This is annoying

The laptop that The Company provides me I use as my own compooter when at home so I don't have to fight with The Mrs. for the desktop system and so that I can log in to work to check email and IM with work people. I also do most of my blogging from it cuz I'm right there. Well, on Wednesday night, the backlight control decided to flake out. Now, whenever the compooter gets warm, it shuts off the backlight and I can't see the screen anymore. I have to do a standby and let it cool off for about a half hour, and then the screen comes back. I've learned that if I set all the power management features to absolute lowest power levels, I can keep it up about 45 minutes.

I tried to get the IT guy to swap the hard drive into another body, but these are being end-of-lifed, and they're dropping like flies. Can't get the chassis anymore. So instead I get issued a brand new compooter. But the Windows build failed on it Thursday night, so I couldn't get it Friday like I was supposed to. I get it Wednesday instead. Then, I imagine, I spend most of Wednesday migrating files and installing software.

Blogging is so much more dangerous now, knowing that at any instant it could cut out on me. Happily, [Gaaa!!! I just lost the screen. That only stayed up for 5 minutes.]

Happily, blogger autosaves every minute or two, so when the screen cuts out, I just sit a couple minutes, then complete the post from the desktop compooter. As I am doing now. I could hook up an external monitor, but that would be a royal pain to dig the 17" CRT out of the storage room. Especially at Christmas time when the storage room is like a war zone of wrapping paper and ribbons and secret secret stuff squirreled about.

I completed the re-lighting of the kitchen cabinets today, right on schedule. It required a quick trip to Ace hardware to pick up a couple 1/2" knockout wire grommet thingees. Those are the little plastic jobbers that go in the knockout holes to keep the bare sheet metal of the light chassis from cutting into the wire running through the knockout hole. I had been scavenging the ones on the old fixtures, but when I got to the second-last one it didn't have one (code violation!). I bought two, just in case the last one also didn't have one. And it didn't.

I learned why the light fixture over the cooktop only had the left side working. The wire that powered the right side was not hooked up. It was just sitting there, happily, like the day it was born. I couldn't find any indication that it had ever been hooked up as the stripped conductor tip was nice and smooth and didn't have the the thread bites in it from the wire nuts that everything else had when I unhooked them. Odd.

The dimmer switch (a Lutron Faedra) is fancy-schmancy. When you turn it on or off, it ramps the light level up or down, respectively, rather than doing it abruptly. And it had little LEDs that tell you how high it is set. When The Mrs. saw it hooked up to all the new lights, she said I was "pimping our kitchen."

I've been practicing the guitar again. I know you're all very happy to know that. I had let it go roughly since we moved, but this week I was sentenced to sit next to HannahC in the office while she did her homework. After a couple days, I decided there must be something better for me to do during this time than play Bubble Shooter. So I brought up my favorite guitar and a couple songs that I had once kinda learned though not at full speed, and I started re-learning them.

Now my finger tips hurt.

Tomorrow, HannahC and I will run out for some last-minute Christmas shopping. Not much. Just a couple quick things.