Spaces, One Frontier

Today is the last day of work before the long weekend. I’m hoping that it will be quiet and that I can leave early. I need to stop at the pet food store on the way home for cat food and I will be swinging by my parents’ house, too. This evening there will be some organizing and packing to do. In the morning, I’ll pack and load the car for the drive. I will need to get up fairly early since I need to get some reports posted for work, though I could probably even wait until the evening for that, once I get the network set up. I’m not sure that I will be wanting to work after eating some turkey and stuffing, though!

I like short work weeks and this is one of them. Thursday is Thanksgiving and we’ll be visiting Pennie’s family. It will be fun to see Amaya, who I haven’t seen in 2 months.

On Saturday as I was clearing what I hope is the last of the leaves from our yard, I passed Pennie’s car in the driveway and noticed that her left front tire was flat. It was getting late, so I left it until Sunday. In the morning, I pulled out the donut spare and pulled off the tire. There was a screw embedded in the flat of the tire, so a plug would have handled it quite well. Unfortunately, the tire was pretty bald and there were some cuts and a quarter sized chunk of rubber gouged out. These were probably from the accident she had a number of months back and they should have replaced both tires and not just the passenger side front tire. I headed down to my parents’ house to clear leaves there and noticed that the tire place by BJ’s was open. I stopped in on the way back and got a price on the replacement. I put away the mower and headed back out with the flat tire. I had to sign up for a BJ’s membership, but I figure we’ll make good use of that over the next 14 months as they do have some pretty good prices there. I put the new tire on and feel much better that it is taken care of. It is actually good that she got the flat as that tire was just not safe!

Other than a load of leaf clearing and the tire, I didn’t do much else this weekend. It felt pretty relaxing, actually. I decided to stay out of the forums all weekend, so I’ll be playing catch-up today and probably the rest of the week, unless traffic is light in them. I had wanted to upgrade the rest of the network this weekend, but it will have to wait a bit longer. And I still need to get the Thinkpad to the final of Windows 7 as it is still running the RC version. I can then get the Office 2010 beta on that machine. I’m also planning to swap out the hard drive on the HP Tablet and put Windows 7 on it. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to that task! Looming ahead is a task I’ve been putting off for years, but now needs to be taken care of soon. I’ve been running Microsoft Money forever and the database file contains some corruption that doesn’t cause any issues with the numbers, but causes an error dialog for every entry and navigation and causes a real slowness of the program, especially at startup. Since Microsoft is ending all support for Money, causing the online bits to stop working, I’ll be switching to Quicken, but first I need to go through a lengthy process of exporting the data and rebuilding the Money data file from scratch so that I can upgrade it to a more recent version and then import the entire file to Quicken. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Not!

I stayed up entirely too late last night and I sure paid for that this morning!

Yesterday, a Facebook poll making the rounds riled me up and I could not ignore it, even though I didn’t take it. It showed up on my feed from a few other people. I won’t bother with the details here, but I commented and I suppose I was a bit harsh in my rebuke. Before heading to bed shortly before 11 I composed an apology and posted it, but tossed in another zing or two to make my point. By this time, I had already been removed from the target’s “friends” list. Apparently, the discussion ensued, so the entire string of comments and the original poll was deleted. No problems – except that I got less than 4 hours of sleep.

I also installed the latest version of MSN Explorer on one machine earlier in the evening and had an email dialog about it with my MSN contact. The upgrade is a bit stealth right now in that the new version is available from the member page, but no reference to its being a new version is made. Upgrades are being staged for a very limited window of time each day until they feel comfortable that there are no issues to deal with which were missed during the beta. The changes are mostly under the covers, but the new version fixes a bunch of defects.

I didn’t spend much time on the Office 2010 beta which I installed to one machine on Tuesday and fought with for a bit until I cold get it activated. The removal of the Technical Preview build from the machine seems to have left lots of junk behind and this caused headaches for me. I wasn’t asked for a key at install, and it designated itself as a MAK version on install. Since I don’t have an Activation Server, activation would fail, of course. I finally ended up resolving it by removing a bunch of TP registry keys and reinstalling the beta – twice. After the second try, I poked around to find the cached setup file and ran it again. This time, when it launched, it offered me choices – repair, remove, change, and change key. Finally! I entered the key, it chugged along for a few minutes and when I launched Word, I was able to activate. I would like to spend some time poking at the suite, but I haven’t had time for that yet. I should have poked at it rather than poking on Facebook.

Coffee does help overcome the lack of sleep, but I can’t stay up late again tonight or I’ll pay again tomorrow.

Well, maybe not half, but I made some progress on upgrading the home network this weekend. I removed 3 switches upstairs and replaced them with 8 port Gigabit switches. It appears that I might need to replace some cabling, too, but I won’t know that for sure until I replace the switches and router in my office. All of the switches I picked up are power saving units, which are reported to drop power consumption when it isn’t needed. I also pulled out the old Shuttle PC from the upstairs computer desk. I had stopped using that PC for any testing almost a year back, but finally pulled it on Saturday. The next steps are to swap out the router and switches in my office and I’ll also move the old Gateway Media Center machine from my office to upstairs. If I don’t get to that this coming weekend, I’ll do it over the long Thanksgiving weekend.

Due to the rain we had on Saturday, there was no leaf mulching to be done on Sunday. Our yard isn’t bad at all, but my parents’ yard is loaded with leaves again and will take a few hours to clear. Hopefully, it will be dry next weekend so that I can get that taken care of.

We don’t have a belfry, nor is the title a reference to any nuttiness, but we do have an attic. Yesterday evening I was riding the exercise bike when there was a fluttering overhead and a bat flew past my head. It flew back and forth a few times before disappearing into the rafters at the other end of the attic from where I was riding. Bats are actually very tiny, so I was unable to locate it when I checked the rafters where it had disappeared. I got back on the bike and finished my workout.

When we first moved in the house 11 years ago, it was August and we didn’t have air conditioners other than our bedroom. There were two ventilation fans in the roof that are controlled by thermostats. We had the attic door open to pull air through the house and we were sitting in the living room watching television when something swooped overhead. Yes, it was a bat. It flew around a few times and headed back into the attic. I went up there, turned on the light, and opened the windows and screens, hoping that it would leave. Well, it didn’t, but unbeknownst to me, our cat, Nikki, decided to climb out onto the roof, but that’s another story. We found her on the roof the next day. I found that bat in the rafters and in my efforts to catch it for release outside, I ended up killing it – they are not only tiny, but also very fragile! I figured we were okay at that point. Later (I don’t recall if it was the same evening or not), Pennie was at her computer desk, which was in the room leading to the attic. I was downstairs in the kitchen. Another bat flew past her and downstairs. This time I didn’t end up catching or killing it, but we closed the attic door. The next day I picked up a screen door at Home Depot and installed it.

The bats managed to get in through the eaves. Where the rafters extend out over the edge of the floor is capped with fascia boards all around and beadboard on the underside, but there are gaps where you can see outside if you pull the crappy insulation aside. A project that I’ve been putting off for a really long time is to close up the ends of the rafters at the top of the wall and seal any cracks. All of the flimsy foil backed insulation that serves little to no purpose needs to be removed and some nice thick insulation needs to be installed throughout. That should stop the bats from getting inside, even if they still decide to take up residence in the eaves, which is where I expect the roost during the day.

I don’t mind bats and actually like that they fly around outside at night to catch bugs, but I draw the line with bats living inside our house! I guess its time to start thinking about sealing things up – to keep the bats out and to keep the heat inside. I’m sure that there’s a whole lot of heat escaping through the roof in the cold weather. So, even if I don’t build out the knee walls or actually finish the attic space, I need to get the first part of the project going soon!