The Vent and Rant Thread

[bjones6416]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

The jackass stoner next door is out of jail/rehab and moved back in. You know, the one who we are pretty sure robbed us last March and stole my laptop and all of my ebooks. He just had the nerve to ask if he could come in and charge "his" computer because "he can't find the cord."

That's because he forgot to steal the charging cord!

I told him that nothing he says can convince me that he wasn't holding my stolen computer, and to never come into my yard again.

Yikes! I hate that he is back next door!

A couple of years ago my car was broken into twice in my driveway, and the stereo stolen. Last year the whole CAR was stolen, and when it was recovered, there were several CD's that didn't belong to me in the floorboard. HA HA HA -- they thought they would joyride and listen to some tunes but THEY HAD ALREADY TAKEN THE RADIO!

[DixieGal]

Originally Posted by bjones6416

Yikes! I hate that he is back next door!

A couple of years ago my car was broken into twice in my driveway, and the stereo stolen. Last year the whole CAR was stolen, and when it was recovered, there were several CD's that didn't belong to me in the floorboard. HA HA HA -- they thought they would joyride and listen to some tunes but THEY HAD ALREADY TAKEN THE RADIO!

Our thief also took a box of season 4 The Simpsons. But one disk was in the DBD player, one was lying on top of it, they dropped one of gthe disks in the yard, so they only got away with one disk out of four.

He moved in when his father died and left the house to him. It was a nonstop circus over there for 5 months, until he crashed his car and killed his girlfriend in April. He's been in jail and rehab ever since, until last week. His poor son came over to tell us that he is back. The son has always been more of his dad's caretaker than the other way around. The old man was a good neighbor. How did this guy becoe such a loser? It must have skipped a generation.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

The jackass stoner next door is out of jail/rehab and moved back in. You know, the one who we are pretty sure robbed us last March and stole my laptop and all of my ebooks. He just had the nerve to ask if he could come in and charge "his" computer because "he can't find the cord."

That's because he forgot to steal the charging cord!


I told him that nothing he says can convince me that he wasn't holding my stolen computer, and to never come into my yard again.

OMG! Do you have the serial number anywhere? If so you could certainly file charges.

[DixieGal]

When it was stolen, the cops took all of the serial number info. Do you think I should call them? I have nothing to base my call on except coincidence and instinct.

There were several hundred carefully catalogued ebooks on it. As well as several thousand valuable gemstone cutting diagrams that were designed for me by expert designers who think it is cute to be a girl cutter. THANK GOD that I had those designs backed up on disks! Now if only my eyes would clear enough for me to get back into the workshop.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

When it was stolen, the cops took all of the serial number info. Do you think I should call them? I have nothing to base my call on except coincidence and instinct.

There were several hundred carefully catalogued ebooks on it. As well as several thousand valuable gemstone cutting diagrams that were designed for me by expert designers who think it is cute to be a girl cutter. THANK GOD that I had those designs backed up on disks! Now if only my eyes would clear enough for me to get back into the workshop.

Did he actually bring the computer over or say it was the same kind? If so then I think I'd make a call. I can't advise you, but the cops certainly can.

[DixieGal]

He was holding a shiny black laptop that looks like every other black laptop on the planet.

The reason we are so sure that he or one of his pals robbed us, is because his girlfriend had come over earlier that day. They had been fighting, and he had locked her out and drove away. She wanted to come in and wait for him to come home. She was really really messed up on meth, and also had the flu. Tim is on chemo for severe rheumatoid arthritis and is immune suppressed, so he can't be around sick folks. We offered to let he stay in our camper until he came home, but she got all ugly and confrontational. That night, while we were asleep, we were robbed.

[kennyc]

Gawd what a mess!

[DixieGal]

He looks clean and healthy now. I hope so.

[kennyc]

Well, it's always possible.....

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

When it was stolen, the cops took all of the serial number info. Do you think I should call them? I have nothing to base my call on except coincidence and instinct.

There were several hundred carefully catalogued ebooks on it. As well as several thousand valuable gemstone cutting diagrams that were designed for me by expert designers who think it is cute to be a girl cutter. THANK GOD that I had those designs backed up on disks! Now if only my eyes would clear enough for me to get back into the workshop.

Here's hoping too .... Take extra care

[wannabee]

I lived in some lousy apartments once. If the neighbors weren't fighting someone was having a party or practicing the drums under our bedroom at 2am. So glad to be away from that crap.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

Speaking of rebooting etc, I must say that I'm utterly impressed with Ubuntu 10.10 on my netbook and workstations, being able to go into hibernate within a couple of seconds and restore in 3~5 seconds, including restablishing secure-wifi, finally I can now shut down my machine (well nearly shut down). The power saving isn't that great, since the workstation is only a 20W Asus B202 (the LCD consumes 55W !!) and of course the netbooks aren't much worse.
Paul

I have Ubuntu 10.10 on an ancient (2002) Fujitsu Lifebook. The box was a gift from a friend, who upgraded to a faster system. She said it was "slow slow slow". Well, no surprise. The box has a 867mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, 256MB of RAM (and the CPU grabs 16MB off the top for code morphing), and a UDMA 4 HD. It came from Fujitsu with WinXP Pro SP2 installed. XP wants 512MB RAM to think about performing.

I redid it to multiboot Win2K Pro, Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS. Win2K is a marginal improvement over XP on the box at best. It takes 8 minutes to boot, and is snail slow once up. Puppy is fairly sprightly if you only use the bundled apps, as it's intended for lower end kit and the apps are chosen for small size. But it's quirky and non-standard in various ways. Ubuntu is usable with a little patience.

I originally installed Xubuntu, but performance was unacceptable. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested that too much Gnome had crept in, and that Ubuntu had a steadily advancing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended reinstalling from the Minimal CD to get a working command line installation, then use apt-get to pick and choose what I wanted. I wanted to upgrade the Puppy install as well, so I wiped and redid the Linux slices, setting them up as ext4 filesystems, and installed Ubuntu from the Minimal CD, then added XFCE4 and preferred apps. It helped a lot.

Ubuntu and Puppy mount each other's partitions at boot and can see each other's file systems. They also mount the NTFS slice Windows lives on, and the FAT32 partition where FreeDOS is installed. Some things, like the subset of my ebook library on the notebook, live on the Windows slice, but can be seen and read from the Linux side with FBReader. I've been experimenting with having one copy of big applications like Open Office 3 shared between the Puppy and Ubuntu installations. For self-contained stuff that installs under a specific directory, like /opt/openoffice, it works well.

The biggest problem with the box is slow disk I/O, and Ubuntu can't address that. The UDMA4 HD has an 18MB/sec transfer rate. Big apps simply take a long time to load. (Firefox 3.6 takes 45 seconds to load and initialize, and is sluggish once up. I don't even try try to use it for browsing. OO 3 takes about a minute to invoke, though it is usable once it has.)

Ubuntu 10.10 did fix an annoying problem with 10.04 - the Lifebook has a native screen resolution of 1280x768. Ubuntu 9.10 recognized and used it. Ubuntu 10.04 refused to do better than 1024x768. (Tracing through logs indicated Linux was aware of the 1280x768 resolution, but I never found the place to tell it to use it.) 10.10 corrected that issue. The most recent patches fixed an annoyance with Update Manager, where it would not properly terminate after use, and had to be killed from the command line.

The current fun is playing with alternate window managers, and Fluxbox, LXDE, Openbox and a few other things are installed and selectable at login.
______
Dennis

[DixieGal]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

Here's hoping too .... Take extra care

Thanks! You are my rock and I love you. Yes, I sprang a new hemorrhage last Thursday a week ago. It was clearing a bit, but seems to have slowed.

BTW, we had a 2.2 earthquake in Alabama this week. The only way we knew was because they told us on the news.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

Thanks! You are my rock and I love you. Yes, I sprang a new hemorrhage last Thursday a week ago. It was clearing a bit, but seems to have slowed.

BTW, we had a 2.2 earthquake in Alabama this week. The only way we knew was because they told us on the news.

2.2? Isn't that about what you get when old man Woodham down the street knocks the pickle jar off the counter?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

Thanks! You are my rock and I love you. Yes, I sprang a new hemorrhage last Thursday a week ago. It was clearing a bit, but seems to have slowed.

BTW, we had a 2.2 earthquake in Alabama this week. The only way we knew was because they told us on the news.

Hope things get better.