Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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The whirrrrrrring sound meant trouble

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This morning my husband turned on my computer. He often does this if he’s up before me and he hears me moving around upstairs. My usual routine is to get up, get myself a coffee and sit at the desktop computer and check my email as I wake up.

My routine was severely altered this morning!

Chris turned my computer on and said “Oh oh …” and you know anything that starts with Oh oh is not going to be good. “your computers making a sound that I just know you’re not going to like” he said. I called downstairs “What do you mean? I can’t hear it from here. What is it doing?”

He didn’t really say, he just kept telling me that I wasn’t going to be happy with the noise. Then he said I think it’s the fan.

As I came down the stairs I could hear the noise. It was a high pitched whirrrrrring noise. He was right. I didn’t like that sound at all.

Chris took the side panel off the computer and figured that it was the fan on the power supply that was making the noise.

Ok, that’s not too bad. We’ll take the computer to Best Buy or Future Shop and get a new power supply for it. We had to replace a power supply for our old computer a few years ago after a power failure zapped it. It had been easy to find the right replacement and the computer was only down for a few hours. No problem.

Chris went off with the computer and I got on the laptop to check my email.

Chris came back a couple of hours later. Much later than I thought he’d be. It turns out that the power supply in our 2003 HP Media center computer is a very special one, much smaller than most and only made by one company that supplies HP directly. Arghhh.

We got on the laptop and started to see if we could find HP parts dealers in the Toronto area, or if the HP parts store carried the power supply that we needed. HP telephone support is only open Monday to Friday so we couldn’t talk with anyone and I couldn’t find the model number on their power supply parts page. None of the computer supply stores we called could get the part either.

What a drag! Chris also told me that one of the people he talked with at Best Buy or Future shop had said the power supply would cost about $140 bucks. Much more expensive than the last power supply that we had to buy for our old old computer. I started to think, gee we could get a whole new computer for about $500 at the most. What should we do?

We decided to check for the part on eBay and we got lucky and found it. So now I’ve made my first ever eBay purchase ($36 with shipping!) and I hope that the part we got really is the correct one. It’s got the right part number but the photo’s looked a little different than what our own power supply looks like. I guess we’ll see in about a week when it arrives.

So I guess I’ll be using only my laptop for the next week or so. It’s unfortunately that all my saved emails are on my desktop, and all the info about money I’ve been making and so on. I guess we could plug in the faulty computer and move some of that info to this computer. The desktop still works but we’re pretty sure that that sound means failure is imminent. Plus, if the fan isn’t working properly the computer could over heat and get damaged. That would be much worse than not having access to some of my stored info for a few days, so I think we’ll just leave it turned off for now.





Something for nothing

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Why do so many people expect something for nothing?

I had a very bad experience a couple of weekends ago. I’m not going to go into all the details. I’ll just say that I provide a free service to people and over the last few weeks I’ve gone around and asked for a little more feedback and participation and it just seems to have all backfired on me.

I actually got quite mean spirited comments and emails that basically wonder how I “dare” ask them to participate. Well … duh .. it’s one of the rules of the service that I’m providing.

It’s upsetting. I felt like shutting down the service that I’ve been offering for approximately 10 months, and when the comments started to get a bit nasty I even started to think, to hell with it. I felt like shutting down that website too.

The service that I’m providing is absolutely free yet it actually costs me a little bit of money to provide. Don’t I have a right to require that people follow the very lax rules?

I’m in a very people are assholes kind of mood as I write this. Hopefully that changes.

Then yesterday, one of the mailing lists I run broke out into flames over a non-list topic. It took me into today to settle the list down and get it back on track again. This again is yet another free service that I provide as I run four mailing lists.

On another forum that I was visiting between naps and bleary eyed wakefulness I theorized over something that might affect the sites terms of service and had my words twisted around by two people, one of them an employee of the company I was discussing. It made me feel like leaving that forum all together. I don’t want to do that though as I learn of interesting things on that site, get some help with my sites when I need it, and I also offer some help and advice to others from time to time there too.

I actually got up and checked my calender yesterday to find out if there was going to be a full moon. Honest. I mean when I work in the ER you wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff that happens on Full Moon nights. I figured that perhaps that phenomena had invaded the net too.

I get really frustrated when things like this happen. I put a lot of myself into the things that I do, and many of the things that I do I’ve created with the benefit of others in mind. I often don’t get all that much out of these things for myself (the mailing lists in particular). So when people start turning things around, blaming me for things, or begin to take advantage of the situation it just makes me so angry.

How about you? Do you ever do things for people and end up feeling like you’ve been taken advantage of? or perhaps like my experience yesterday, have a bunch of things that go wrong all at once?

WomanSavers – rate a guy and a whole lot more

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Ladies listen up! Have you visited WomanSavers.com yet? If you haven’t you should take a moment to visit this site that touts itself as the worlds largest database rating good and bad guys. Some of the articles are amazing!

If you aren’t into reading some of the very interesting listings about good and bad guys or adding your own worst boyfriend to the list, you can chat with other site members, take relationship quizzes, join in on relationship polls and play women’s cartoon relationship games, shop, or read and join in the conversations on the the sites forums.

Speaking of the message boards. There is a large forum section devoted to abused women, called “Abuse Help” where women being abused can talk to others who can help, or who can offer support. A number of resources for abused women are also listed.

Other topics in the message board are general issues and general discussions, Infidelity and catching a cheater. There’s also a section for men too, and I’ll bet the men reading this were feeling left out. Men can use the message board to talk with others and get relationship advice, ideas for the perfect gift for that special woman, or perhaps even get some advice as to what women consider the perfect date.

One thing that I really like about WomanSavers is that all proceeds generated through donations or sale of WomanSaver items are donated to abused women and children’s charities.

Check it out. I think many of you will enjoy this site.

Have you been following the I follow movement?

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ifolloworange.gifJulie from UtterlyGeek.com, has continued on where Colleen left off, and has posted her version of the the D List. The D-List is a version of the I Follow Movement. What we’re trying to do, is build a complete list of all the blogs that use the dofollow plugin.

If a site uses the WordPress dofollow plugin, as this one does, that means that whenever you leave a comment on a post the search engines will be able to follow the link that you left back to your site. You see, most blogs are automatically set up with a “no follow” tag, and this no follow tag causes search engines to ignore that nice link to your site that you list when you leave a comment on a blog post that you enjoyed. The dofollow plugin removes that nasty no follow tag and makes your link valuable again.

When you leave a comment on a site that uses the dofollow plugin your link will be counted as a backlink to your site by google and other search engines, and add to your link popularity. It will probably help your site increase its page rank too.

So add the dofollow plugin to your wordpress blog and help us build this D-List. Follow the instructions bellow:

***Begin to copy here***

1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra link back.

2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.

3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.

4. Add at least 1 new blog that you KNOW us using the DO FOLLOW plugin to the list in the “My Adds” section. (Add no more than 5!) Let the people you’ve added know, so that they can keep the list going!

My Adds:

Amanita.net
WebStyle
Meredith’s Weight Loss Blog
Pink Blog
Thoughts out of my head

The Originals:

Tricia’s Musings
Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot
Midlife Musings
Utterly Geek
Whatever I Feel Like
My Dandelion Patch
Surviving NJ
GeekySpeaky
Simple Kind Of Life
3DayMom
BuyMeBlog
The Hockey Dad

***Quit Copying Here***

UPDATE – I created a Do Follow Bloggers blogroll, if you’d like to join leave a comment on that page and I’ll send you the blogroll code and instructions.

Fun game – make over a 1985 wireless cellphone

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Now here’s something cool! Your Wireless Source has just launched a site with a fun game where site visitors can “makeover” an old wireless Motorola cell phone.

Get this, the old 1985 Motorola cell phone is nicknamed Dusty.

When you play the “Makeover for Dusty” game you can choose his face, hair, accessories, clothing and locations. He interacts with you and gets sassy at each choice.

Once you’ve completed Dusty’s new look you can rename him and post his image on the Your Wireless Source photo gallery. You can also email your made over Dusty to your friends with a customizable voice message.

I just started working on my Dusty Makeover. Here’s what the “Makeover” screen looks like.

dusty.jpg

I’ll see if I can post another image of my made over Dusty as soon as I’m done my creation. Let’s see who can do the best Dusty makeover. BTW I love the music! Make sure you turn your sound on if you try this fun game.

Ok here’s my Dusty Makeover. I called him Pimpy-Dusty in the photo gallery. Why does he remind me a bit of Bender in Futurama?:

dusty2.jpg

If you upload your Dusty makeover to the photo gallery it might be rated by other “Stylists” and of course you can rate other peoples creations too. Come on … give it a try. It’s fun.

As an extra bonus, when you are working with Dusty to give him a new look you’ll be able to see a promotion code worth 10% off any of the wireless accessories that are sold at Your Wireless Source. The promotion is valid until 12/31/07

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