Posts from — July 2004

Homeschooling for Liberty by Tom Smedley
Great Essay on homeschooling. He articulates what I believe about education in today's society. If it wasn't for my bookworm tendencies, I would have had a very bad education. I don't want to send my smart 3 year old to government school to be taught on what the latest fad is and how to be cruel to other children because of their real or perceived differences.

I had to reinstall Windows XP Pro over the weekend when a bad driver which worked fine up till Friday decided to nuke my system. The only way to boot was to do it in Safe Mode which bites. It was my onboard Ethernet a SiS 900 on a ECS M810S board or what they call a KVSEM. The driver was trying to go past its allocated memory space. What had started it was a power outage, one second, and that's when it died. I've had the driver corrupted twice already and thought that was the issue. Spent most of Friday and Saturday trying to fix it. We eventually bought a replacement NIC which works great so I have my cable internet back. Cheap system builder. Anyways I've been wading through Casssandra Claire's trilogy Draco Dormiens, Draco Sinister and Draco Veritas. Beautiful stuff. Draco Veritas in Word set in Garamond 12 is 800 pages long and 300k words. I would hate to print that mess out. And she's not finished! I was very relieved that I had put almost all my settings and documents on a separate partition which meant I didn't lose my stuff. I do have to reinstall everything and get my settings back which sucks but much better than losing stuff from my last back up till now.

[Listening to: Nookie - Limp Bizkit - Significant Other (04:50)]

Friday night, my husband's aunt gave him three laptops, a IBM ThinkPad 700(from 1992!), a Dell Latitude XPi CD P150ST(Win95!) and a Dell Latitude CP M233ST. The IBM is too old to use with a 120MB hard drive,and the XPi is running well, after I fixed the errors about the network driver and the video driver. The CP needs a new screen, but it'll we very usable when it is fixed. Now I'll be networking them together. Two PCs, a PS2 and two laptops. Whee. The desktops and the PS2 will be wired and the laptops will be wireless. I had the pleasure of moving my Office XP Outlook file to Outlook 97. Note to self, check to see if readonly is checked on the attributes. Now all I have to do is finish putting my statements into Money, which now resides on the Win95 machine, which will be for managing my life with my calendar and Money files. That and my fanfic collection. LOL. I would like to be able to read my collection when I'm say waiting on something in the oven to bake and the main PC (which I'm typing on right now) is being used. So I spent Friday and Saturday fixing the Win95 machine and general futzing around. I got w.bloggar Saturday and I LOVE it. Sunday, I went to go see the new Harry Potter movie and I liked it but they messed up a few things like when Harry got his broom and stuff like that. I had a completely different picture of Professor Lupin though
I logged into Blogger today and lo and behold GMail accounts were being offered Of course I signed up for one. I wonder if they are going to offer POP access?