Austin Update

This weekend, Jenny from work asked if she could keep Austin. You might remember that the first time she kept him, he broke her nose. Anyway, that never affected how much she adores Austin. Here’s an e-mail I got from her today . . .

He has been very deprived as you might suspect. After you left, he had homemade mushroom and cheese pizza with some homemade mac and cheese and chicken. You know he hated that! Yesterday, he had sliced chicken mixed with the yucky hard crap [dog food -ed.] for breakfast and a Bruster’s snack after the traumatic experience of seeing other dogs at the park. For dinner he had 3 helpings of roast with potatoes and carrots! Oh and a biscuit and banana pudding for dessert. Today he had roast and chicken with his hard crap and he’s been responding well when I say “uhuh” to the huge water intake so he only urped a little yesterday. He really likes vanilla wafers. We’ve done a fair amount of walking. He’s been his usual angelic self, cute as a bug and responding fairly well to excessive petting. He has turned into a little snore bird; must be the company he keeps. He really likes soft covers and robes. At any rate, that’s the update.

Phoneless

I finally canceled my home phone service a few weeks ago. Today I was walking the dogs and got a call from a local number I didn’t recognize. It was the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Last Spring I had taken Susan to see Carmina Burana, and ASO has been sending me mail, e-mails, and calling every now and then ever since. Not sure why I gave them my cell phone number, but I quickly informed them that they were calling my cell phone and I didn’t want them to use that number. The guy asked if there was another number where they could reach me. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but realized I could only answer No. So he said “So you just don’t want us to call you?” I said “I guess not.”

Kaspersky – Ugh

Last year I bought Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0. I was really happy with it because it wasn’t that intrusive and didn’t use a lot of system resources. It was also pretty easy to configure. So when Fry’s offered a 3-license version of KIS 7.0 for free after rebates, I jumped on it. The first install I tried was on Mom’s laptop. She said it brought her computer to a crawl and uninstalled it. One nice thing about Kaspersky is that it is pretty easy to uninstall. I was disappointed, but if Mom said it was no good, then that was the case (maybe more memory will help Mom’s computer).

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Linux, Part 3

I couldn’t get rid of the partition I had freed up for Ubuntu. So I thought I would try one more time with a clean installation. I also noticed on the page of lengthy instructions (from Linux, Part 2) that it was for the Dell 1390 wireless card and I checked and I had the 1395 wireless card. So I reran everything, only this time I downloaded the driver file R174291.exe instead of what the instructions told me. Worked like a charm!

Yeah, it still took a really long time to get everything to download and install, but I am writing this post wirelessly on the Vostro 1400 on Ubuntu.

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Linux, Part 2

Today I got the Vostro 1400. Starting it up and getting Vista going wasn’t bad, but it took a while. I had opted to get rid of most of the software bloat that Dell usually includes, but still had to set things up, download updates, etc. Vista is the slowest thing ever.

After I got everything set up, I decided to try installing Ubuntu (see Linux, Part 1 where I downloaded and tried out the installation CD). I knew the first step was shrinking the main hard drive partition to free up room. But Vista doesn’t make this easy. I still don’t know how to get to that control panel other than by searching Help for “partition” and then clicking on a link that opens the utility. I struggled with that for a while before I went back and read the article that said I didn’t have to do anything but free up the space (not create a volume, which I couldn’t do). The Dell came with the hard drive already partitioned into 4 parts. I think one is for a quick-booting media player, the other is a recovery disk, one is diagnostics, and the other is the rest of your hard drive with Windows on it. (In Ubuntu they are called MEDIADIRECT, RECOVERY, DellUtility, and OS).

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