I took a couple of days off to use up my remaining vacation days before they expire at the end of this month.
It has been rainy and later very cool during my vacation. I managed to get off some yardwork before a bout of showers on Friday.
Before my vacation, I removed a public printer from the first floor because its place is about to be recarpetted. The complaints were loud because nobody was informed that this would happen, even though everyone should have known that the printer would have to be moved soon. Anyway, I put the printer in the north entrance as far from the doors as possible because we had to use the original datajacks for that printer.
Anyway, one of the reasons for the vacation is the restoration of my phone service (done Thursday) and the erection of my antenna (to have been done Friday). My own ladder was too short; and the one I borrowed from my folks was too rickety. I will talk to some guy in Marion to erect my antenna this coming week.
In the meantime, I have hung the antenna (a Winegard SS-2000) on my wall. From the wall, facing east, I can get channels 23 and 49 and (maybe) 6. That is good enough for awhile. (It faces east because the cable I am using is too short; it was meant to hook up with the wall.)
My living room computer died the death. I suspect the hard drive failed, so I will replace that and the network card. I am trying to use as little of what the motherboard has as I can, because the inboard cards (video, network, and audio) are decidedly inferior to what can be had elsewhere.
People are impressed with my work on the data cable conduits on the side of my house, either because they admire the work or because they find the ugliness of the thing remarkable.
My sister the editor is impressed with my car after taking a drive and trying out the pseudo-manual transmission with the clutch on the steering wheel.
It is nice that I got my living room computer, Nabiki, finally hooked up with the house local network. Its original hard disk died the death and had to be replaced. A trip to Fry’s got me a good hard drive (Hitachi) and network card (USRobotics). Naturally I had to reinstall Windows XP. The install DVD was for service pack 2, but the good thing about the wired network is that it did not take that long to download and install service pack 3. It would have taken forever with the wireless.
I ended my vacation by watching the latest The Fast and the Furious.