And it’s only Thursday

 Family  1 Response »
Jan 242008
 

I sure hope this week is a one-off. Noth­ing major, no life-threat­en­ing issues, just a bunch of annoy­ing smal­ler things that all came at once. While Tim’s away. 

Monday: go to drive Tim to the air­port; he’s away until Fri­day. The oil sensor light comes on in the car. Tim gets a cab, and I get to take the car to the work­shop. They prom­ise to look at it Tues­day morn­ing. The 19-month-old decides to have a party in her crib at 3 am, wak­ing me (of course). She gets back to sleep even­tu­ally, I lie there think­ing of what needs to be done.

Tues­day: the work­shop looks at the car, changes the oil sensor, changes the oil, the sensor light still comes on, they want to keep it until Wed­nes­day to do some fur­ther tests. The 19-month old only wakes twice dur­ing the night, so that’s not too bad, but then she wants to get up at 6:30 am.

Wed­nes­day: the prob­lem isn’t the oil sensor, it looks like it’s the instru­ment cluster. Which needs to be fixed at an “author­ized deal­er”, since they’re the only ones with all the secur­ity codes and appar­at­us to pro­gram the elec­tron­ics. So I get the car back, can still drive it short dis­tances (great ser­vice from the work­shop, BTW, and a reas­on­able price), such as to the author­ized deal­er. Whose first appoint­ment isn’t until Feb­ru­ary 4th, that’s almost two weeks from now. The 19-month-old fig­ures out how to take off her sleep bag in the middle of the night, gets cold, needs to have the sleep bag and blankets put back on her so she can sleep. Guess I’m not using that sleep bag for her any more. For­tu­nately she sleeps in till 7:30 am.

Thursday: cold, frosty, but sunny. The toi­let clogs. Badly enough that I can­’t get it unclogged, and I’m cur­rently wait­ing on a call back from the plumber. 

I sure hope the rest of the week goes better.

Banks and Firebug

 Technology  No Responses »
Jan 212008
 

I had a prob­lem with online bank­ing; every time it got to the sec­ond­ary pass­word check on the login screen the whole browser froze. Com­pletely. Leav­ing it to sort itself out did­n’t help. And the bank had no idea; they just said “we’ve tested on Fire­fox on Win­dows XP, it works for us”. And it prob­ably did. Even­tu­ally I got sick of hav­ing to use anoth­er browser and tried the old debug­ging standby of turn­ing off all the exten­sions and add-ons. Lo and behold, it was some prob­lem when Fire­bug was act­ive. Not a big issue, just an annoy­ing one. Not annoy­ing enough to run around fil­ing bug reports every­where, but some­thing to keep in the back of my mind (and on this blog) for future reference.

Good Support

 Technology, Vancouver  2 Responses »
Jan 152008
 

In the online and soft­ware world, there’s “sup­port”, and then there’s sup­port. I’ve dis­covered my host­ing sup­pli­er for this blog, Cana­dian Web Host­ing, offers the real type of sup­port. And at a decent price, too. 

I run two Word­Press blogs, this one and a craft­ing blog, and had a prob­lem that showed up on one and not the oth­er. They dug around, sent sug­ges­tions to try things out, and gen­er­ally made a great effort to help fig­ure out what was going on (I’ll post the gory details once I have a bit more time to make them under­stand­able). That sup­port coupled with a decent price ($8.95 per month if you pay upfront for 1 TB band­width per month, 125 GB stor­age, lots of add-on domains, and SSH access) means I recom­mend them to any­one who needs host­ing. If you’re in the mar­ket for a new host­ing sup­pli­er, you could do a lot worse.

Blossoming in the Sun

 General, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jan 152008
 

In a city like Van­couver in the depths of winter, when we’re so used to rain, rain, and more rain, to the extent that even the loc­al paper prints “this is get­ting bor­ing” as the weath­er fore­cast, any sun is appre­ci­ated. So today’s glor­i­ous sun­shine, even though accom­pan­ied by cold frosts in the morn­ing, was extremely wel­come. Every­one is out walk­ing, people are vis­ibly relax­ing and enjoy­ing the sun, their faces remin­is­cent of blos­som­ing flowers, rather than scur­ry­ing along under umbrel­las scowl­ing at the grey skies. Many are delib­er­ately not look­ing at the weath­er fore­cast, pre­fer­ring to enjoy the weath­er as it is rather than be cast into des­pond­ency over the rain that is undoubtedly just over the hori­zon. Even the trees seem to be smil­ing, and the cats are out­side cat­ting around rather than hibernating.

Some­how even work­ing in the base­ment seems easi­er when the sun is shining.

One-Stop Shopping

 General  3 Responses »
Jan 082008
 

I see that Paul Ked­rosky is talk­ing about a resur­gence of depart­ment stores, based on the fact that lots of people want one-stop shop­ping rather than going from store to store. Fun­nily enough, Wal­mart has been meet­ing pre­cisely this need for years; I gath­er one of the major demo­graph­ics for Wal­mart is har­ried moth­ers with chil­dren in tow who also don’t want to schlep from store to store. Now, if depart­ment stores would actu­ally make it more pleas­ant to shop in them, and more effi­cient, they’d get more of my busi­ness as well. Effi­ciency to me means a reas­on­able selec­tion of products, not only cloth­ing, organ­ised in a way that means I can find what I’m look­ing for (or find out they don’t have it) in a short peri­od of time. People to help in the pro­cess would be a def­in­ite plus, but some logic in where things are would make up for that. Rolling carts for people push­ing strollers or bug­gies would help as well.

‘Tis the Season to be Frazzled

 Family  No Responses »
Jan 052008
 

If I have a New Year’s Res­ol­u­tion, it’s to not let next year’s year-end become as stressed. And to get enough sleep. Both of these hold a longer story that I don’t have the energy to tell right now. Tim pos­ted some; in the last couple of days oth­ers have got sick (there seems to be a gastroenteritis/norovirus epi­dem­ic in Van­couver) and the tod­dler hurt her hand and is sleep­ing even more poorly than usual.

As a con­sequence I haven’t had the energy to blog (or do any­thing much, to be hon­est), and it will take a few days before I do.

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