Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

We’re getting there…

Monday, May 12th, 2014

I’ve wanted to actually sit down and post for well over a month and a half, but the joy of homeownership when the place is constantly a wreck tends to take the priority.  So, since it’s been so long, I now don’t even know where to start.

If you follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook you’d know that we did actually close on the house and get the keys, it happened on March 14th instead of March 12th but it happened. Since then it’s been a mad-dash of “Get This”, “Fix This”, “Clean This”, followed by INSERT MORE COFFEE!!  The house was so freaking disgusting after we got here on closing day. It took me over a week of shampooing carpets before I was even remotely comfortable with moving in my stuff over here. The bathrooms were scrubbed a few times with A LOT of bleach, the garage was full of crap that the previous owners should have gotten rid of and it fucking cost us money to do it, money we didn’t have because they completely fucking screwed us during this entire god damn process.  After going through this house we’ve easily determined that these people were low-life scum who had absolutely no idea what broom was, let alone any advanced cleaning accessory such as a SPONGE. The layers of slime that were scrubbed off of the showers is still mind-blowing to me… to the point that I’m now scrubbing the shower down almost every day just to make sure there’s none of their residue making an appearance – my O.C.D. in this house is possibly 10 times worse than it’s ever been before.  I swear to god if they were ever dumb enough to step foot on this property I’d probably shove a few of the shot-gun shells found in our crawl space straight up their asses.

In the past month we’ve gotten the bare essentials taken care of on the house, the rest are all happening this summer. We’ve got a huge couch and a big comfy chair (for Sean) in the Den. We recently picked up a gorgeous 6-person cherry dining table to start building up the dining room, we bought a small kitchen table the first week so we had somewhere to eat, picked up some bar stools on clearance from Lowes that were a really good find. George and Sean have been busy with some of the maintenance around the house so that we can be in a livable environment, and the only major thing left to accomplish this upcoming summer is to get the roof patched up.  If we had a little more wiggle room with the bank account this summer we’d have a company come in to take down a few of the over-grown (and dying) trees in the back yard so we can start putting in posts for a fence.  Why? Cause the neighbor behind us has the most annoying dog in the world and I’d rather it no longer have the ability to see us whenever we pass by one of our windows, and I want a damn pool so a fence must come first!

Sean’s been really happy down in his basement office, I was able to spend some time getting my office painted and setup so the only thing at this point that’s missing is a new desk but I’m making due with the folding table for now, it’s holding the iMac up pretty well, as well as the side monitor so I think I’ll be OK for a little while. Of course I’m going to need to get my Windows desktop setup at some point for cross-browser testing but I’ll continue to utilize the free services for now.  I could really care less if IE6 supports something anyway, if you’re still using IE6 then you shouldn’t have a computer to begin with.

The one big draw-back for life recently is the fact that my cell-phone is pretty much useless. I dropped it on the day of closing and the back popped off, it’s currently being held together with electrical tape and the battery only holds a charge for about 30-60 minutes. I literally have to keep it on the charger unless I’m talking on it, in which case I have to make sure there’s a charger close by.  Now, the battery was shit before I broke the back off of the phone, it’s just gotten much worse over time so I’m going to assume that replacing it should help to solve a few of my problems.  Thankfully, even though the Droid-4 was made in a way that Verizon would have to change the battery for you, I was able to break the piece off that Verizon has the tool for and I don’t need to waste money by bringing anything to them.  So, I’m gonna spend $20 on Amazon for a replacement and hopefully be good to go. I’m not due for an upgrade, but with the cost of cellphones I’d rather salvage the one I have for as long as humanly possible.  There’s no point in my spending $200 to upgrade every two years when I can just pick up a $20 battery that should hopefully give me at least 12 months without any problems.

BUT – the one thing we’re doing to help with the problem is turning our Double Play with Comcast into a Triple Play. Sean didn’t really see the point in having a house phone in the beginning, but now that he’s seeing how many problems I’m having with my phone and seeing how often I need to be ON the phone because my entire family and all of my friends live in NY he’s realizing that the house phone will be an essential part of life here for me. So tonight while we were in Staples we found an AT&T phone system for like $100 that included like 5 phones which would pretty much cover every room in the house, Sean figured it would be cheaper on Amazon so we walked away from it, but I saw saw it for like $130 on Amazon so I guess I’ll be heading back to Staples… when will men learn to listen?

In any event, I have an inbox full of crap to take care of and eyelids that are not willing to cooperate, so it’s time to increase my caffeine and while that’s working through my system it’s time to walk the dog. If it weren’t for her snoring next to me, I honestly would have completely forgotten it’s time for her to head around the block.

I hate wires!

Sunday, July 14th, 2013

I wish I could understand why, even living in a wireless world, I can’t fricken escape them! I just spent the last two hours pretty much ripping every single wire out of the walls/surge protectors so I could properly reorganize.  With the addition of the new computer (had to purchase a Windows machine, clients were complaining about cross-browser/cross-platform crap) I was really crunched for space on my desk, and this is something I desperately need so I’m not stuck with the overflow of paperwork I seem to accumulate for some reason.  I wound up moving the tower to the shelf next to me but that then required the printer being moved to the shelf above me, and then anything that I had on that top shelf needed to move to one behind me (that Sean put up on the wall last night), and then I needed to drag wires from underneath the house so I could move the cable box. Thank god there was extra slack.  But for now, everything WIRE related is pretty much set on where it’s going.  The only issue is having to get all of the daily essentials reorganized since everything else was shifted around.

Even with an excessive amount of shelving I feel like I don’t have enough room to properly organize this room.  I’ll wholeheartedly admit that the bed is just way too damn big for the room, but when you factor in that Sean is in a completely different room for the entire day (his private office space) there’s really no reason why I can’t make things work in here.  The only thing he’s got in here is clothes for crying out loud.  Meanwhile I’m always sitting here looking at wires and crap that just needs to be put away and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out where it all freaking needs to go.

I really need a cup of coffee, that’s got to be why my brain isn’t working right now.  I haven’t even looked at my emails today, it’s Sunday I need a damn break. Tomorrow is a completely different story, I know that I’m already completely overloaded and I also know there’s more stuff coming in.

On the upside… I’m about 50% done with the new template for Krissy.nu, took me a few years but I’ll finally have something new up.  I wish I could go back to a time when there was a new theme every month and the main income was just from sponsored posting.  Can’t do that anymore, there’s just no damn time and sitting at a computer for any longer than I already do would drive me crazy and completely kill my back.

I think it’s time for that cup of coffee.

It’s all coming to an end…

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

With the Holiday’s winding down, I’m finally able to wind down long enough to actually knock out a post. I’ve pretty much been running around like a chicken with my head cut off since Thanksgiving. Work, as I noted previously, is coming in waves, but at the same time the tide hasn’t really gone out. It’s not the luxury of “Ok, I can take some time on this and then bounce back to this.” it’s been “Do it now, and faster!”

@AGnDesigns - Instagram @AGnDesigns - InstagramWhile that can get a little annoying, it also worked to our benefit this year.  All family members were well taken care of for Christmas, Sean and I did spend quite a bit of money on ourselves but it was on things that we both wanted (for a while) and desperately needed.  We know the difference between Wants and Needs – unlike anyone under the age of 16 these days.  We both were in desperate need of new desks.  I had my Mac sitting on a Rubbermaid folding table and being as the 27-inch iMac (2011) weighs about 40 pounds, it was starting to sink down in the middle. To avoid it completely caving in, we went out and got me a new desk.  It’s a super nice one, with plenty of storage and it’s even a little bigger than the previous folding table so I actually got the chance to organize things where I can still completely function without any issues at all. Obviously after Sean spent 7 hours putting this thing together (one warped piece was throwing EVERYTHING off) he gladly took a little nap.  I decorated the drawers with dollar store shelf liner so that they can list a super long time without getting destroyed. There’s more than enough room for the work phone so my boss can stay on my butt too heh. I had it across the room next to the TV because we didn’t have a long enough Ethernet chord, but that was taken care of with the addition of a ZyXEL wireless switch that now sits behind my monitor. It supposedly boosts the Wifi in the house, but turns the Wifi into an actual plugged in connection as well, so I’ve got the phone plugged into it and if I needed to I could plug a printer in to it. It was actually strong enough of a feed to handle Sean’s XBOX 360 for a few weeks as well, so obviously it works how it’s supposed to.

@leprakhauns - InstagramSean, after my desk was put together, began increasingly becoming annoyed with his desk. After drilling into him that he spends way too much time at his desk and needs a new one…. we headed back to Staples a little over a week later (this past weekend actually) to pick up a new desk for him.  The one he’s been using for years was a typical students desk with the metal legs, the pull-out keyboard and the thin table top. One you’d see in college students dorm, basically.  So it was creaking like all holy hell and we wound up replacing that one as well.  He found a nice wide desk that he was in love with, but it unfortunately was not going to fit in the room so he went with one that was closer to size (in comparison to mine).  He’s in love with it as well.  It’s very nice dark wood with a nice sturdy base, some drawers – finito.

While picking up his new desk we browsed around the store a little bit, and came across the Google Nexus 10″ – Android Tablet.  Of course I was instantly in love, this thing is more powerful than the Droid 4’s that we upgraded to in October.  The $500 price tag instantly turned this item into a “Want”. We’ve been bouncing back and forth about Tablet’s for a little while now.  Sean really wanted to see what the new Microsoft Surface was about, I personally had no interest in it at all being as I’m as anti-Windows as you can possibly get these days.  Upgrading to Mac has spoiled me rotten.  I don’t have to deal with excessive upgrades, daily virus/malware scans and the blue screen of death that Microsoft claims to have gotten rid of , but I’ve seen it on both Windows 7 AND 8 because it’s very easy – when you know what you’re doing – to trigger everything Microsoft claims doesn’t exist.

@AGnDesigns - InstagramEither way, we both were playing with the Tablet for a little while and found out when browsing through the Settings to get all of the stats that it was now possible (with Android – Ice Cream) to have multiple users.  This sparked our interest almost instantly, and we both looked at eachother and I was like “I want”, he said “Go get it” (cause he’s fricken awesome) and while I was pulling the car around (cause he was picking up his desk the same day) he paid for both. Turned into an expensive shopping trip on our parts, but we walked out of there with a want, and a need.

 

@AGnDesigns - InstagramWhile he was in the Bedroom for a few hours setting up his new desk, I was prepping the house for Christmas.  I did more baking in the past few days than I ever thought possible. Everything from cookies, to breads, to brownies – you name it, I probably baked it. I went all out for Christmas this year, because I actually had more room to do it. I know that sounds a little weird but it’s true. A huge living room and a big footprint in reference to the front end of the house, things just kind of happened.  The baking was really just phase two, we’d spent quite some time decorating prior to my even pulling the flour out of the cabinet.  So the tree was decorated, the bulk of the outdoors was draped in white lights and the rest of the house had random little touches here and there.  Thankfully, minus today, there was really no wet weather going on outside so my garland didn’t get all mucky and was nice and clean for Christmas. I was also really happy with the tree in the living room. With the combination of Karen’s ornaments and mine everything kind of came together that worked out really nicely.

Traditionally, families open their gifts on Christmas Day. Around here? Christmas Eve. I think it’s a tradition based on impatience but to each their own. Sean cleaned up this year, outside of the gifts purchased for ourselves of course. New shirts, plenty of toys and gadgets to keep him entertained and the guitar I bought him. I know I usually complain to him about how much noise he can make on his own (without an accessory) but at the same time we’ve both had a pretty rough year, him more than I, and it was something I know he always wanted. So I got him a nice stand for it, and a DVD so he can learn how to play and we’ll go from there.

@leprakhauns - InstagramI also got him some new Happy Feet, this is a brand that we were in love with long before Snooki put it on MTV. I’ve always had a pair, and so has he and his were worn to the point that his toes were going to start popping through the bottom. Knowing how comfy they are I changed it up a little bit and got him the “All Around” ones, they look like real sneakers and there’s about an inch-thick rubber sole on the bottom of them. They’re better than my usual outdoor slippers so of course I’ll have to pick up a pair for myself in the future but for now this was all about him and that’s what he got. So that was one pair, and instead of getting him the standard color variations I decided to take a look under the “Animals” section and got him the most ridiculous ones I could find – and his favorite animal – the Penguins. Watching him walk around in these is more amusing than the slippers themselves, but they bring a smile to just about everyone’s face so it was more than worth it.

I cleaned up pretty well myself. Karen got me the “In-Styler” which is a hair straighter I’ve always wanted. I’ve used a friends before and it was probably the fastest way to straighten my hair that I’ve ever used. Some people have mixed feelings on it, others use it totally wrong and wonder how their hair gets wrapped up in it. As long as you read the directions it works out exactly as it’s supposed to, so I’m bringing it up to NY with me while Sean and I head up there for New Years, and after I get a much needed hair cut (via Mom) and dyed (via my sister), I’ll be using it to style my hair. Mom and I are also hitting up the nail salon, I’m long overdue for a manicure AND I desperately need my eyebrows done it’s been almost six months and I just can’t fricken take it anymore.

As usual, I bought myself a few articles of clothing while I was doing some shopping for other family members and had Sean wrap them for me. There was a jacket at Old Navy that I’ve wanted for a while, and I was in need of new yoga-pants so I threw those into the shopping cart as well. He wrapped everything for me, knowing that he was supposed to actually buy the items for me for my Birthday back in October but never did (I oddly got a Christmas tree instead), so he switched Holiday’s but kept the wrapping paper basically lol.

@agndesigns - InstagramThe thing I was surprised about, however, was the ViewSonic 24-inch Monitor that was under the tree. I’ve been using a 17-inch monitor as my “Email Screen” for the past couple of months and it was working out pretty well for me. I kept my email completely on that window and when I was actually in Photoshop or Dreamweaver I would just load project free TV and watch television right on the desk, no complaints at all. So you can imagine my surprise when Sean upgraded me to a much larger screen. This was one of those items that wasn’t on my wants, or my needs – which then turns into a complete and total surprise. And that wraps up Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day was a completely different story – I was non stop in the kitchen. I was cooking/cleaning for a good 8 hours yesterday. I fired up the crock pots early in the day to get the sauce going, the meat balls and sausage wound up in the pot a few hours later and from there it was just the matter of getting the pasta in the water so I could get everything into the oven. I even managed to get a spiral ham in the oven with everything else going on. As soon as dinner was done, I had a quick cig and was back in the kitchen to clean everything up and start baking the brownies. Why? Cause for the most part the cookies from Friday were already gone and the ones that remained were a little on the hard side. I figured that some time of dessert was required on Christmas and I went the double thick double fudge brownie route – more than half of them are gone which – to any cook – damn good sign.

Then Wednesday comes…..

Today was supposed to be a day of packing, working and getting ready to get out of here bright and early tomorrow morning for the long drive up to New York to see friends and my family. Of course that hasn’t been the case at all. Even though I woke up relatively early, I’ve been doing other things (not sure what) but nothing that I had originally set out to do. I do know that a load of dishes was done, all of the laundry was folded but nothing was put into the suit case at all. I also needed to get about 8 or-so hours of Work completed because we’re losing an entire day tomorrow to the drive up to New York and lord only knows what kind of a drive that’s going to be considering the storm sitting over the Northeast right now. Thankfully, in southern Delaware, it’s just rain but unfortunately it’s A LOT of rain and the complex is completely flooded. This was heaps of fun when it came to walking the dog. I don’t mind the drizzle, that wasn’t the problem, the excessive amounts of water just sitting because the complex has absolutely NO proper drainage systems is 4 inches of just mud and twigs to walk through. Poor Bella wound up taking a swim on multiple occasions tonight just because we completely misjudged the depth of the puddles we were going in to. I also found out that my winter boots are absolutely NOT water proof. As soon as I was in up to my ankle, my foot was soaked and of course they’re too big for me so they were rubbing weird and my sock wound up slipping down – needless to say it was not a good experience for anyone involved and Bella only really went to the potty twice (usually she goes about 4 times) but she still wound up having to be thrown into the sink for a nice bath to get her color back to white, she’d turned into a muddy brown fur ball for the bulk of the walk, the puddles did help but it just darkened everything and I wanted her to be nice and clean for Grandpa tomorrow.

We’re hoping to leave here before noon, now no ones gifts are wrapped and I haven’t done any packing but that’s completely the plan for the morning so that we can get up there in a decent amount of time and have the time to stop somewhere on the turnpike to pick up a roast beef sandwich from one of the Roy Rogers along the way for my father because that’s his one and only request for my time in New Jersey on the way to Long Island. I’m also needing to make a stop while we’re down here to pick up some cigs (for peoples xmas gifts) and some fudge from Candy Kitchen as I promised other family members that I would.

I can honestly say… there’s no way in hell we’re getting out of here by noon…that’s for damn sure.

We’re only going to be up in NY for about a week. Sean’s father is staying down here with his mother while we’re up there, she’s got 2 Chemo treatments this week and then unfortunately she’s going to lose a week to sickness because she’s not getting the third day of extra fluids because they supposedly don’t do that on Saturdays around here, and she didn’t go in today – for whatever reason – to start the scheduled 3-day cycle. So now she’s going to lose a day and I just hope that George keeps pushing large glasses of water onto her so that she can stay hydrated enough to get through the nausea that’s going to completely consume her for the next week.

We’re ringing in the New Year and NY and I personally couldn’t be happier. Being down here for the last six months I’ve really missed my friends and family and just can’t wait to get home. Even if that means I’m not sleeping tonight just so we can get out of here tomorrow – I’ll do whatever it takes.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be able to get into my Dashboard for a while since the work is still piling up and this is a ‘mini vacation’ for me, so I’m wishing everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year! I hope 2013 is a hell of a lot better than 2012… at least we won’t have to deal with all of the Mayan Calendar bullshit anymore, heh.

This is NOT a good time!

Wednesday, November 7th, 2012

So even though I’ve got my own little office and a nice comfy ‘managers’ chair to make me feel important – it still doesn’t void the “my back sucks” issues I’ve been experiencing.  As many of you know I suffer from sciatica, unfortunately with all of the weather changes and the constant up and down all day long I’m pretty much in the “heh, you’re screwed” category.  I don’t want to do it, but I have no choice – I’m officially working from bed.  My laptop is on the verge of death but I’m hoping it holds on long enough for me to actually get something accomplished before this client begins ripping my head off.  I used my dual monitor setup for ONE fricken night (last night) and now, not only am I only on ONE monitor, I’m also only on a 17″ screen.  That’s a big drop for someone who’s accustomed to working on a 27″ screen.  The biggest draw back would be switching back from Mac and downgrading to Windows for at least a few days until I start feeling better.  It’s driving me up a damn wall, but what choice do I actually have?

Bella and I took a nice COLD walk through the wind storm going on outside. Its been raining since about 5am this morning, it slowed down around 7:30 and even though everything is flooded, she still needed to go.  Poor thing was being knocked over with every gust of wind to fly down the road.  I felt bad, but she needed to do her business and that’s just the way things go.  I had her bundled up in two coats.  The one ‘sweat shirt’ type of coat she has to cover her stomach from all of the muddy grass, and then the cape looking coat to actually keep her warm.  I don’t condone dressing up animals for personal gain just because one thinks its adorable to put a tutu on their Pomeranian (you’re an asshole if you do it so just admit it).  However,  I do condone making sure that if you’re going to make it a point to put on multiple layers to walk your dog, the least you can do is make sure they’re warm too damn it! It bothers me whenever I see someone bundled up like they’re going out to climb Mt. Everest but their short haired dog is chattering in the cold and running back towards their homes because they need the warmth.  It takes two seconds to stick a cover on the dog, why is it so hard for people to do that?

In any event… time to boot this piece of shit – all the damn updates finally completed.  Hoping to be able to get this thing up and running without the ability to take a half hour nap before completing the work for tonight.

Woah…talk about QUICK!

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012

So I’m not really sure why I needed one considering I have a 27″ screen, but Sean ordered me a piece for the Mac so I could setup dual monitors.  For $16 on Amazon he picked up a Thunderbolt to VGA chord that worked INSTANTLY when I plugged it in. I thought I was going to need to sit here and figure out how to push things over to another screen, and then need to figure out what the size was going to be on top of everything else. So of course you can imagine my surprise when everything pre-set itself AND there’s even the ability for me to have a second desktop background instead of the stretched across one that I previously had when using a second monitor (which was being booted off of my laptop).  Oh Mac! How I love your ease of use!!

My only minor complaint is the temporary monitor I’m using, when you’ve got a 27″ iMac, having a little OLD 17″ screen sitting next to it – it just looks so tiny.

http://instagram.com/p/RtKMvoyVRB/

This will be taken care of within the next couple of weeks. I’ll be upgrading a 23″ (or bigger).  The definition on this particular monitor sucks based on the fact that it’s 10 years old, but it’s doing its job for the time being – all I need is the ability to easily access my email while I’m waist-deep in Photoshop/Dreamweaver.  It’ll also help for the slower nights with Netflix and Project Free TV.

I’m so far behind on numerous shows it’s unreal. So I’m hoping I’ll be able to catch up on them over the course of the next few days anyway.

Sean’s been bouncing around the house all day waiting for the UPS truck to show up.  My mother preordered Halo 4 for him for Christmas 2011.  He’s been waiting for 11 months for the game to finally be released and is happier than a pig in shit, but more than likely on the verge of tears thanks to the extreme delay with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy stopping him from being able to jump in front of his XBox to play.  UPS hasn’t even been in the complex today, every loud car that drives past the house he’s got his nose up to the glass in anticipation for the big brown UPS truck.  Unfortunately he might not get it until tomorrow, and even Amazon has already issued an apology to everyone for all deliveries because of the delays with the storm.  To make matters worse, there’s another one coming up the coastline so if we actually wind up getting snow – who knows how long it’s going to be until he can actually play his game.  I feel bad for the guy, but I also can’t help but laugh because he’s moping around like a child who had Christmas taken away from him.