I'm separating things out so this blog will remain personal (mostly cats and trips).  If you want to follow my technical rabble, take a look here:

http://blog.eppesconsulting.com/

We've been having problems with our Dell Insprion 8200 recently...  mainly to do with the power supply and connector.  For a while there, it could be fixed by pushing the connector a certain way or propping something underneath the laptop.  As it turns out, we were experiencing two problems at once and just didn't realize it.  The first was that the cord on the power supply near the laptop connector had worn to the point that the smaller wires within the big wire had broken.  I had to cut this open and manage to solder them together.  I should probably purchase another power supply since this is likely to happen again since it has already happened to the three power supplies I already had.  The second problem is that the connector on the motherboard the power cord connects to was flakey.  Do you see the four regularly-spaced solder joints?  On the bottom line of that rectangle, do you see the triangle shaped set of three?  The connection on the bottom left corner is a bad solder joint.  I have no way of knowing if this came from the factory this way, but it's for sure there now.

I did fix it for a while by re-soldering the pin of the connector back down (effectively repairing the existing joint), but that eventually wore out again and I finally ended up soldering a wire to the back of the power connector and soldering the other end of it to the chip you see in the bottom right here, effectively bypassing the trace on the board.  The laptop seems to be fine now, it just looks a little strange to see an extra wire in a laptop.

Isn't this just infuriating?  Bad programmer.  Bad.

And in case you can't read the scaled down version of the error message...  "Unexpected error encountered.  It is recommended that you restart the application as soon as possible."  Grrr.

Have any of you noticed the drastic difference in quality with some of my pictures?  I just wanted to explain as it's kinda funny (as least to me). 

A couple years ago (5?) I bought a digital camera before a trip to London (unfortunately I did not buy one before my trip to Barcelona - I would love to have some good pictures from there, but that's beside the point).  It was a Canon Elph 110.  I absolutely love that camera since it's small enough I can put it in my pocket and not appear to be the typical tourist.  It took excellent quality pictures at 2.1 megapixels.  The only downside to it was it only had a 2x optical zoom which pretty much meant you had a manual zoom (walk really close or walk far away).  Some (but very few) of our pictures on here were taken with this camera, especially since Chris M. has been borrowing it for the past several months.

A couple years ago (2?) Laura bought me a very nice Nikon D70 that used the same lenses my old N6006 took.  Hello 300mm zoom lens.  Turns out this is only the equivalent of a 6x optical zoom, but it's an amazing difference.  That and it's a 6 megapixel camera, so if I use Photoshop to crop the picture a little, it has the appearance of being a much higher zoom (call it simulated digital zoom since that's pretty much how a digital zoom works).  I absolutely love this camera since I can tinker with it all day to make some bizarre photos.  Of course, this sometimes tries on the patience of people I'm with, but it also has a fully automatic mode that saves the day.  The majority of the good pictures on the blog were taken with this camera.

A year and a half ago Laura bought me a Motorola MPx220 smartphone with a camera in it.  It has a 1 megapixel camera, but the quality is somewhat lacking (but it makes an excellent phone and PDA - which was the reason for getting the phone).  The majority of the bad quality images were taken with this camera as I have it in my pocket almost all the time, so I can take random pictures in traffic, etc.

A couple months ago I bought Laura a Motorola Razr.  The camera in it is very low resolution, but it has incredible quality for its size.  Those pictures have started working their way into the blog too as she is using it more and more.  The picture of the warning sign and of Chris T. in a cast were taken with it.

Hopefully some day the cameras in phones will catch up with mainstream digital cameras.  Until that day, if you continue to follow this blog, you will be enjoying incredibly high quality pictures of cats and poor quality pictures of random things.

I've been using MS Visual Studio 2005 for a few months now and I must say it's way better than the 2003 version.  I still very much miss using IntelliJ, but what can you do?  I ran into this error message this morning.  I was trying to expand the list of contents of a project in the solution explorer.  Seemes like a trivial task.  I appreciate that they tell me something is stuck, but if they know something is stuck, why don't they un-stick it?

Saw this article about dropload.com and figured I'd share it.  It's a very useful site that will let you drop up to 100MB worth of data (whatever you want) for someone to pick it up.  Seemed pretty cool.  It'll only keep it for 7 days, so that way there isn't too much stuff lingering around.  I just thought it was a cool concept and would be a great utility to keep handy.

That and it has an amusingly catchy name.

I thought this was really interesting...  I got a postcard in the mail that tells me that DirecTV will be replacing their music channels with XM Satellite Radio.  I'd been wanting XM radio but didn't want to have to buy a special receiver (and have yet another remote) just to hear it at home.  I also disagree with having to either carry your receiver from car to house or to pay for two subscriptions.  Maybe this will prompt me to actually pay for one for my next car.

Link.

I don't normally write too many serious things on here, but this is one that I think might become a huge issue in the future.  Microsoft is apparently trying to patent the FAT filesystem.  That might not mean a whole lot to the non-computer folks that read this, but that should be a huge deal to the rest of us.  This is along the lines of someone patenting paper.  The FAT filesystem has been around as long as Microsoft DOS has.  The first IBM PC was released in 1981 and DOS was around then.  FAT pretty much defines how files are stored on floppy discs, zip disks, hard disks (until recently), and most importantly flash memory. 

I'm not sure what Microsoft plans on doing with this patent once it is approved, but if they decide to enforce it, it could be huge.  Just thinking about stuff I have in my house that uses the FAT filesystem...  MP3 player, digital camera, camera phone, computers, etc.  I think the kicker for me is that my TV will take a flash card and display the pictures on it.  If Microsoft decides to start charging royalties for this patent, someone might have to pay a little bit more for their TV just because it can read the FAT filesystem.  I seriously doubt there is a way to enforce this retroactively, but this could be huge in the future. 

I was cleaning out a computer the other day and realized it was quite possibly the dirtiest computer ever.  Believe it or not, the computer was still functioning 100% which is quite surprising.  It's amazing how much dust can be hiding under the front cover.

I saw this link and couldn't help but wonder if they put lights on them at Christmas....

http://waynesword.palomar.edu/faketree.htm

There is one of these in Vestavia Hills that doens't even look like a tree...  it looks like a traditional pole with three branches - like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree that has cell antennas on it.

I found a VERY useful utility the other day...  it's avidemux.  This utility will open virtually any video file and allow you to transcode it to virtually any other format (compression scheme, etc) of video file.  It opened quite a few that I couldn't in Premiere and ULead and allowed me to convert it into a format that is readable by those two programs.  You can read more about it here.