Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

At random

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  • We had Easter dinner with Dan’s sister Linda and her husband Casey, our nephew Travis, and 2,983,958 Border Collies and two Pit Bulls. Okay, there were only four Border Collies, but they keep moving so it’s hard to count them.
  • I didn’t think there was any possible way that it could take longer to drive from Rockford to Norwood Park than from Madison, WI to Norwood Park, but tonight it did.
  • Apparently I never set up this iBook to print to our current HP PhotoSmart printer. It was easy enough but it took quite a while to install all those files, a sure sign of bloated printer driver.
  • I tried to tell Freya and Axe that they chased away the Easter Bunny, but they apparently knew that the bunnies they chased out of the yard were just regular rabbits. They were not carrying baskets, so it was obvious!

(NaBloPoMo | April ’10: 4 of 30)

Un-doggy Saturday

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Saturday is usually all about Freya, with either a class or a competition to attend. Today, I considered taking her to a fun match or a rally obedience drop-in class, both held at locations we will be trialing at in May. But today was my best chance to catch up on a number of different non-doggy errands that have been put off for too long.

I closed the last of my accounts at a bank I have been with since my first job downtown. I’m not a very sentimental person in general, and I’m thinking it would be really hard for even a gushy emotional type to be sentimental about a bank these days. I’m mostly just angry and annoyed that changes they’ve made over the years, particularly in the last two years, have finally gotten to the point where I felt forced to seek a bank that is more friendly to the very small investor.

I dropped off my pretty red VAIO laptop at the Sony Style store for a warranty fan replacement. It will take about a week from the time the laptop actually gets to the service department on Monday or Tuesday. Since I also have an iBook G4, I don’t have to go laptopless. But computer years are like dog years, so this five-year-old laptop is showing its age. You see where it is a G4 and thus still a PowerPC, so I can’t run the latest and greatest versions of a growing number of applications. It’s old enough that a built-in webcam still wasn’t standard (although the SuperDrive was, thankfully).

I shouldn’t complain, I know. It’s like whining about a rather unexciting meal when there are people starving in other parts of the world or for that matter, in other parts of this city. My most-needed documents are cross-platform and saved to my giant-ass 1.5TB network drive. I have Mac versions of my most-needed applications (some provided by and for work, and others purchased by me… yes, being cross-platform comes at a price). So I’m not exactly suffering.

I know today is iPad release day, and since the Sony Style store is in the same mall as an Apple Store, I suppose I should have gone to check it out. I did walk by, and it was very crowded. Apple fanbois and fangirlz make me want to kill on a good day, and this probably would not have been a good day. So I kept walking.

Really, I just can’t get that excited over the iPad. Yeah, it’s cool, but it just doesn’t seem like something I need. But if a nice new 15″ or 17″ MacBook Pro fell out of the sky to replace my trusty iBook… now that would be exciting!

(NaBloPoMo | April ’10: 3 of 30)

Search terms again!

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Every so often, I like to look at the list of searches that have lured people to this blog. Some of them make sense, and others make no sense at all.

li hing mui margarita: This one surprises me only because most people spell it correctly. Or maybe that shouldn’t surprise me, because you probably wouldn’t search for it unless you’d had one and knew how tasty they are. I had one search that included “Chicago” in the string. I know I posted that I hadn’t found one here in Chicago yet, but you know something… that reminds me that I’ve been meaning to check one place that should have it… Roy’s Restaurant. And… it is in fact listed on the Chicago menu! I’ll have to call to confirm, and if available, this might require a downtown trip, as much as I usually tend to avoid the downtown area aside from work.

why does my rottweiler sit crooked: If I knew the answer to that one, we would not lose points in competition for crooked sits, now, would we?

rottweiler fonts: My professional background includes a lot of years as a typographer, but this still made no sense to me. I asked Freya and Axe what “their” fonts are, and they just looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Their kennel and advertising fonts are the Fontdinerdotcom family from Font Diner and the Futura family designed by Paul Renner (we use the Adobe Type 1 version). Oh! The original inquiry does make sense once you see this: If Fonts Were Dogs. No Rottweiler, though!

(NaBloPoMo | April ’10: 2 of 30)

Nothing BIG yet

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No April Fool here either, as I’m not creative enough today to think of a good Photoshoppable scam to try and mislead you all!

I don’t think I want to write about anything BIG today, even though that is the theme for April’s NaBloPoMo. I’ll wait until tomorrow, when no one would have even a small suspicion that it might be a joke or a scam.

I’ll just update you all on the mysterious fluid leak from the van. It was in fact refrigerant from the air conditioner, and it was also a no-charge warranty repair, and that’s no joke. It took only about an hour, so I was able to wait for it before work. We ended up breaking a record high temperature for this date with a high of 83° F, so I was glad they could get to it right away!

(NaBloPoMo | April ’10: 1 of 30)

Small mystery possibly solved

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A couple of weeks ago, there was apparently a leak of some kind from my van. There was an oily spot near the passenger front tire in the garage. It was due for an oil change anyway, so I took it in and mentioned the location of the leak and that I didn’t think it was an oil leak. They checked a number of likely suspects, but didn’t find anything. It wasn’t oil, brake fluid, tranmission fluid, or engine coolant.

I think I now know what it is. The one thing they probably did not check, since spring had not yet sprung at that time and temperatures were in the 40s, was the air conditioning. Today, spring sprang with a vengeance and temperatures rose well into the 70s. The interior of the van was pretty hot at the end of the work day. I turned on the air conditioning for the first time this year and I got… nothing.

Mystery possibly solved, though!

And now, March 2010 NaBloPoMo is done.

(NaBloPoMo | March ’10: 31 of 31 and done)