I am Karan from Olympia, WA.
Almost every other name used here is a pseodonym pseudonim pseudonymn alias.
The rest of it is true - mostly - and all of it is my own.
Don't even think about taking any of it, unless of course, you want to pay me.
Random Wisdom: Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed. - George Burns
The counter says that 2846340 have been flummelized, but I personally think it's all a big lie.
In my never ending quest to bring you the latest and greatest events in my life, I present, the Samsung Road Trip.
On my birthday, Leonard bought me a little flat screened LCD TV by Samsung. It’s what I wanted to replace the previous set which went belly up after a long sad death scene. One day after it’s Best Buy (misnamed) return warranty expired (that’s 30 days in human years), the digital channel sounds started speaking intermittent Martian. Of course I took it back to Best Buy (misnamed) to see if they had mercy in their cold cold hearts and as expected, they don’t. So that I could take advantage of the year long warranty, they did offer to ship it back to Samsung for me. For $38.95. I declined and instead opted to do the effort myself. After an eternity of effort to obtain the proper shipping label from Samsung, I UPS’d the thing back to New Jersey after they kept it for two days and, I hope, they opted to repair it for me. I just received notice that it is on its way back to me so I thought I’d keep y’all informed regarding its progress to Olympia.
The trip to New Jersey was a long one...taking almost two weeks. Although I don’t have proof, I do believe the green line documents my TV’s many miles, including a stop over in Georgia where I’m sure it visited my sister.
On its return trip hopefully direct from Parsippany, NJ, which is nestled up against Highway 287 and on its way to Hodgkins, IL (near Chicago):
Click for larger map view
This effort has the potential to put even me to sleep.
On July 1st, WAshington state will ban the use of hands-on cell phone use while driving. To remain in compliance, I bought a dandy gizmo by BlueAnt 
called Supertooth Light. It essentially clamps onto my visor and allows me to yell at it in order to be heard by the lucky person on the other end of the cell phone call.
How does it work? I dunno. I’ve been looking at it for two days and I can’t get the package open. In my way of thinking doesn’t speak well to my ability to install it correcty in my car.
Alas.
I’ve been mucking around in the ee code that build this place and so far have managed to mess it up a bit. For example...the RSS feeds are completely broken. Must fix. And...there’s other internal bits that don’t work any more but I don’t care so much about that.
I also changed Rej’s name back to Rej/Rejjie. I like it better than Orion and Rejjie doesn’t seem to care about that right now.
One cool thing I finally changed was that I reset the permissions to allow me to use small snippets of code here which allows me to post cool stuff like this from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories:
More mucking about to do…
Today my long suffering computer gave up the ghost. It is dead. It is no more. It is toast.
Lucky for me, I backed-up the whole thing on Sunday so all that is lost is one or two highly replaceable email messages.
Of course all this joy is tempered by the fact that I now have to pony up some bucks to replace the thing. With that in mind, I costed out my dream machine, a Mac Pro. After adding in all the bells and whistles and I do mean ALL the bells and whistles, I’ll need to write a check for $28,000 plus tax plus shipping. And in keeping with things Apple, I’ll need to get me a Macbook Air for an additional $5200 and and an i-Phone for $500 more. I’ll hold off on getting an i-Pod for now because I’m not the greedy sort.
Or I can go with plan B and get Leonard to just build me a new PC.
Life is never ever dull around here.
Update: As if Apple is calling to me in my time of need, this $40,000 Blinged-Out MacBook will just meet my laptop needs
if you haven’t...well....now I’m heartbroken. If you have, thanks. I missed you too.
I’ve been experiencing many technical difficulties including the fact that an idiot let loose on the delete key on my keyboard.
That would be me.
You know how it goes...you have in mind a correction to a long time in-place set up, get going on making those changes and then hit delete even though your brain is screaming, not that one, not there you fool....achhhh too late now.
And given the long ago-ness of the original set up and the inability of me to find my set up files, that delete was a BIG mistake, one that eventually took 5 days fix. Gotta love the customer service cadre. Not one of them told me what they were really thinking about my predicament.
About 20 minutes ago I reloaded the reloadable, reset the lost and pressed the finish button and there before me it all returned to the version that is normal for me.
Once again, life is good.
I don’t know if I mentioned it before or 10,000 times but our power goes out here. A lot. Usually we go electricity-free during some sort of storm but only if it’s raining or snowing or blowing or cold or hot or sunny or dry. As part of our long term just deal with it, we installed a fancy gizmo called a gen-tran in our electrical panel that allows us to plug our Binford 3000 Power Generator directly into our house electrical web. It’s better than just snaking an extension cord through the window because one....it doesn’t require that have an open window and two...when the power does return, the power shipped to us by the electric company, the gen-tran prevents power feedback which would fry the guy on the pole working so hard to let us use our microwave.
My understanding of electricity is really quite small. I know that it has something to do with a kite, a key and a young man named Ben. But that’s about it. I do know that at this moment in time, the electric company is earning it’s monthly arm and leg from us. Those are days to celebrate. Yay.
We realized this early on and nearly everything that requires juice is on some sort of surge protector, even our Sonicare toothbrushes. However. Hoooowevvver. Occasionally these electrical comings and goings play havoc with our electrical toys, even those who have spent their entire life living in a fancy plug protector. Sometimes an electrical thing gives its life to the big surging bolt that zooms from wherever it originates to the tiny circuitry inside. I don’t know if this is because the surge protection is faulty or previously fried. I just don’t know because like I wrote earlier I don’t know nuthin’ about powering no toaster.
Anyway, the last power outage or ginormous surge must have fried something electrical in the corner that houses all my computer gizmos and office sorts of machines. It seems that 2 of the USB ports in my 6 USB port thing-a-majig no longer work. My paper shedder has gone belly up and even worse my tiny 15 year old TV has taken on some sort of bratty existence where it turns off all by itself. I’ll be sitting here typing away, totally ignoring Bill O’Reilly when blink, the thing goes off without my fingers being any where near the power button on its remote control.
I’m just kidding. I would rather be dead than watch that bag of air O’Reilly. But my TV does turn off all by itself and it stays off for hours.
So now I’m thinking that either I get my big bag of money and replace all this stuff or just keep pretending that everything is just taking some sort of 19th century break.
Oh...I forgot. I don’t have a big bag of money.
Maybe I need to take a 19th century break and live without all this stuff.
