day leaving two inches on the ground. I\’m glad I don\’t have to drive in this, but that means I have to walk in it. Looks like the snow might have stopped, so I\’m about to brave the walk home!
Simple apparently, the…
December 2nd, 2007
Simple apparently, the voice recognition is not the greatest above its so pretty cool. listen
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I am so easily amused…
December 2nd, 2007
I am so easily amused I can do this off-line. listen
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Hey Leslie, this is…
December 2nd, 2007
Hey Leslie, this is pretty cool. I just call John Lynn, leave a voice message and it turns in to a blog post. listen
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Just testing a new way…
December 2nd, 2007
Just testing a new way to post to my blog, voice testing through Jott. listen
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