Things I've been doing instead of blogging

Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Spending the weekend in Estes Park at the Rocky Mountain National Park with the Superlative Stacey, the Incomparable Anne, and two other amazing women to celebrate Stacey's 50th birthday. There was shopping. There was amazing views. There was plenty of good food (and not just food porn - I'm talking homemade no-knead bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, brie and french bread, chicken enchilada casserole, picadillo, crepes, and my own contribution, biscuits and gravy). I'm so glad I have amazing friends who are also foodies - my standards for high calorie days are increasing exponentially. Oh, and we made an attempt to exercise, too. While enjoying this view from our cabin:


You may commence your envy....now.

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Trying to get my POS work laptop to actually support the applications I need to do my damn job. The thing is older than the hills, and every time IT attempts to push an update to it, it hoses up six other things, relegating me to several hours of frustrating troubleshooting with some unintelligible IT help desk minion.* Last time it was a McAfee driver that disabled my wireless NIC (no, really), this time it appears that my .Net Framework is completely fucked, and an attempted re-installation resulted in this incredibly informative and detailed error message:

Microsoft error messages are known for their specificity.

Thanks, Microsoft. Now please go die in a fire. Right after you purge my bloated-ass registry and complete the design changes for proposals that were due yesterday. My ticket has been escalated to the next Tier for resolution, of course, and my organization still doesn't have any budget for PC refresh. Sigh.
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Reading. You know, books. I'm reading more this year than I did last year, probably because I always make sure I have my latest audiobook on my iPod when I head to the gym or for the elliptical here at home. This is not, of course, reducing the volume of my virtual "to read" pile. Far from it. I think there's some logarithmic relationship between how fast your "to read" pile grows and the number of books you've already read.


My "to read" pile, explained.

I'm "Janiece_HCDSM" over at Shelfari if anyone's interested.

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Wondering how I got old enough to have children that will be old enough to drink alcohol in all 50 states this week. No, seriously - how the fuck did this happen?
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Giving my mind an overdue housecleaning. I probably won't write much about this, but suffice it to say that when I find myself becoming disappointed, sometimes it's hard to remember that the component of that equation over which I have some control is my expectations. So I'm learning that lesson once again.


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*Please note, I have no issue with off-shore support services. I have an issue with off-shore support services where the technician doesn't speak the language of the customer well enough to be understood. English, motherfucker, I asked for it. Do you speak it? Usually the answer is "no."

8 comments:

Random Michelle K said...

I was actually wondering if everything was okay with you.

Glad you have been doing FUN things (aside from the mental housekeeping.)

Stacey said...

We did have a good time, didn't we? We rocked the sugar cane.

Good luck with the mental housecleaning.

Thanks for being part of my family of choice and making some pretty stellar biscuits and gravy.

Anne C. said...

Heh. I agree with the relationship of the "already read" pile to the "to read" pile. Definitely a calculus equation rather than a simple algebraic one. :) I've joined Shelfari (you'll find me in your followers) and I also have a Goodreads profile.

It was so nice to see you this weekend! I'm really glad you had a good time! :)

Jeri said...

I'm glad you had an excellent weekend and are enjoying life!

Hmm... reading.

vince said...

Most important, hurray for fun with friends time.

Second, .NET, with the various versions and often screwed-up updates can be a nightmare. Especially when different programs require different versions. I've had it trash client systems to the point that the only way to get it working was to do a wipe and reinstall of the system.

Let me recommend two (non-Microsoft) tools that may be able to help you. They are the .NET Framework Setup Verification Tool and the .NET Framework Cleanup Tool.

Note that since the .NET Framework 2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2 and 3.5 SP1 are all installed as OS components on Windows 7, the cleanup tool won't remove these versions of the .NET Framework on Windows 7. Also, the cleanup tool will delete shared files and registry keys used by other versions of the .NET Framework, so any .NET Framework versions that are still installed on your computer must be manually repaired or re-installed once you use the tool.

I hope some of this helps.

Janiece said...

Vince, I appreciate the suggestion, but the application I need to do my actual work is custom developed and uses MSVC and .Net both. I'm afeered of messing with either one in case I make things worse.

vince said...

I'd be afeerd as well. May the Good Tech Support Person of the West appear and help you fix things by clicking together a fabulous pair of shoes and saying "There's no place like 127.0.0.1. There's no place like 127.0.0.1."

Tom said...

"...There's no place like 127.0.0.1."

I think Vince is getting a bit loopy.

But good friends and mountains make up for bunches of .NUT crazyness!