The Wins Keep Rolling Along

It's a Monday so there was curling once again. The long and short of it was that we had the game in the bag but allowed the other team to come back and tie it up eight all on the 7th end. We had the hammer for the 8th but it was not looking too good coming up to skips rocks. The other team was able to tuck a rock in the four foot and then surrounded the darn thing with other rocks.

Our skip was going to try a 'TV' shot but we really didn't think he would be able to make it. Even he didn't think so. But as it happens in curling at times 'Plan B' came to the forefront and bing, bang, bong and we were sitting with a counter sitting on the edge of the four foot and their rock had moved out of the four foot. We also had lots of surrounding stones guarding the button. The other skip tried his best to get a rebound and knock us out of scoring, but he came up a couple inches too short.

Our skip didn't even bother throwing his last rock (in case we hit something we shouldn't be hitting). The final score was 9 to 8 for us. That means another big 'W' for me in the standings.

I just didn't have the will power to look at the other curlers to see how they made out today. If the other curlers had prevailed and won their games, then I would still be sitting on the bottom with the worst record. Mind you, I just may have the worst record, but at least I don't know that at this point in time.

I think I'll just savour the win for another week before I actually look at the individual listings for the players.

Reality will be here soon enough :(

Trucker No More

Well it is official now. James has hung up his 18 wheel steering wheel for the time being. He is now going to see if he can climb towers without falling off. Just prior to starting the recent job hauling super B trailers around he had applied to 'Your Link' to work on their tower crew. This is the same company that 'Uncle Ron' works for.

James went in for an interview last Thursday and he found out on Friday that he had gotten the job. That meant that he had to hand in the keys for the Kenworth and dig out his woollies to keep warm on the new job.

I guess he has to go in to the office on Wednesday and fill out some papers and then he's onto tower climbing. He's been told to pack a bag when he reports on Wednesday so he will likely be working out out town for a couple of days.

The nice part of the job is that it is essentially Monday to Friday and weekends off. The pay isn't bad either and there are benefits. Definitely sounds better than jambing gears back and forth. But then it can get a bit cool out there in the winter time. Especially if you are a hundred or so feet off the ground.

Worth a try for sure and the best of luck to James in his new endeavour.

WhoooHooo It's A Win!!!

Even though it was a holiday in Saskatchewan today, we still had our curling go ahead as normal. I played the late game today, but was at the rink early as I was on lunch detail. When there were no customers waiting for lunch I got to looking at the curling board and the wins/losses of all the members.

As I glanced through the list I saw that I probably had the worst record of anyone who regularly curls. I have only had 1 win under my name since we started curling. I did notice that one other lady only had 2 wins under her belt. She was curling the early game and it looked like she was not going to get another "W" beside her name. So I had some hope with our upcoming game.

We actually had a very good game going for us even though we had given up a 3 ender to the opponents. On the 7th end we actually scored a 4 ender and tied it up coming home. Of course the other team had the hammer, but we were going to give it our best.

Lo and behold we stole 2 on the 8th end and we were victorious. That also meant that I got another 'W' beside my name. I was just thrilled as all get out, but then I looked over at the other lady to relish that we were even in the standings. Wow was I deflated, her team pulled off a tie today so she was now sitting at 2 W's and 1 T with the rest being L for losses. My total is still only showing 2 W beside my name with all the rest being L.

That means that once again I have the worst record for all the main curlers in the Senior Curling League. You know, I just might get a complex soon. But I do have 3 more weeks to go so hopefully I can pull out at least a tie to add to my list. A win would really be great though :-)

Interesting Computer Repair

On Tuesday I had an appointment to look at a fellow's computer in town. This is an older PII 266 computer with 160 megs of RAM that had been running fine up until recently. The fellow doesn't use it for much other than surfing on EBay and the odd email message.

When I sat down in front of the keyboard I immediately saw there was a problem of lack of hard drive real estate. The computer has two hard drives installed. One is a 2.3 gig model and the other is a 512 meg model. Now that adds up to less than 3 gigs of room on the hard drives and the fellow was running XP Home.

I did look around in the computer and found that someone tried to help him recover some room by deleting certain unused programs. Of course they just used the 'delete' key so the registery was a total mess.

After prodding around for an hour or so I advised the fellow that the best thing he could do (other than buying a new computer) would be to reformat and start afresh. I told him that I could do it for him but it would take a day or so to get it all back up and running. He was agreeable with that so I unplugged the tower and headed for home.

Once home I reformatted both 'C' and 'D' harddrives and commenced installing XP. Oh yah, the fellow couldn't find his own XP copy but he knows he had one somewhere. No problem as I had a couple CDs I could use and just needed his Product Key. I have a full version of XP so I started the computer with it and commenced the install process. The process went fine and was booting just ducky. I then got a new version of AVG 7.5 antivirus and put that in the computer so we could keep out some of the nasties that show up every now and then.

It was when I put in the AVG that I realized that the amount of room on 'C' was going to be critical. So I installed the program onto the 'D' drive. Of course you still get all kinds of DLL files etc that programs insist must go on 'C' so I did loose some space.

With that all in place it was time to look for some updates. When I checked on Microsoft I found it needed at least 73 updates. So I started downloading the required files and watched the hard drive get less and less room to play. Eventually all the upgrades were down and the beast was still functioning fairly well. Then I looked and realized that XP was still sitting at SP1 and needed some more upgrading to get up to SP2.

Well I started downloading the update but the computer immediately started to balk at the size of this puppy. A stand alone download of SP2 runs about 266 megs of space. However, the update download is a bit smaller than that, but it still takes up a lot of room.

About half way through the download I could tell it was not going to work so I cancelled everything. I then reformatted the computer and started over with an Upgrade XP SP2 disk I had. This went better as Microsoft had at least fixed the 73 upgrades that were needed from the original XP disk so I didn't need to download the files.

I continued on and also installed the AVG over on the 'D' drive. I also installed 'Crap Cleaner' on the 'D' to assist with cleaning out some of the extra update files once I was done. This worked out quite well and once I had the XP all up and running and updated I still had close to 940 megs free on 'C'. This isn't a huge amount of room, but it would probably work for the way the fellow used his computer.

Then I figured I'd go whole hog and install the new IE7 for him. After downloading and getting the program updated I was fast running out of room on the hard drive. The program was complaining that there was not enough 'free space' left on 'C' and that the program needs at least 200 megs to function.

I looked around and there really wasn't a lot that I could remove that wasn't needed. The fellow stated he wanted email, be able to browse and to be able to play solitaire. I did have a bit of room sitting over on 'D' so I then figured I'd move the 'Page File' over there. This worked just great and did free up some needed room over on the 'C'. I had over 450 megs of free room left on 'C' which is plenty to allow for temporary internet files and the odd email that was expected.

I tested the computer out and surprisingly it worked fairly well. Now remember this is only a 266 computer with 160 megs of RAM. But it was definitely peppy enough on opening up the browser or the email. The solitaire worked just fine as well.

After running a final AVG scan and finding everything was clean I bundled up the computer and headed for the customer's house.

Once I got it all hooked up and purring right along, the guy says 'Oh yah, I have this 'All In One Printer/Scanner' that I would like installed". So I grabbed the CD and started installing. As I watched the files fly into the computer, I knew the free space was fast declining. But I continued on and ensured everything worked just fine.

I took a peak at the 'Explorer' to see that there was about 350 megs free on the 'C' drive and about 250 megs free on the 'D' drive. But the printer, scanner, fax machine now worked just fine. Well not quite fine, the customer hadn't used the printer since last summer sometime so of course the print cartridges were dried up. But the printer did go through the printing process as well as scanning in a document, etc. So it appeared everything was good to go. The customer was going to pick up a new black print cartridge to ensure he could print but he was satisfied that everything was in order.

I wasn't sure it could be done on such a small hard drive, but at least now I know, you can have XP Home with all the recent updates installed on less than 3 gigs of hard drive real estate.

My final comment to the fellow before I left was to ensure he kept his 'Temporary Files' cleared out and don't be saving huge attachments in his email messages. Oh yah, keep your eye out for a good deal on a new computer. PII 266's are getting fairly long in the tooth and you never know when it would decide to die a silent death.

Road Trip

James was hired by a local fellow to drive his semi to haul grain. This of course means learning how to handle 'super B' trailers which essentially are two full length semi trailers hooked together. This does make for an extra long unit to be driving around and does take extra care in turning corners. Backing up the unit also is quite a bit more complex than a single trailer unit.

Anyhow, James had a dry run on Tuesday to get familiar with the rig and then he got the trailers loaded up with a load of lentils that were destined for Wilkie, Sask. Now seeing as Wilkie is the town where I was born and lived for a few years, I thought it would be a treat to travel out that way with James as a passenger.

The plan was to depart Hanley at 7 a.m. and to return somewhere around 3 p.m. James and I got to the truck just before 7 a.m. and we ran into our first problem. The fellow that was showing James the ropes set the preheater to come on but he neglected to set the darn thing to the right time. So the preheater came on at 1 a.m. and ran for two hours (ie until 3 a.m.). So at 7 a.m. when James turned the key, the Kenworth just grunted a few times and that was that.

James turned the preheater on to start warming things up and then he got hold of the owner to arrange a tow truck to come and boost us. The truck was parked at one of the local garages and it opened up at 7 a.m. so at least we could slip inside and have a coffee while we waited for the tow truck to do it's magic. When the tow truck hooked up the cables to boost the semi, it had to just leave them in place for awhile to get the batteries warmed up enough to take a charge.

At 8:30 a.m. (give or take a few minutes) we pulled out of Hanley heading towards Wilkie. By the time we got to Rosetown, both James and I had to hit the washroom from all the darn coffee we drank. So after a quick pit stop we were enroute once again.

We finally pulled into Wilkie around noon and proceeded to get in line to unload our lentils. By 1:30 p.m. we were done and 'on the road' back to Kenaston for another load. All went fairly well and we strolled into the house at 6:30 p.m.

Let me tell you the walk up from the garage was brutal. The wind was coming right at us and we were almost frozen to the bone in the short walk home. But we did make it safe and sound.

Vista Programs

Today I had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that NOD32 is now Vista compatible and so I should be able to install the program on the new computer with no problem. The bad news is that ZoneAlarm PRO is not yet compatible and ZoneAlarm themselves advise against installing it until they have got a Vista compatible upgrade available.

Then I read a few other spots on the net and there is some question as to the actual need for a further firewall as the Vista firewall is much better than the previous XP firewall. Vista's firewall does check for outgoing connections from the computer whereas the XP version did not. That was one of my main aims for using ZoneAlarm. It prevented programs from accidentally being downloaded and clearing the virus scan and then installing themselves and sending out information from the computer (ie Trojan programs). So if the Vista firewall does in fact do as good a job as ZoneAlarm, then I would wonder why I would in fact need ZoneAlarm.

I still have the 60 days (57 now) Norton Internet Security version up and running on the Vista computer for now. I'll be leaving it installed for a few more days until I can read up a bit more on the firewall program installed through Vista. As my time counts down for the end of the Norton's then I can install my NOD32 program (which has been paid for) and go with the Vista firewall until ZoneAlarm comes out with an upgrade.

Other than that the Vista computer is humming right along and I have most of my files (that I wanted on the new computer) copied over. Thank goodness for routers and the ability to network the computers together. I've not run into any more programs that do not work on the Vista operating system yet.

One of these fine days though, I'll have to get Sandra's computer transferred over. She inherited my old 2.8 Intel tower and we'll replace her 800 Duron. I've tentatively transferred programs, but I just haven't gotten all of her emails, favourites, etc transferred. I keep telling her soon just after I finish doing something on my computer...

Sometimes I don't really think she believes me though :)

Eyes Are Falling Out

I haven't been on the blog of late because I've been working in the computer room on a couple new computers. Lo and behold I've had 2 Vista computers in the office to play with. Of course one of the computers is my own new HP Pavilion Media Center with 2 gigs of RAM, a 400 gig hard drive and a AMD 5000+ processor. The other computer is an Acer system with a 3800+ AMD, 250 gig HD and 1 gig of RAM. I've been working on the systems for so long my poor eyes are having a bit of trouble focusing of late.

My first impressions are that Vista is different but nothing earth shattering.

Let me tell you though, I don't think I'd be running Vista with only the minimum of 512 megs of RAM. The computers I'm working on are brand new and have only had Vista Home Premium installed on them so I haven't tried an upgrade just yet so I'm not sure what can of worms the upgrade would bring into it.

For my own system I had the computer up and running in a few short hours with most of what I had on my previous computer (ie Email, Favourites, etc). It did take me a couple hours to figure out how to network them all together so I could go back and forth and transfer favourite programs, pics, tunes, etc. Looking back at it now it was a relatively easy task. The major stumbling block was the firewalls (ie ZoneAlarm Pro and Norton Internet Security not playing nice). But after I got them sorted out, it seems to be working quite fine.

On my own system I have only found one program that is causing a bit of problem. That is the EPrompter Email notifier program that I use. It takes it's updates from the Windows Help system and Vista does not use this Help system at all. So of course my program won't update so I can't receive notification of my Windows Live account. This is not a great problem as I don't really get very much email through this account anyhow. I haven't tried switching over from the supplied Norton Internet Security to my preferred ZoneAlarm Pro as of yet either. I've read that there 'may' be a problem with ZoneAlarm and Vista. I don't foresee this as a large problem as I'm sure ZoneAlarm will have a fix out quickly. I do get 60 days to play with the Norton Internet Security before it dies. As well I haven't installed my preferred NOD32 antivirus either. I'll tackle that in a couple days and see what transpires. Once again I'm sure that if NOD32 does have a problem it will get fixed quickly. As a side note on the other computer I did install the free AVG antivirus and it works quite fine.

On the second machine I did run into some problems with the printer however. The fellow had bought a brand new HP Photosmart C3180 All In One printer just recently. There were no drivers available for this printer for Vista so I had to go to the HP website to get some. Even at the website HP only had basis drivers available so the full function of the 'All In One' will not be able to be used until the drivers are updated. But for now the printer does print as it should.

Overall I would have to say that the largest difference I've found between XP and Vista is the file system and where each operating system stores their defaults. Another thing with Vista is that the program pops up dialogue boxes questioning if you are actually doing a certain task or not. If you are, you click on 'allow' and away you go. In one way it seems to be a little more security conscious that XP was.

I'll play with the system a bit longer to see what other problems may occur. So far so good though.

One is a Lonely Number

This is Monday so it was curling day once again. As per normal the team I was on gave it a valiant try, however, we came up a couple points too short. It was 7-6 for the other team going into the last end. We had the hammer which should have allowed us to at least tie the game. As per normal, the team didn't bring it to the forefront and we gave up a steal of 1 in the final end. The final score being 8 to 6 for the other folks. Mark that down as one more 'L' beside my name.

That makes it 7 L's and 1 W for my record in the league so far this curling year.

But of course it is all for fun and exercise, so I certainly don't take it personally. When you are playing with different people on your team every week, anything is possible. In my case it is just a bunch of L's beside my name.

So be it :)

It Figures!!

As I was sitting here moaning my sore nose and chest from all the coughing I've been doing, my neighbour Ernie calls me up to see what I'm doing. "Oh nothing much other than half-way dying from a cold". Sorry to hear that he says, but he wanted to thank me for clearing out the back alley and his yard so he can park next to his house and plug his car in. Hey, it doesn't take too long and gives 'big red' a little more running time.

After a bit of small talk, he then pops the question whether I would consider curling for him in the Thursday night league. Now this call was about 5 pm and curling started at 7 pm. My first thought was if he had actually looked at my win/loss record from the Senior League or not, but I kept that to myself having a bit of pride you know. I did question him on the calibre of the curlers noting that I'm not up in the Brier League just yet. He assured me it was more a fun thing than anything else and I would fit in just fine.

I then thought about my cold and all the coughing I had been doing. I was tempted to decline the invite but of course he embellished the story that someone had walked off with his curling gear and one of the other team mates was down holidaying in Florida. This means they would be down to only 2 curlers and you can't have a game that way. So being the softy I am (or is that masochist) I agreed to replace Ernie in the game.

Once I got to the hall and saw some of the curlers showing up I definitely had second thoughts about my decision. These were darn good curlers showing up for the draws. After a few minutes a few other folks showed up that I wasn't familiar with, so I figured I'd already said I would, so I might as well follow through. I explained to the skip that I was only a last minute replacement and I definitely was not a 'Super Curling' type curler. He assured me it would be okay.

We headed out to the ice to get ready to play. Great start, we lost the flip and got to throw first stones. The end went by okay with lots of rocks in play and me sweeping up and down the sheet almost dying from a lack of oxygen. At the completion of all the rocks there were 2 yellow stones counting. I had to rub my eyes though at first and give myself a pinch as our team were actually throwing yellows rocks so that meant we were up 2 to 0.

The second end completed and we had 3 more counters sitting in the rings. This definitely was a GREAT game going on as far as I was concerned. In actual fact, the other team wasn't doing so swell even though they have played together for a while. The rocks just were not going where they wanted them to go this evening.

The score after 6 complete ends of play was 12-0 for our team. At this point, the other team conceded and we got to depart the ice surface. Now I'm not usually one to just throw in the towel when some good exercise is available, but I was all for it this night. I had drank down about half a glass full of cough medicine (none of those sissy little teaspoons for me) before the curling started and I hadn't done too badly coughing thoughout the game, but the reserves just weren't there. I was plumb tuckered and more than willing to call it a night.

We shook hands and everyone retired to the local watering hole to quench their thirst. Sadly, I was not one of those that attended to 'Buck's Bar' that evening. Sam and I got in the truck and we headed for home. Enough was enough. I needed some rest and fast. It was either that or I was going to fall down from exhaustion.

Too bad I can't use this game for my 'Senior League' curling. Two "W's" are a way more impressive looking than just a lonely one "W" to my thinking.

For Sale - Very Cheap

I knew my luck was not good enough to hold and keep me from catching Sandra's cold. Of course she is now on the mend and I'm suffering big time. The only good thing is that so far it just is a cold and there is no flu type symptoms. I would say that I have to mark that down to us both getting our flu shots in early December. But if anyone wants one slightly used cold, by all means give me a call and I'll send it off to you free of charge.

Of course this is the weekend we had planned to celebrate Janessa's 8th birthday. Sheila, Wendell and the girls showed up last evening, but I'm not in a real celebrating type mood. Sheila and family headed for the city today to visit the Lakeview water slides which I wouldn't be going to at the best of times anyway. That left me a few hours to get horizontal and try and recuperate a bit before they get back.

The idea is that we will have bbq'd hamburgers and wieners for supper and then a piece of cake and ice cream. I'm not certain that ice cream is appropriate for the weather that we are having right now, but of course with young people, they will want it for sure. Yours truly can probably do without anything cold at the moment as I'm shivering enough.

Achoo !!!

The Snow Keeps On Coming

We have had snow and blowing snow for the last couple of days and I'm getting a little tired with it all. We were in the city on Tuesday to do a bit of shopping and ran into snow on the way into the city. While in the city the snow increased and then the winds started to pick up.

I had a few stops to make before we could make our break for the country once again. Of course my eye was watching the impending blizzard conditions with a bit of trepidation. However, I'll gladly exchange the slippery city streets for some lower visibility driving out in the country.

I think the city of Saskatoon is trying to save a few bucks or something as the roads are just atrocious. These are not the side streets, these are the main roads such as 8th Street, 33rd Street, etc. However, in all honesty it is hard to keep the roads sanded when the snow and blowing snow is just moving the sand around all of the time.

We did make it back home safe and sound although it took a bit longer than normal, but then it is winter and you expect the sub standard road conditions. The wind continued to pick up throughout the evening and we had a mini blizzard around 11pm or so. It was nowhere as bad as it was with the full flown blizzard a week or so though.

So Wednesday morning I fired up 'big red' and cleared out the driveways and sidewalks around our house. It normally takes about 60-90 minutes to get it all done which is good exercise as far as I'm concerned. But this week I've caught a bit of a cold so it isn't the best situation to try and fight the snow.

Then last night as I was sitting watching the boob tube, the darn wind started to pick up and then it started snowing again. Once again we had ourselves a mini blizzard. After I got up this morning, I sat and looked out the window at the driveway and was tempted to say 'to hell with it' and let it sit. But then I thought a bit more and decided to head out into the weather once again.

Brrrr, it was a lot colder out there today as the temperature was sitting near the -25 point and then a fairly gusty wind on top of that. But 90 minutes later I got to park 'big red' once again. My world was at peace once again, and the driveways, sidewalks, next door neighbor's driveways, etc were all nice and clear and ready for the next onslaught.

As I'm sitting here typing this, the darn wind is picking up once again. The forecast is calling for 'light snow' in our area, but the forecasters are warning of blizzard conditions south of us in the Regina area. Those forecasters have been wrong before, but I'm hoping that they aren't this time.

I looked in on the fellow from Tomkins, Saskatchewan who predicts weather by chewing on Pig Spleens to see what he had for a forecast. It doesn't look good as far as I can tell, but the only consolidation I have is that I hope he is talking about 'southern Saskatchewan' and not for us folks that are little bit north of Regina. Afterall, we do have at least 1 or 2 trees up in this neck of the woods to block off some of that darn wind.

We can always hope, can't we?

Wish Came True

It appears that someone has gotten their wish to come true for them. James made it back to the Saskatoon area last Thursday and then spent the day in the city on Friday the 26th. He then had the weekend off to do as he wished.

The only problem was that the boss never called to get him back to work after the weekend. Finally James made his own way in to the city and found out his truck was going out, but he as sitting at home. A little deja vu floated to the surface as far as I could tell. As per Another Day, No More Dollars It seems that one of the senior drivers needed a truck as his clutch went out on his own truck.

The next thing James knew he was advised to clear his gear out of his truck. This was from the senior driver and it appeared to be a 'sacking in progress' from my point of view. James tried calling the boss/owner to find out his status, but as of today there has been no returned calls from Roger.

Of course he doesn't know what the heck is going on, but it could very well be that he did get his wish to have more time back home in Hanley. The only problem is that he won't be out on the road in the near future. Without actually having spoken to the owner of the company, it is hard to figure out just where he sits though.

From my point of view, it seems that the 'parting of the ways' has been coming for the last month or so. James didn't seem to be happy with what was happening by being out on the road all of the time as a long haul trucker and the boss was getting a bit unhappy with the amount of downtime required in Hanley.

Too bad, but that is the way things go every now and then. Hopefully it will all get settled out in the next bit and all can get on with their respective goals in life.