23 November 2008
Momiji Medicals, Ugly Floor, Tech Wizardry, and Psycho Bush
23/11/08 05:52
A normal late November week. Cloudy, rainy and cool. A friend at work is convinced we will have snow on Monday. I seriously doubt it though. While the north island and the Queen Charlotte Islands may get snow here it's likely to be only rain. We did notice Minnesota has some snow. In case you weren't aware of it there is a great web-cam on Northrop Mall at the University;
http://www.it.umn.edu/webcam.php
So we are able to see exactly what it's like on campus.
The big thing this week was a bit of a medical crisis for Momiji. Her wound where Geiger nipped her a couple weeks ago had gotten infected and her natural method of treatment, clawing at it with the same paw she just used in the litter box, didn't seem to help. Go figure. So we took her into the vet. She cleaned up the wound and gave us some medicine. For the last five days we've had a twice a day routine. While Marsha holds Momiji, I clean the area with an antiseptic on a kleenex, she doesn't mind that too much. Then I wash the area with warm water, also something she's OK with. Then I apply an antiseptic/cortisone cream to the area. This kills the itch and she seems to really like it. Lastly we squirt 1 ml of liquid antibiotic in her mouth. At that point all good will is out the window and Momiji wants nothing to do with us. I'm not sure why though. The Vet said that the antibiotic was banana flavored. Don't cats like bananas? Anyway, we're getting rather good at giving her the medicine but she is also getting really good at struggling and wriggling to get away. Stalemate. We're just glad we're almost done with that.
Last week we mentioned that we ordered a garage door and because it was on sale we also bought four boxes of flooring for the foyer. Yesterday I opened one of the boxes and laid several pieces out just to see how they looked. They were supposed to look like stone and the manufacturer did a very good job. It really looked like stone. Old filthy stone tiles that had dirt ground into them for about a hundred years. The kind of stone floor you'd expect to see in an Anglo-Saxon house in North Wales that nobody had lived in for a couple of centuries. The sorts of stones found in the dungeon of a ruined castle where bears hibernated on the first floor and went downstairs to relieve themselves rather than going out in the cold Scottish winter night.
OK, Marsha didn't think it looked that bad.
But boy it wasn't good. It looked OK in the store, but I absolutely hated the pattern when it was in our house,( in case you had not picked up on that yet, sometimes I don't make my opinions very clear when I'm writing). Today I boxed everything back up and took it back to Home Depot. We'll have to keep looking.
Last weekend we performed a bit of surgery on the TV. Several years ago we purchased a Magnavox LCD TV at Target. It came out here with us but in the last year we'd noticed an odd problem. The TV started to spontaneously 'flip". It would change channels by itself, to channel 3, 33, or 333 or to 9, 99, or 999, then to would start switching from TV to DVD to VGA input. Then the Mute started flipping on and off. In the last few weeks it was doing all of these at the same time. Amusing in some ways but not terribly useful if you actually want to watch something.
After some research I found that this model was known for this problem (actually many problems of which this is only one). The trouble is that the circuit board above the screen that holds all of the buttons is defective. It has a bunch of leaky capacitors that generate spurious signals that make the TV think we're sending in commands. I started to hunt down a replacement board when it hit me: I haven't changed channels or adjusted the volume by walking over to the TV in years. I don't even think our other big LCD TV has buttons on the set. I do everything with the remote. So last Saturday we lay the Magnavox down removed the back panel, and performed a button-ectomy. There were actually only three wires connecting the switches to the main circuit board. We cut the wires and isolated them with electrical tape and then put the whole assembly back together. With bated breath I picked up the remote and hit the power switch... and nothing happened. Then I realized I was holding the remote the wrong way around and tried again. This time the TV worked just fine. We've been watching it for a week now and it has been rock solid with nary a problem. This little exercise saved us the cost of buying a replacement, some $500-$900 . Not a bad bit of work for a Saturday Morning.
As I mentioned before Marsha has been very busy this week. She really likes her job at Superstore. It's active, she gets to help people, and there's no stress to take home. She also had one of the best grades in the final in her tax class. Now they are starting to train them to use the software that HR Block uses to do taxes. It's Windows only but that's no problem for us. We have MacBooks. I set up a virtual WindowsXP environment using VirtualBox from Sun (which is free, making it one of the best deals in computing today). Setting up the XP environment, installing the software and finishing everything else took less than an hour.
Cat's getting better, TV's working again, Computer is working just fine; all in all this was a good week.
D&M
Pix
In our yard we have a plant that looks tropical but that grows in Canada and blooms at the end on November. How messed up is that? Does anyone know what the heck this thing is?
P1010003.JPG
P1010004.JPG
http://www.it.umn.edu/webcam.php
So we are able to see exactly what it's like on campus.
The big thing this week was a bit of a medical crisis for Momiji. Her wound where Geiger nipped her a couple weeks ago had gotten infected and her natural method of treatment, clawing at it with the same paw she just used in the litter box, didn't seem to help. Go figure. So we took her into the vet. She cleaned up the wound and gave us some medicine. For the last five days we've had a twice a day routine. While Marsha holds Momiji, I clean the area with an antiseptic on a kleenex, she doesn't mind that too much. Then I wash the area with warm water, also something she's OK with. Then I apply an antiseptic/cortisone cream to the area. This kills the itch and she seems to really like it. Lastly we squirt 1 ml of liquid antibiotic in her mouth. At that point all good will is out the window and Momiji wants nothing to do with us. I'm not sure why though. The Vet said that the antibiotic was banana flavored. Don't cats like bananas? Anyway, we're getting rather good at giving her the medicine but she is also getting really good at struggling and wriggling to get away. Stalemate. We're just glad we're almost done with that.
Last week we mentioned that we ordered a garage door and because it was on sale we also bought four boxes of flooring for the foyer. Yesterday I opened one of the boxes and laid several pieces out just to see how they looked. They were supposed to look like stone and the manufacturer did a very good job. It really looked like stone. Old filthy stone tiles that had dirt ground into them for about a hundred years. The kind of stone floor you'd expect to see in an Anglo-Saxon house in North Wales that nobody had lived in for a couple of centuries. The sorts of stones found in the dungeon of a ruined castle where bears hibernated on the first floor and went downstairs to relieve themselves rather than going out in the cold Scottish winter night.
OK, Marsha didn't think it looked that bad.
But boy it wasn't good. It looked OK in the store, but I absolutely hated the pattern when it was in our house,( in case you had not picked up on that yet, sometimes I don't make my opinions very clear when I'm writing). Today I boxed everything back up and took it back to Home Depot. We'll have to keep looking.
Last weekend we performed a bit of surgery on the TV. Several years ago we purchased a Magnavox LCD TV at Target. It came out here with us but in the last year we'd noticed an odd problem. The TV started to spontaneously 'flip". It would change channels by itself, to channel 3, 33, or 333 or to 9, 99, or 999, then to would start switching from TV to DVD to VGA input. Then the Mute started flipping on and off. In the last few weeks it was doing all of these at the same time. Amusing in some ways but not terribly useful if you actually want to watch something.
After some research I found that this model was known for this problem (actually many problems of which this is only one). The trouble is that the circuit board above the screen that holds all of the buttons is defective. It has a bunch of leaky capacitors that generate spurious signals that make the TV think we're sending in commands. I started to hunt down a replacement board when it hit me: I haven't changed channels or adjusted the volume by walking over to the TV in years. I don't even think our other big LCD TV has buttons on the set. I do everything with the remote. So last Saturday we lay the Magnavox down removed the back panel, and performed a button-ectomy. There were actually only three wires connecting the switches to the main circuit board. We cut the wires and isolated them with electrical tape and then put the whole assembly back together. With bated breath I picked up the remote and hit the power switch... and nothing happened. Then I realized I was holding the remote the wrong way around and tried again. This time the TV worked just fine. We've been watching it for a week now and it has been rock solid with nary a problem. This little exercise saved us the cost of buying a replacement, some $500-$900 . Not a bad bit of work for a Saturday Morning.
As I mentioned before Marsha has been very busy this week. She really likes her job at Superstore. It's active, she gets to help people, and there's no stress to take home. She also had one of the best grades in the final in her tax class. Now they are starting to train them to use the software that HR Block uses to do taxes. It's Windows only but that's no problem for us. We have MacBooks. I set up a virtual WindowsXP environment using VirtualBox from Sun (which is free, making it one of the best deals in computing today). Setting up the XP environment, installing the software and finishing everything else took less than an hour.
Cat's getting better, TV's working again, Computer is working just fine; all in all this was a good week.
D&M
Pix
In our yard we have a plant that looks tropical but that grows in Canada and blooms at the end on November. How messed up is that? Does anyone know what the heck this thing is?
P1010003.JPG
P1010004.JPG