Getting back to my roots. :)

Sorry, this post is not going to be deep contrary to what my title says. lol. By my roots, I mean my neosoul-loving former self. l have not been able to get enough of Vivian Greene’s “Emotional Rollercoaster” or Floetry’s “Say Yes”. Those songs sound awesome on my Creative I-Trigue system which I got for a steal at $50 and even better through my HP premium headset. Those songs pump me up while at work and are the secret behind my ever-present smile(s) at work. I’m sure I’m already a constant fixture in many people’s minds for my bouncy walk and ever-ready smile. It makes me feel good to just smile even though I have problems. It’s totally worth seeing the smiles get lit within people when they see me being all infectiously happy. 🙂 I really love the environment at my workplace and that makes all the difference because it makes me want to haul ass free of charge! lol.

In other news, I sustained a mild injury at work. I’m inclined to call it a major injury, but the learned bosses and my smart husband have concluded that it’s “not a big deal”. Try telling that to my hurting left hand which got all swollen up to the size of a small egg. 🙁 Anyhow, I put an icepack on it and it kept the swelling down. My diagnosis (by the 4 DVMs or doctors of veterinary medicine) was that I had busted a blood vessel. One of these days, I’ll regale my children with tales of their mother’s clumsiness.

In yet other news, my HP premium headset broke. I got that blasted thing on the 20th of September and it’s broken already! Matt can attest to the loving care I bestow on my electronics so it was definitely not operator error. I say that HP has a defective design. Accordingly, I called the warranty line (HP Premium Digital Stereo Headset manuals) and got told that they couldn’t help me because I didn’t have the box which had the serial number on it. Why HP doesn’t engrave the serial numbers on the headsets? I have no earthly clue. Well, this is where Matt, my knight in shining armor, comes in. He simply took it to the returns department at a certain unnamed retail store and they gave us/him a brand new HP premium headset. At first blush, I was ecstatic, but I’m now extremely suspicious because I might not get lucky a second time. So, when I get home from hanging out with Matt, I’ll scan my receipt that documents the exchange of the defective HP product for the new HP product and write down the relevant numbers and such. I knew it paid to be paranoid. Now, I’m 100% certain it does. From today, I’ll try will scan all receipts that show purchase of heavy duty items like electronics and other precious items. lol.

With that, have a happy friday! Lawdy, ya’ll, I was slogging at work today! I couldn’t stop yawning and it felt like the day had an extra hour tagged onto it! I’m relieved to be off work and just chilling out. However, knowing me, I’m also up to something that’s pretty cool if I may say so myself. 😀 I am giving Remote Administrator a trial. What is Remote Administrator? It’s basically a way of remotely administering your home/work/whatchamacallit computer. I have successfully connected to my HP pavilion desktop pc from my laptop using Radmin 3.2 Remote Control and even Matt was suitably impressed. The best thing about having this type of control over my home computer is that I won’t have to constantly carry the same files on both laptops e.g. I can keep things that I’m not ready to dispose of, but might have a need for on my home computer. Sadly, I had used my local address to connect and now that I’m away from the house, I need the external IP address. So, I’m just listening to my music library on Windows media player and sipping on some Hennessy. I kid about the alcohol part, but I am in that kinda mood, feel me? 😀

Which brings me to the topic of media on the PC. On my desktop PC, I use the Creative MediaSource player for listening to my music and video files. However, I decided to give Windows Media Player 11 a whirl on my Vista Ultimate Laptop and I have to confess that I wonder what had been stopping me from trying it all this while (at least on my laptop). If you recall, I had to reformat my laptop and Creative MediaSource had been a minor irritation on my system. So far, I’m loving the way it integrates with my Creative Zen Sleek Photo player seamlessly and its organization of my music files is to die for. I can’t imagine going back to Creative MediaSource just yet. Still, some small part of me feels like giving up Creative MediaSource for Windows Media Player is an admission that sometimes it doesn’t pay to fight the power, if you get my drift. I mean it’s often best to use things made by the PC manufacturer for the maximum compatibility i.e. instead of Thunderbird, learn how Microsoft Outlook works and make it work & instead of some alternative media player, learn to love Windows Media player. lol. I’m tired of fighting. 🙂

Last but not the least, the reunion (representing Matt’s maternal side of the family) is tomorrow and I’m looking forward to it.

Namaste.

An Update on my HP dv9700t.

Alright, dad, I know you’re sick of me talking about my laptop, but I just wanted to provide a status update because I’ve gotten a couple of google queries to certain posts I’ve written concerning my laptop. Several things have changed since I wrote posts like this, this and this. In those posts, I wrote about the fingerprint reader royally sucking. I whined about the Windows Mobile Device Center not working with my Palm Treo 750 and I complained about the lack of a TPM-compatible BIOS on my laptop & not having a TPM to begin with! I’ll start with the first biggest change:

  1. I reinstalled Vista Ultimate on my laptop. When I first got the laptop, I didn’t uninstall certain programs correctly like Cyberlink’s Cybercrapware, et cetera. I also installed a bunch of programs that weren’t 64 bit compatible and they ended up making my laptop rather buggy. So, I called up HP and told them to send me my system restore discs because I was unable to make mine from the laptop. They graciously obliged me and it took about a day for everything to be restored to normal. It was rather painless too. My initial Windows Experience Index score was the same as the first time I received the laptop (i.e. a 4.6). I installed the usual suspects: Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.1.2, et cetera and updated them all. After installing my essential programs, my WEI score popped back to a 5.0. A quick tip for software updates: always make sure you update the programs by running the builtin HP Update (I’m using version 4.000.011.006). A lot of my troubles came from bypassing that easy way to update the programs and I went directly to the  manufacters’ websites where I got the latest, but not  necessarily guaranteed to play  nice with my HP Laptop.
  2. My fingerprint reader by DigitalPersona is now my Best Friend Forever (BFF). lol. You see, they had released an update to make it compatible with Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0 and now I’m totally spoiled. Granted, I’m not a finger-scanning expert like Matt who gets it on one try, but it’s worth not tasking my fingers too much  and not to talk of the increased security i.e. not having to type my username & password for anyone to see.
  3. Vista and Bitlocker Drive Encryption woes: Well, at this point, I’m sort of resigned to the fact that HP technical support staff is deliberately playing dumb on this issue. All they have to confirm to me is that they do not equip their consumer dv9700t with the TPM chip and I’ll be fine. Right now, my system is set up to enable Bitlocker Drive encryption, but I’ll have to be inconvenienced by using a USB key all the time. Anyway, I think I’m better off without Bitlocker for now. I’ll probably be better served by simply securing my laptop  better and perhaps investing in remote control software like RealVNC, etc.
  4. Windows Mobile Device Center is my second BFF now.  I can sync my information via bluetooth and the cable that came with my laptop. I didn’t have to install any updates or anything. I simply followed instructions and everything went smoothly. The first time you want to connect your phone, use the cable provided. Vista just automates everything and really, just follow the on-screen instructions. 🙂
  5. TV Tuner brouhaha: I don’t need no stinkin’ TV tuner! 😀 Okay, it’s theoretically nice, but in reality, it was a bunch of extra cords and baggage that I definitely didn’t like one bit. I’ll just stick to watching my favorite shows on Hulu like The Office, Hell’s Kitchen, Monk, Kitchen Nightmares, etc.
  6. I’ve made up with Microsoft Outlook 2007. I’ve promised to not start clicking on things while it’s still loading and she seems to be alright. She keeps clashing with the “Send to Bluetooth” addin and lately, has had some trouble with the Outlook Connector addin. Still, I’ve kept those two enabled and keeping my digits crossed. 🙂
  7. I have had some major peeves though: cases in point: Firefox and Gizmo. Firefox 3.0 has been rather unstable and slow on my system. I don’t understand it, but I clearly too invested in it because I’d rather keep using it than use Internet Explorer or install a newfangled browser like Google Chrome which caused me some trouble prior to my OS reinstall. *sigh* And as for Gizmo, don’t get me started. I use it a lot to call Nigeria (my homeland) and it is rather buggy on a 64-bit Vista system. I don’t blame them. It just got too much for me to take and I had to request a refund of my Gizmo Call Out minutes. I’ve currently got Skype concurrently installed with Gizmo and I get a better call quality with Skype even though the main reason I used Gizmo was the cheaper callout rates compared to Skype’s. I definitely see myself still using Gizmo for chat, et cetera. However, until they improve the software for Vista 64-bit systems, I’ll have to use a more mature program i.e. Skype.

And that’s about it on updates. More personal stuff to come later. Ciao!