Whoosh!

[psipsy]

--Fix air conditioning. It's only April, and warm weather was already gaining on the AC. So, I had to go under and fix the ducting that fell off. Hooray for really long zip-ties. Hooray for having the balls to climb under there. It's musty and full of spiders, and I had to lay on gravel to fix the AC. But it all works now. Status: SUCCESS

--Refill waterbed. These things do lose water over time through evaporation. I couldn't find the usual fill nozzle, so I rigged one up with parts from the hardware store, implementing a shut-off valve. I can once again lay in bed and not sink all the way to the bottom. (Or maybe it would help if I was less of a fatass.) Status: SUCCESS

--Fix my mom's VCR. I forgot when she got this one, but it's quite a few years old. Some research indicates it's from around 2003. That said, it's impossible to find parts for it; newer ones are considered "disposable" by the manufacturer. (Meanwhile I can still find a ton of parts for my 25-year old Zenith.) As it was eating tapes, I suspected the drive belt was going bad, and after taking it apart, it certainly looked to be in poor shape, and my first choice of electronics parts stores had one similar. A disconcerting discovery was that removal of the sub-chassis effectively disassembles the head, something I've not run into before. Alas, after putting it all back together, and using a guinea pig tape, it still has the same problem. Status: FAIL

--Find where ants are coming in. They're looking for sweets, and the waste can I have full of empty soda cans was a prime source. But! Despite removing the empties, the ants were still following their little trails and coming in, and instead of submitting to my instinct of blasting them with Orange Fantastik, I simply watched them to see where they were coming and going from. It was narrowed down to a tiny crack, which I promptly pumped a load of bug spray into. The flow of ants immediately stopped. As for the ones that were already inside and running around in the open on the walls and countertop, I prefer Orange Fantastik. It's kitchen-safe, doesn't make the entire room smell like a leaky gas station, it sprays out fast enough to gun down several square feet of ants in seconds and there's just enough surfactant to be lethal to them without being hazardous to me. And it makes for easy cleanup. I'm still finding a couple stragglers, but they're wandering around completely lost. Also, the empties have since gone to recycling. Status: SUCCESS

--Round 2 of healing aichan95. She's going in at 8am Monday morning. I'm gonna be up for awhile. Status: TBD

--Getting 3DCG to work in W7. Windows 7 as an operating system has a lot going for it, and I'm finding a few features exclusive to the Ultimate version are handy. It's like they took out what made Vista suck, and fixed a couple bugs from XP along the way. (I'm not surprised that my workplace is going from XP to W7 and skipping Vista entirely.) There's a compatibility feature, where if you know something worked in XP but it doesn't work natively in W7 somehow, you can tell it that it worked before in XP, and there's a couple other settings for tweaking as well. 3DCG was one of those programs, and one of the biggest obstacles preventing me from doing a complete switchover from XP to W7. However, it doesn't do well when I have the 2nd monitor in use, so there's still a few issues sticking in my craw. Progress is still progress. Status: SUCCESS (mostly)

--Get new UPS for computer. One thing I recommend to a lot of people is to have their computer powered through a UPS, as a power outage can cripple a system. And, for the longest time, I've done so. Until mine crapped out, so I've been flying without a net for awhile now. A full re-install of the OS isn't an issue to me (discs for clean install FTW), and replacing failed hardware even less so, but I guess all that anime I've harvested over the years might be a little hard to re-acquire if one of my hard drives can't be brought back to life. Plus the whole principle of practicing what I preach. So I got a new one while I was out and about. Status: SUCCESS

--Repair my iTunes library. My aging G4 PowerBook isn't getting any younger. It's already having trouble with booting up cold, taking several tries before it stays up. Temperature is a direct factor, the colder it is the worse it is, while if it's a simple restart and thus already warm, it'll follow through on the first try. It'll also grind to a halt if the hardware gets too hot. As such I'm gradually transferring assorted duties over to the XP/W7 machine, with the G4 keeping tasks that aren't processor intensive. Anyway, the system froze up and when I relaunched iTunes, the library file was corrupted. Fortunately, I've had the presence of mind to make regular backups of that file since it happened once before a long time ago. The latest backup was about 5 months old, so the task at hand was to round up all the files that I might have added during that time and put them back in, maybe a hundred or so. A couple handy tools I used was "ListMIA" which makes a list of all the songs that are in the library but can't be found, (usually due to them being on an external drive that's not plugged in) and a modified version of that called "Lister" which makes a text list of all the files' locations. After some cursing and grumbling, all 12,300 files have been found and accounted for. And a new backup of the library file has been made. This is an Important Thing, and it's a key ingredient in my cleaning efforts. There's something about having that many songs set on Shuffle that gets me going. Status: SUCCESS

--Watch some anime. I had a small backlog of about a dozen episodes of assorted anime to watch, and got through most of it. I only wish I had a pizza for it. Status: SUCCESS

All told, a productive and mostly successful weekend.