havocandmayhem.com

Again with the hating on me. I wish I knew what ever it was I did to technology…probably back in the 70s sometime. I suppose I did reject the 8 track cassette player in favor of albums. But I was 9! That was 34 years ago! And 8 tracks totally did not last! I’ve owned every other musical format since! I have a smart phone! I have a Kindle! I had an iPod when they came out! I’m typing this on a laptop, with a second flat screen monitor! I used to work in IT! I love databases & spreadsheets & computer games! I own a Nintendo DS! And a Wii! I really wish technology would forgive me my lapse in judgment & like me again. The latest hating is from the aforementioned smart phone. It decided it’s internal memory was full & no matter how much stuff I deleted off of it (3GBs!) it continued to claim the memory was full. Sometimes it would play Everything I Do (I do it for you) by Brian Adams on an endless loop in the music player even that song was not include...

Well, they did it. They defied all the omens & portents . All the clear, clear signs of Divine displeasure. They took my tower Thursday. (hangs head in grief) They came in a white van, early in the morning, before I’d had enough coffee to mount a coherent protest to their actions. The tower didn’t stand a chance Can I get a moment of silence? *silence* Ok, so, I deal with negative situations by finding the funny. Know what is funny about a tower being replaced by a pole? That’s right! Jokes & innuendos about poles and guys trying to erect their poles! Towers just don’t lend themselves to innuendo quite like poles do. I disparaged the pole the man was trying to get up, finding it inadequate to the task. I need a big long pole, not the piddly short little thing he was showing me. He extoled the benefits and perks of his shorter pole to distract me from the loss of my Big Man, but I wasn’t buying it. I need length to satisfy my needs! A...

I cannot remember the last time I did a post about search queries. Probably the last time I bothered to look at my analytics & since I only seem to do that in months with a F in them, it’s been almost a year at least. This blogging class I am taking has you look at your analytics rather more often than I am accustomed to doing. My queries are not really all that interesting, which might be why I rarely do these sort of posts. If I had queries like “Sewing head of llama to lampshade” or “samba pickles chainsaw” like I ran across for others, I would do this much more often. 52% of all queries are for just havoc 18% are for stacey havoc Most of the rest are from perverts, with sex naked nude being added to various spellings and combinations of stacey havoc and mayhem . Those queries all show 00:00:00 time spent on the site, so I’m hoping they knew I wasn’t what they were looking for & didn’t visit. But there were a few interesting non-perverted query strings "w...

I wouldn’t say God Him/Herself wants me to keep my towering blight on the landscape, but… Thursday's removal was thwarted by snow – an act of God And Monday’s removal was thwarted by 40MPH wind gusts – also an act of God What I will say is - circumstances certainly do seem to point toward a certain Divine interest in the topic. Another attempt will be made next week. I wonder if it will rain? Also, I got a package all the way from England yesterday! More on that tomorrow. The winds keep blowing & the power will no doubt go out any time now. The Divine might be inclined to let me keep the tower, or They might just want the pleasure of taking it down Themselves.

*sigh* My ISP called me yesterday and said they would be downgrading my blight on the landscape. You remember the blight that brings me my internet signal, right? A 75ft mini tower that, in Sept 2009, replaced this 50ft mono pole eyesore. because the mono pole had a tendency to do this and this in high winds or after heavy rains, before it finally did this and resulted in the mini tower It was  a regular feature throughout 2009. The ISP says the mini tower ‘can be better utilized elsewhere’ Nice. So obviously someone else is now more important to them than I am. Apparently enough time has passed they have forgotten just how annoying I can make myself when my internet signal has problems. I’m like a crack addict desperate for a fix. I will CUT YOU if you don’t fix my signal! I know where you are! I have nothing better to do than call you eleventy billion times a day. Of course if my signal was working I’d have LOADS of other things to do. But sinc...

I’ve mentioned before how frustrating I find ‘helpful’ technology. Cordless phones for instance. They are helpful because now you can have a phone ANYWHERE. The problem is that now you have phones that could be ANYWHERE & you can’t actually find them when they start ringing because whoever used them last set them down where ever they happened to be when they were done talking. And an amazing number of people in my house seem to be in linen closets when this occurs. Or under small tables with 2” of clearance. Then there is my wireless router. It helpfully scans the airways for a good transmission band to send my signal. Only half the time the phone likes that band too so when you actually find a phone & answer it, the internet cuts out. Getting a phone that can be told to leave that band alone would solve that problem, but not the problem of locating it in the first place. Plugging the router directly into my computer would also solve the internet problem, at lea...

I really wish it would stop doing that. It’s the phone this time. Actually it has been the phone for almost two years now but it comes in waves. Sometimes all those wonderful ‘features’ are the problem. When I grew up (oh here she goes…) in the 70’s, a phone was physically attached to the wall. Possibly if there was a second phone in the house it was ‘portable’ in the sense that you could carry it into another room and plug it into a phone jack there (assuming there was a phone jack there and probably there was not) and then use it, but you were still tethered in place by a cord. Maybe, if you parents really loved you, you might have had a princess phone in your room, which was sleeker and lighter & usually had a longer cord so you could roll around on your canopy bed and hang upside down off the side while talking to your best friend about what this guy said to this girl about this other girl (we didn’t have BFFs back in the day. We had to use whole words). If they reall...

My husband reminded me that it has been almost 20 years since we bought our first computer. It was a Maxar 286 with 1MB of system memory, 1MB video memory and a processor speed of 12.5MHz. It had a tiny hard drive and was a DOS based interface.(photo taken in our apartment in 1991, please note the joystick and all the MtDew, needed to stay awake to play games all night) We wouldn’t get Windows 3.1 until we upgraded to a 386 in 1993 or so. It used these sort of floppies which do not have enough space on them to store this photo of them (photos taken in our junk closet in April 2009, can you say ‘pack rats’?). and these sorts of floppies, which might be able to hold this photo of them We had a dial up connection at a whopping 2400kbps and mostly used local BBS sites, but there was this new thing called Prodigy that connected you with the whole country, but only with others on Prodigy. Our phone line was tied up for hours while I posted to forums and s...

It’s an ASUS 17” gamer laptop. 6GB RAM, 1GB dedicated graphics memory, 500GB hard drive,HD screen,etc etc. Very nice, very fast, very slick screen. Kinda bright actually. Combined with my beloved 22” flat screen it is almost too tall for me use. And I am not used to having a number pad anymore. Losing it 4 years ago when I switched to a laptop from a desktop was very hard. It took months for me to stop reaching for it.  It will take just as long for me to get used to the delete key not being all the way at the end anymore. I had everything reinstalled by Sunday at noon. Except my email and ACDSee. I expected the ACDSee problem & have pretty much just written it off. I have 4, yes 4! other photo programs that work just fine in Vista. Surely to god one of them can tag things. But the email…oh my precious email… I’ve been running a 10 year old version of Outlook since it came out. It’s not Vista compatible. I could buy Outlook 2007 for $55 from the academic supersto...

The laptop is reaching the end of it’s life. It’s had the buzzing problem for a bit & the new HD failed to help. It over heats. It clicks and groans. It takes forever to load anything. every program freezes at some point. Two days ago it started just shutting down at random, generally when the CPU is running a bit. I’ve found a new one & hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get it. Supposedly it is in stock at a Best Buy an hour away, not the easy to get to one south of us, but the one in traffic hell to the east. It has Vista, with free upgrade to Windows 7. It also has 1Gb of virtual memory (I have 128MB now) and 500GB HD (I have 160 now, recently replacing the 80GB one the laptop came with). It has 6GB of RAM (I have 4). It has a build in webcam. I’ve never used a webcam. I have this vague worry videos of me looking at the screen unaware I’m being filmed will end up on You Tube. I’ll have to reload EVERYTHING.  Just the list of Firefox add ons is daunting, never mi...

I suppose it is just as well that there was a confluence of doom rather than having the various doom occur consecutively.  Saves time. The pole went down at 6:30pm Wednesday taking with it all outside forms of communication. We live in a fringy cell zone & have a cell signal enhancer on that pole along with our internet antenna, so the cell went out too. Thursday morning the new HD arrived & the laptop was so hot I was shocked the keys weren’t melting & it was useless after about 11am. The plan was for DH to take the laptop in Friday & have the Clonezilla copy the existing HD onto the new HD. But the guy that knows that software was at the dentist with an abscessed tooth, so DH had to wing it with occasional calls to that guy who was naturally whacked out on pain meds. He is also the guy that drives the bucket truck & who we were going to pay to come out over the weekend to help put the pole back. Five tries later, at 6pm, DH calls and says “It says it...

Perhaps you may remember this photo from Feb when the pole with my internet receiver collapsed in the high winds and this had to come out 3 days later to fix it Look what I found at 7pm last night I had internet before dinner and 90 minutes later when I got back on the computer I didn’t. I went out to see if maybe the antenna had moved maybe and there was no antenna to be seen. There has been no wind & it is tied down now with steel cables. What could have happened? Rain. I found this That is the spike that was screwed in the ground that had the cables tied to it. Apparently a month of nearly non-stop rain saturated the ground enough that the weight of the antenna & receiver pulling against it, pulled it out. So to recap 1. hard drive is dying & must be replaced 2. most of the software has to be downloaded 3. I have no internet at home 4. Library internet filter views every single page on the web as spam & unpleasant, pissy library la...

{scary thundery voice} DOOOOOOOMMM My computer hard drive has a terminal condition. It’s dying slowly as we speak. The buzzing comes more often. It gets so hot I am surprised the keys are not melting.  Or maybe its the fan. Either way, the thing is dying. A borrowed hard drive did not create a buzzing sound so those who know these things feel 95% sure its the hard drive. It is a 3-4 year old laptop. It has a certain type of hard drive style they stopped using about 50 seconds after my Visa payment went through (which is the story of my life) So the various computer docs I consulted did not give me much hope that a replacement hard drive could be found. But one has been found! A  160GB Seagate of appropriate style has been located. The current drive is only 80GB and is a Seagate as well. It has been ordered & will be here by the end of the week. Which is why I have this cloud of doom hanging over me. I have to load a hard drive from the ground up. Operating s...

On the other side of your computer screen there sits a real person typing these words. A real person, with real live feelings, hopes, dreams, a past that stretches back into the mists of times (it was 1967, perhaps it was the smoky marijuana haze of time) and hopefully a long and glorious future. This real person does not exist online. Not even a vague reference. I was reminded of this other day when I read something about people googling themselves and had an idea I'd done it once but couldn't recall the results. That would be because there aren't any. Lots of people with the same name as me do exist online with Facebook & MySpace pages and Flickr albums and job resumes. They appear in newspaper stories, or lists of swim meet winners or tags on other people's photos. But none of them are me. Anyone googling me without meeting me first (for a job interview for example or because I'm the mom of one of their kid's friends) is going to be in for a bit o...

The Windy defeats me again! At least it didn't wreck my car this time, like it did last year, but look at my internet receiver It's not supposed to be on the ground!!! The winds were gusting so strongly Wednesday evening that they bent the pole so much it pulled the guy wires out of the ground and toppled over. See that 30 degree bend in the pole? This pole is not going back up. It has to be replaced. Which means my receiver will remain on the ground for awhile. Rumors of a bucket truck coming to my house Saturday have been mooted but it's supposed to rain tomorrow and you can't erect metal poles in the rain. (not that we haven't but this would be people under company insurance doing it so it won't happen) I'm used to the weather playing merry hell with my internet. The ISP has equipment hanging on towers all over the place and sometimes they get hit with freak lightening strikes or power outages or the wind knocks things askew and someone goes out & rep...

Something happened to my internet connection in the past week. First there were sporadic power outages, then some high winds and then....my connection speed took a nose dive. I went from an RSSI of 70 to one of 50 (and they boot you off the tower at 60 because you are dragging everyone else down). My error rate went from 35% to 49%. My connection is now moody. Sometimes it is in an upload mood, letting me upload things like this post or photos. But if it is in an upload mood, no downloading is allowed, and vice versa. This is not good. I have broadband internet and due to topography issues my signal comes from a 4 ft antenna at the top of a 50ft pole on my roof. So if the problem is not with the router in the house, then it is with the cable coming from the antenna or the antenna itself. Meaning the pole has to be collapsed as much as it can be and taken down, things replaced and then the pole gets hoisted back up and extended. (My house is underground so while it is a PITA to unde...