Bad Linux experiences...

This computer isn't jiving with my ADD here... It frequently closes programs unexpectedly, sometimes expectedly but not wanted. (Like every time I try to run a certain report from a database, when the same report with a different central entry does work.) Then I try to SFTP to somewhere, and it stalls. I really want to go home now and watch a movie with my husband, but I'm here trying to get something to work that I should have been able to do fast... It's frustrating. :( I normally have 6 or so tabs going in firefox and I do work in one while the other one loads. I can't even come close to that tonight, I'm scared to have more than my two terminal windows and one logjam window open. Almost makes me wish I had IE. Short story shorter, go here: http://www.thewybles.com/~patti/family/index.html That's what I've been working on over the past week or two. If you have any information to fill in, please help me do so, I'm hooked now. I have to find out more about more people! I tried turning my yahoo pictures of the wedding, but it didn't work. I'm not sure if the functionality is gone or my pictures are too big, but I'm going to have to rotate them on the computer and re-upload. Not going to happen this week, sorry, not till Charles makes the computer all better.

Grrrrrr. Re-Write

I'm really really upset right now because I spent a long long time writing a post to account for the past week or two, during which alot happened, and when I was scrolling down to find the submit button, my screen went black with a cursor (I think it was blinking, I'm not sure) and after a few moments went back to my desktop but without my firefox window. Grrrrrr! I was on the phone with Charles at the time, and he tried to remind me that it can't be the first time a program has crashed on me and I lose my work. Well, it's not, but normally I save my work every couple of minutes and a webform has no capacity for that, so I lost a lot more work. That and I normally don't have so much to say at once. So you get the short version. New wedding photos from the photographer are up. The CD was cracked, but Charles got them to send another one. http://photos.yahoo.com/calliope320 Click on "Wedding" for sister's pictures, "Wedding Cont" for photographer's pictures. Charles got a new job, making more than he did at his old job and liking it better. I need to buy work pants, because my new work is navy blue and my old work is khaki. Luckily, we got a new policy last month at my old job saying we can do either navy or khaki, well timed with my new job. I went through a downward spiral with my credit card... You see, I carry a $500 balance, not by choice but because of inability to pay it off. So every month, the cell phone bill was taken out of there and I'd put a corresponding amount back in when I got the cell phone bill in the mail. Maintained my credit, met the minimum payment each month, paid my cell phone bill on time, and so on. All was right with the world, or at least my finances. Then I didn't have enough money to do that, so a bill got declined the following month because I was maxed out. So I got the auto-debit changed from my credit card to my check card. Now, I used to have a nice little ritual of putting money in every time I got a bill. Moving without setting up forwarding (I'm not on the lease yet), not having that payment come out of my credit card, and not having money all lead to me just about forgetting I even have a credit card. All I ever used it for since it was nearly-maxed was the phone bill, and now it's not. So I have two $29 late fees as well as over-limit fees. I paid them off tonight, brought the balance back down to $40 under my max. Probably wrecked what credit I did have though. Two consecutive months of missed payments, can't be good. I wanted to, at one point, put the car on my credit card. Have it auto-debit from there, cycle the amount through my credit report twice. Two on-time payments for the same $350 each month. I thought it was a good plan, but I didn't have $350 of credit to spare at the time so I had it auto-debit from my check card instead. I may re-consider that (once we zero the balance) to re-build from this blunder. Someone at my new work is a control freak, and it's keeping us from getting our jobs done. This person takes work home (which is expressly forbidden in the new hire paperwork we all signed) rather than share responsibility or delegate, which is not only unfair to us and to that person, but it leaves us without critical information because they take home the only copies of very important forms. It's very frustrating. This person has the "if I delegate this, it'll get screwed up" syndrome that I think new managers tend to suffer from. That's theory 1. Other theories include job security, getting credit for doing all the work (since there are advancement opportunities, but not for all of us at once), or not wanting to admit they can't do it all. It better get fixed by summer, or we'll have big problems (not inter-personal ones, but operations problems). I've scheduled 40 guards over 4 bodies of water, I've scheduled and run an instructional program of 17 instructors, 3 lifeguards, and 104 students AT A TIME for half hour a day TWELVE times per day. I can handle it, put me in coach. Work stuff: I'm setting up an inventory tracking database, that's been my latest project. The name tags I made for the employee lockers came out great, the graphics department does all of our color printing for us since we all have laser printers. Wow, am I impressed. Whatever they're using, I want it. The colors are SPECTACULAR. My supervisor laminated them and I put them up today, I love them. They're pictures of the pools with people's names incorporated in word art. I'll post pictures of that at some point, I'm quite taken with them. I'm going to do them at both pools, but at my new pool it'll be prettier because of printer quality. I have peoples' names climbing the ladder of the high dive, jumping off the board, coming down the slide, dropping out of the drop buckets... Can't wait to get mine, it's in the second batch. I want to use my PDA to get files from my old work to my new work, because it has a 1 Gig SD card. But the computer at my new work recognizes it as a PDA and then tells me I have to be an admin to install it. Haven't tried on old work's computer, but they're on serious lockdown so I doubt it'll work there. Really, Mr. IT dude, I just wanna use it as a hard drive. I promise I won't try to synch with Outlook or anything silly like that. Just saving CDs and increasing productivity! Now, it does let me connect my mp3 player and recognizes that as a hard drive without me having to install anything. But that's no bigger than my thumb drive anyway, that'll take me ages to transport all my files! Have I ever told you that IT at my old place wouldn't install drivers for either my camera or the department's shared camera on my work computer? Again, I just wanted to pull files off it like a hard drive, I didn't want any software or anything. But it's a "have your division manager talk to my division manager" shop, and the idea didn't get past my immediate supervisor because she said they wouldn't allow it due to licensing. Now, really, I know better than that. If you buy a camera, nowhere in your receipt does it say you can only connect it to one computer. Now your license for software, that I may have believed. Does she know better than that? Probably not. That's what's wrong with the system, people who know better aren't allowed to talk to each other. So I got into the habit of doing it the long way: upload to computer, upload to website, download from website. What do you mean, we're using more bandwidth this week than all last month, mister IT dude? Ask my division manager about it. Charles is doing laundry, we still haven't gotten the dryer looked at so we wash at home and dry at the laundry-mat place. He dropped me off here at Starbucks and went there, then we're going to go home, have dinner, watch a movie while sorting dry laundry. Tomorrow, I'm going to the November SCPPOA (Southern California Public Pool Operators Association) meeting. I was going to go representing my old job, was I did all last year on my own time and in my own vehicle. Then I found out today that my new job will pay me to go. Guess I'm wearing blues instead. =) I still have to drive my own car, but that's because it's complicated to drive city vehicles to other counties, that's not unusual really. If my supervisor was going (she normally does) I'm sure we could get a car. I'm just a part time manager though. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the meeting. It's at the headquarters of my home chapter of the American Red Cross, and the speaker is the person at ARC that we call when we need stuff. All my once-a-month aquatics friends will be there! Back with another post some time by month's end.