Bill Roper's Journal

Thanks for all the lovely anniversary wishes!

I took Katie and Julie down to Joliet for Gabriel's birthday party. A great deal of fun was had by all, especially on the go-karts. :) We then adjourned for ice cream and shortly thereafter headed home. The rain earlier in the day had made the softball field unplayable, so the girls' game tonight was canceled, which took a lot of time pressure off.

It being our anniversary, I suggested that the appropriate destination for dinner would be Perry's Pizza, Gretchen's pizzeria of her youth and a place that we had ordered a great deal of pizza from after we met. This worked out well.

Because some things work out OK in the end. :)

Today is daisy_knotwise's birthday.

In an effort to maximize the amount of chaos associated with same, Julie has been picked up from school because she was sick.

I love you, Gretchen.

daisy_knotwise has strep again. Dr. Bob was good enough to call in a prescription yesterday for a Z-Pak in an attempt to knock the thing out and Gretchen is slowly starting to improve after having spent most of the last day and a half in her recliner chair. In any case, she is very tired of having strep.

The upshot of this was that I volunteered to take Katie and Julie to their swimming lesson this morning. Since the temperature outside was 59 degrees, I was not greatly surprised to arrive at a pool that was thoroughly closed and locked shut. Thus, we came home and little girls fell into a Minecraft frenzy.

Later, I ran out to McDonald's to pick up lunch for Gretchen, Katie, and Julie; then on to Five Guys and a quick trip to Home Depot to pick up some replacement switch covers. Had I but realized that I would be going there again today...

The guy arrived to look at the attic fan that we'd had installed a few years ago and pronounced it most likely dead. Although it's under warranty, the process of getting the warranty honored is going to cost far more in stomach lining than it's worth. Also, the guy is coming back tomorrow to install a replacement fan, so it's important to actually have the fan when he gets here.

Well, I'd gotten the original at Home Depot. I could certainly get another one. So after consulting with Gretchen, we piled into the van and started north to Home Depot, intending to continue on to Old Country Buffet for dinner where I could bring Gretchen soup and things like that.

The plan collapsed about three minutes after we left home when Gretchen suddenly realized that Julie had tumbling tonight. There was just enough time to go to Home Depot and get the fan. Then I dropped off Katie and Gretchen and took Julie to her tumbling class.

And while she was tumbling, I walked around the park playing Ingress and racked up another 40K AP, which puts me over halfway to level 7. Afterwards, I picked up the rest of the family and we went over to Sweet Baby Ray's for dinner.

Now, it is finally time for bed. :)

It appears that the problem with daisy_knotwise's computer that I thought I had fixed the other day persists. However, I now have a much better diagnosis.

The problem is that when the computer goes to sleep, it does not wake up properly. It starts to come out of sleep and then hangs, sending no signal to the monitor.

I've hunted on line and discovered that many people have had this problem with Windows Vista (and other Windows versions), but solutions appear to be mostly voodoo. One suggestion was related to video drivers -- I've updated them to the latest version, but that didn't help.

I will probably continue messing around with this at some point, but -- for now! -- I've just told the computer not to go into sleep mode.

In completely different news, it will be interesting to see how long it takes Katie and Julie to go into sleep mode tonight.

I predict that they will not hang in the morning when coming out of sleep mode.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

daisy_knotwise reported last night that the assorted girls who had been playing with the computers in our bedroom had left hers in a state where it was not talking to the monitor. It was about time to go to bed, so I checked the connections (which Gretchen had done earlier, but you check these things anyway), determined that the machine didn't seem to be booting up, and agreed with Gretchen that I'd look at it today after we watched some TV and got some sleep.

Well, I didn't get to sleep right away, but I spent some time on the MicroCenter website and determined that, if push came to shove, I could get some sort of reasonable replacement box for $200-$300 dollars. Since Gretchen's handling Capricon e-mail, getting her back on line quickly was going to be a good thing and it's not like she's using the box for high-end gaming. If it will read her e-mail, surf the web, and run WordPerfect, that will pretty much fit the bill.

This morning, I got showered and dressed and rolled a spare chair over next to the machine so that I had a workbench. I determined that no miracles had occurred during the previous night that would cause the machine to start working again, so I dropped it on the chair and popped the cover. First, I disconnected the power to the hard drive, in case that had prevented the boot somehow. (Moving parts have that nasty high failure rate.) The machine still powered up, but wouldn't boot.

A corrupt BIOS was another possibility. I spent a bit of time looking for a jumper on the motherboard to clear the BIOS, but didn't find one, so I put that strategy aside for a bit.

Let's check the RAM. I pulled the two memory sticks out and started up the machine again.

BEEEEEEEP!

Ok, it knows it doesn't have any RAM. I couldn't power it off from the button on the front, so I just pulled the plug. Then I plugged the two sticks of RAM back into their sockets, making sure they were nice and tight.

Start computer again. Look! It's the boot screen. But there's nothing to boot from, because I disconnected the hard drive.

Power down, reconnect the power to the drive, power up again.

And up came the computer.

Yay!

I had noted the manufacture date for the machine while I was moving it around: February, 2009. We'd gotten this box because Gretchen insisted on having her own computer that she would have access to if I was going to be working at home.

After nearly six years, I suppose I can't complain about having to reseat the RAM. :)

There is nothing like a deadline to spur me into action. In this case, daisy_knotwise and I now have a song for the OVFF Songwriting Contest that we finished writing last night.

The fact that it was Gretchen's birthday and writing a new duet was probably the thing that she wanted most for her birthday did not hurt at all. :)

One of the things that happened during the weeks that we were busy being sick around here was really nice.

daisy_knotwise and I were nominated for a Pegasus award for Best Classic Filksong for Apology.

Thanks to everyone who thought of us! (Because, you know, I don't think you ever get too old for positive reinforcement. Or as Gretchen frequently reminds me, "We should write another duet." Well, yes. Yes, we should...)

As of today, I have been married to the lovely daisy_knotwise for 20 years.

We're a bit surprised by the size of that number, because it doesn't seem nearly so long ago. :)

Happy birthday, daisy_knotwise!

And I am very happy to get to share it with you.

daisy_knotwise has returned from the drum workshop in Indiana, somewhat better for the wear.

Little girls were happy to see her.

So was I. :)