Jumperless

Calorie Lab is a pretty slick site. My sisters have started calorie counting to shake baby weight, so I’m trying it with them. While keeping track of all the calories I intake is a bit of a drag, it really makes me think about what I’m eating. This site is a good alternative to carrying a book around, I have enough crap in my purse already!

I took a gamble and answered a call from an unknown number on my cell today. It was a wrong number, some dude asking for Joe … or Mike, not me anyway. I told him he had the wrong number, so he proceeds to verify with me the number he dialed.

“Nope”, I said, “wrong number”.

“Wait, what number is this?” He asks.

“Not that number!”

I hung up on him. It’s one thing to call the wrong number, but to continue to annoy the person by verifying you effed up?!? Is it really that hard to look at the dialed history? I’m not going to verify my cell number with a stranger.

I went to dinner at a great Japanese restaurant with my mom and sister yesterday after a day of shopping at the slammed, downtown mall.  This older couple sits down at a table near us and the guy is morbidly obese, to the point that he could hardly walk.  He was unable to site at a booth and had to have a special table that the chairs could be pulled far back from.  When he sat down, he looked exhausted from the walk in, dripping sweat, and just leaned back to absorb the air conditioning.  I found myself nervously watching him during dinner because he kept balling his left fist and grabbing that wrist, wanted to be ready to call for am ambulance if needed.

It seemed like they hardly get out for dinner and the reason they were this night because obvious when family joined them at the table.  But, he did not seem that thrilled to be spending time with them, but pained that he had to leave his house and uncomfortable to be in public.  How sad.

I wanted this site to be more of a tech oriented site, but after working with IT all day, I have not been that enthused to write about it when I get home lately. So in goes a new category for my barely-coherent, hormone-imbalanced (just started a new pill) thoughts of the day. Gas prices are nearing $4 a gallon here in CA. That does not bother me so much because I’ve been driving fuel-efficient economy cars for the last 14 years, pretty much since high school (jeez, was it really that long ago?). Back when I lived in Florida and gas prices were below $1 a gallon, I still commuted to college in a little, efficient Toyota. Maybe I should have been like so many rednecks in the area and abused the cheap prices by commuting in a blue-collar, gas-guzzling utility-thing. Being cheap, I couldn’t convince myself to drive something that was less-efficient and overkill for what I needed.

I like driving, I prefer stick-shift cars and racing video games. It’s a fun hobby to me, not just part of my daily grind. I love cars and feel that peoples choice in cars and driving skill reflects what drives them. So it’s sad to see that driving is a mundane task for so many people, but I suppose if I was stuck shuttling kids and crap around in a clunky, automatic Suburban, I’d feel the same way. There are too many people trying to make better uses out of their traffic-jammed daily commute. This week I was stuck behind a young, not-bad-looking guy in a freaking Ford Taurus. Normally he’d probably be a peppy driver, but instead he was driving like so many senior citizens I used to grit my teeth behind in Florida, 10 miles below the speed limit in the fast lane and swerving repeatedly. It was because first he was dialing, then surfing emails on his Crackberry. Then he was eating something with a spoon! I’m thrilled that the hands-free cell phone law kicks in for CA drivers in a couple of months, but what about those that can’t make time to eat breakfast or put on their makeup before they leave the house?

I recently switched from Verizon to AT&T and tried the Samsung A737 before getting my current RAZR V3xx.  Here are some things I noticed about the A737:

- Bluetooth seems flaky, sometimes will connect to my Plantronics Voyager 510 when I power the headset on, sometimes I have to manually tell it to connect.  Bluetooth must be activated for the phone to connect to any Bluetooth device, so there is always a Bluetooth icon on the display, then another icon when it’s connected to a headset, making the display seem a bit cluttered.

- It was very simple connecting the phone to my Windows Vista PC via Bluetooth and transfer files to and from the phone, such as pictures and MP3 ringtones.  Something I missed on my old Verizon RAZR because it had those features locked down.

- The location of the voice mail menu is not intuitive.  In older phones, I’m used to it being under the messaging menu or having a shortcut key.  On this phone, it’s located in the Recent Calls sub menu, so to get to it, you have to hit the Menu button, move to the Recent Calls section, then scroll down to Voicemail in the sub menu.  I added Voicemail to an empty shortcut in the Options menu to get to it faster.

- I’ve had spotty reception problems with the phone that I’ve found other users complaining about also.  While walking my dog around the neighborhood, the phone struggled to get one bar in an area I know AT&T has good reception.  Two blocks over in the same neighbor hood, it showed full bars.  A couple of times it had reception problems in the pocket of my purse, draining the battery without my knowledge, so I’m always checking it now.

I use multiple GMail accounts at home and work and it gets tiring having one open in Firefox and Internet Explorer so I can check both at the same time. Here’s a Firefox plugin that lets you check multiple GMail accounts at a time and notifies you when any account has new messages. Once installed, click on the mail icon in the lower, right corner of Firefox and add the accounts you want it to check. Then you can just right-click on the icon and select the account from the pop-up menu, pretty slick.

Frustrated by my unfruitful research to solve my video problem, I finally emailed ATI (now AMD) support to see if I could get more information on driver plans. It took me 10 minutes of filtering through ATI’s site to find where I could just email support, I was forced to sift through knowledge base after knowledge base to see if my answer was in there before submitting a support request. Finally able to do so, I got a disappointing automated response:

“AMD Customer Care for ATI products does not provide direct technical support for laptops/notebooks at this current time (telephone or email). If you require direct technical support please contact the system manufacturer of your laptop/notebook.”

Followed by:

“AMD strives to continually improve our drivers and software and we thank you for taking the time to submit your feedback. The feedback you provided will be forwarded to our development team for review.”

Yeah, that’s quality support. Meanwhile, testing some apps in Vista yesterday nearly made me sick due to the jacked up video settings. Moving on, I attempted to contact Toshiba as instructed by above useless support message. As expected, got nowhere, Toshiba will not guarantee or support any laptop that does not have a Vista compatible sticker and they have no Vista drivers available for my laptop. Frustrated, I tried one more thing, a big gamble considering what happened with my last XP driver install, but this one worked and here’s what I did:

1. Download Toshiba’s Windows XP driver ATI Mobility driver, click to download.
2. Ran the self-extracting exe in Windows Vista, which launches the ATI installer then blows up with an unsupported hardware error.
3. Then go to the display properties in Vista and manually update the driver, selecting the “Have Disk” option and pointing to the driver sub folder of the newly extracted ATI directory (like C:\driver.temp) and selecting to first file listing.
4. Next the driver wizard will confirm which card you’re installing by showing 2 listings for ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP, select the first one and proceed.

The driver installation should take Vista about 3 minutes then you’ll be prompted to reboot. On restart, the video settings should look much better and the display properties should show an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP for display adapter.

This is not a perfect solution, some programs leave desktop remnants and some of the desktop gadgets have an ugly purple frame around them. Aero and some of the built-in screen savers will not work. But it’s much better than the distorted default and I don’t feel like I’m going to hurl after working in Vista for 30 minutes.

I got a Nintendo DS Lite when it first came out over a year ago and the only color choice was white.  I’ve been more addicted to it lately with a wide selection of adult oriented learning games.  I’m a sucker for puzzle games and love having so many constructive options now.   My Word Coach is the newest addition to my collection and I’ve been playing for 2 weeks now.   I’m not the most articulate person in the world, but I’d love the ability to stump my boss with an impressive vocabulary and I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt my writing skills.

The game starts out with some basic learning exercises to determine your level and map out your daily adjectives and has you pick a character to be your word coach (I went with the red head).  It then gives some basic games, such as Missing Letter and Block Letters (which still stumps me), as you progress more games and levels are added.  Currently it takes me about a half an hour to meet my daily objective.  Once the objective is met, it recommends you stop for the day to let the new words sink in.  If you stop before your objective is complete, it will pickup where you left off if you play before the end of the day.  I like having it available to play while watching TV, but it’s also good for getting 5 minutes of play here and there.

WordPress is a new adventure for me and the first challenge was getting Google AdSense to flow with a theme.  After many unsuccessful attempts to edit themes myself, I looked into widget options.  Here are the 10 Best WordPress plugins.  Currently I’m using the AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar, installation and configuration was super easy.  But the configuration menus lack color palette menus, so you have to know the color codes you want to go with your theme.