Rainin’

Today was one of those days that could’ve been better and could’ve been worse. Reckon kinda like most days for most people. Rained around here. Water. It rained water. I’ve heard there are places it rains other things – disaster, money, cats, dogs, inns. Yeah, I was really goin’ on about somethin’ the other day and my buddy said, “Hey, rain inn, dude.” Or, maybe it was, “Hey, rainin’, dude.”

Later I thought it must be finally gettin’ ’round to quittin’ time. And, it was. Everybody had quit. Except me. That was really spooky.

Maybe tomorrow will be different. Or maybe it’ll still be rainin’. I dunno.

Kevin Gunn & the Weathervanes

Back in 1970 I was a freshman at Univ. of Kansas and thought I’d be a writer of some sort so I took English and writing classes, including the Science Fiction class taught by James Gunn, author of several sci fi novels and other works. I learned a lot from Prof. Gunn, and still have some short stories I wrote that have actual praise (not to mention the criticisms) from him in the margins. But, ultimately, my career went a different direction, although, as I think about it, it involves an awful lot of writing. As time went by my kids grew up and went to college about the time the www was starting to get noticed, and I developed an interest in making websites. I found a great web editor called Web-O-Rama. Lo and behold, turned out it was written by Prof. Gunn’s kid, Kevin Gunn. More time went by and along came the likes of MySpace and FaceBook and LinkedIn. While goofing around on FaceBook one day I came across, yes, Kevin Gunn! He’s now devoting his efforts to his real passion, music. Be sure to check him out at Kevin Gunn and the Weathervanes. Kevin has me thinking again about my back-burnered passion, writing.

Browser Update Reprise

Apple recently released Safari 4 beta. Wow, it’s fast. It’s a real pleasure to browse sites and pages using it. It’s about as quick as flipping pages in a book or magazine, even with images displayed. I expect Firefox will pick up on Apple’s technology and use something like it to speed up Firefox. Meanwhile, if I want to look at pages fast, I go Safari; if I’m developing web pages, Firefox is still the choice, due to certain very helpful plug-ins. Most people, I think, would find Safari a real joy as their primary browser.

Browser Update

I posted recently (measured in space, not time) about discovering Safari for PC. Since then, of course, I’m back to Firefox as browser of choice. It’s the plug-ins. They enhance security, enhance usability, enhance web analysis, design and production; all on top of general reliability and satisfactory speed. Occasionally I re-visit Safari, Flock, Avant, Orca, Opera; but, generally, if I’m not using Firefox I’m using Google Chrome.

My Laptop Gets a Blow Job

My laptop was getting more obnoxious by the week. Progressively getting slower, taking longer to boot up, taking longer for pretty much everything except aggravating my temper. All the symptoms of a STD. But my battery of free security programs found nothing. I caved in and bought Spysweeper. It found nothing, either, and just made things even slower.

I started noticing it felt hotter than it used to under my right wrist. Well, okay, I thought, it is over five years old, after all. Probably getting ready to blow the power supply or something. Before it could do that, though, it started just shutting itself off. They’re made that way, y’know, to automatically shut down when the internal temperature gets too high.

Of course, by now I was primed to use the imminent demise of the machine as an excuse to get a new one. Even started checking the BestBuy ads every Sunday. But, the damn thing wouldn’t die; just kept after my goat. Last weekend I asked my wife if it would upset her if I got out the .38 and shot it. She said it would. So, I scrapped the notion of putting it out of my misery.

Today it shut itself down before I could print a letter I needed to get out. So I turned it over to have a look at the fans. A busted fan could certainly cause overheating. Couldn’t tell anything from squinting through the tiny holes except the blades looked kind of dusty. I grabbed a can of Dust-Off and shot a blast at each fan. The first result was a major cloud of dust flying out the vent. The second result was one of the fans didn’t spin. It occurred to me laptops maybe store up dust as well as desktops, despite what seems to be a fairly enclosed structure. And it occurred to me I might need to replace a fan. Fans are what I’ve had to replace the most on all my computers.

I can see you’re about to fall asleep so I’ll cut to the chase. At home after supper between Olympic events I removed as many panels as I was comfortable removing and used about half a can of Dust-Off blowing into strategic crevices. In the process, I not only blew out more clouds of dust but also dislodged a major dust-kitty that I had to slowly work out with tweezers from behind one of the fans. Yup, it was actually keeping the fan from spinning. Got it all back together and the difference is incredible.

Sounds way better, stays way cooler, runs way faster, hasn’t shut off. Keeping fingers crossed, of course, but it’s looking (and sounding) like I’ll have to spill a cup of coffee into the keyboard if I’m gonna get me a new laptop in the near future.

Stinkin’ dirt, anyway.