good evening friends

well, we are back to two people in my department. matthew has some issues that have led to his dismissal. with as busy as we are, absenteeism really puts a kink in our customer service. mattew missed eight out of the first fifteen work days of the year. the boss was all set to fire him, and the service manager stepped in and gave him another chance..

we have been having some difficulty in seeing just what he has been getting done lately. monday, he skipped a service call to start on an installation, then bailed on the installation. tuesday morning he called me to ask a tech support question. that was the last we heard from him. he did not do the repair he had asked me about, and stopped answering his phone. i finished tuesday by catching the appointments he had made.

wednesday, he did not show at all, and did not answer his phone. we sent a couple of guys over to his apartment to see if he was there, and o.k. they could hear his phone ring, and someone moving around, but no one answered the door. the company truck was in his parking stall and unlocked. the guys brought the truck back.

thursday night, the service manager called the authorities. they found matthew at home, and seemingly o.k. the manager called after the police had been there and told matthew to come in this morning.

i missed the meeting, but heard later that matthew did not seem concerned that he had lost his job. he was very amused that the guys had been knocking at his door and that they did not know he was on the other side just laughing at them.

i hope he can get some help.......

all those years of sobriety, down the drain!

many years ago, when i realized how stupid i got when i was drinking too much, i gave it up. a couple of years ago i started drinking a glass of wine once in a while. i am partial to the spanish reds. a couple of glasses is about my limit.

last night, in an experiment, i exceeded the two glass limit. considering i was not behind the wheel or out in public, and that everyone else in the house had gone on to bed, it didn't go to badly. about halfway through the fourth glass, i dozed off in my chair.

i guess my capacity diminished over the years......

good evening friends

the refurbished "mint" condition thinkpad arrived today. it is even nicer than advertised. it is pristine. i was able to install my hard drive, battery and ultra bay floppy drive and start right up. not bad for sixty one bucks.


my next project is to take the other two laptops and tear them down and reassemble a nice working laptop from the parts. this will give me a back up machine for my critical applications. i should be able to do this with spare parts left over.

good morning friends

and happy saturday! this is one of the great weekends: it is payday, i have a nice chunk of overime pay and commissions on the check, i handed the on call responsibility off to matthew, and the used thinkpad i bought on ebay seems to be working fine. it is a little rougher in appearance than i am happy with, but performance is the important part here.

to solve this appearance situation, i have been watching ebay carefully. yesterday, i won an auction for another thinkpad. this one has been refurbished rather than listed as used. it carries a warranty and a return gaurantee. if delivered as advertised, this will give me a nice looking, functional laptop for work.

i can then take the rough but working laptop and the nice looking but non functional laptop and build a second machine to use as a backup.

some kind soul also auctioned off a set of technical repair manuals for these thinkpads.

happy computing!

good evening friends,

today, the ibm thinkpad i bought on ebay arrived. it started up fine, and seems to be working pretty well. this should allow me to just shift the hard drive from my broken thinkpad and get all of the programming i need at work to return to full operation.

not bad for 127.50

good evening friends,

today has been tax day at our house. i spent the afternoon with three sets of federal returns and three state returns. thank god for turbotax!

yesterday, it was a beautiful day. it hit sixty degrees and sunny. sadly i wasted six hours in a class i needed for the continuing education requirements for my electrical license. the guy who used to teach these classes retired and we had a new guy. he had copied a great deal of n.f.p.a.70 code into a power point presentation then spent most of the class time reading it to us as we followed along in the handouts he printed up from the slides.

great phrases like "the power sources of non power limited fire alarm circuits shall comply with chapters 1 through 4 and the output voltage shall not be more than 600 volts, nominal. these circuits shall not be supplied throug ground fault circuit interrupters (gfci) or arc fault circuit intrerrupters (afci)"

the challenge is not to understand the nature of non power limited circuits. the difference between power limited and non power limited circuits is a common discussion among fire alarm technicians. the real challenge is to stay awake while that guy reads this to us.

good morning friends,

after last night and the final minute of the ebay auction for an old, but working, ibm laptop it is easy to see why there are people who get hooked into ebay. i really needed this laptop. i have a particular set of aplications that will not run on anything newer than windows98, and will not even load on some of those. the laptop on its way is identical to the one i have been using that is now dead. i am sure that i can just transfer the hard drive from the old to the new and be back in action. well worth the $127.50 i had to bid

good morning friends,

tonight are the oscars, and having seen so few of the movies nominated, i will probably give them a pass. this last week has been constant computer repair. my younger daughter has been using a compaq desktop that i put downsatirs for her when i bought my newer computer. she asked me one morning if i had turned it off. i hadn't. "well,' she said "it is off and will not come back up" i have an old gateway that i have been using for network storage due to a failed video card, so i opened up both cases and started poking around. my older daughter called while i was doing this and told me that her computer "made a popping sound from the back and shut off and smells hot."

this gave me three computers on my desk in various degrees of disassembly. i bought one power supply and a cmos battery. a couple of days later, i have rebuilt two working desktops out of the parts from three that were not working.

now, if i can just win that bid on ebay for the parts i need to fix one of the laptops..........