Tag: the office

Simply addicted

Oh. My God. Is this blog still alive? 🙂 Sorry, bad joke. Mea culpa because I have been bad about updating my Facebook page & my blog! Well, the title of this blog post refers to my current addiction to the show, The Office. Holy Jesus, it’s sidesplitting-ly funny. Thankfully, John (Matt’s friend) has 4 season DVDs and you bet I scored 2 of those from him. I can’t believe it took me this long to get into it. Dwight is simply ridiculous and Michael is just plain crazy. lmao. Okay, enough of that.

It’s Fall Break and the nice thing about being part of the school system is that I get to taste a little bit of the Fall Break fun. lol. This means I’ve got a 3-day weekend and I’m really happy because I can start planning  my mini-vacation. It, of course, helps that payday coincides for both of us so Matt & I might finally treat ourselves to something. Matt’s kvetched about my techy talk on this blog and that got me thinking that perhaps it was time to start a separate blog dedicated to talking about my trials with my computer software and hardware. Courtesy of Microsoft DreamSpark, I’ve currently got Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft Expression Studio group of programs on my laptop. I am looking forward to learning about designing and coding which will be difficult because I’m somewhat horrible at learning new hobbies. So, here’s to self motivation. 🙂

Movies I can’t wait to watch et al

One movie that tops that list is the next Bond film (Quantum of Solace). I just watched the trailer here (Quantum of Solace) and I am so ready for it to come out already. I already loved the Bond franchise and Craig just came and revitalized things. I fell in love with the soundtrack to Casino Royale’s soundtrack by Chris Cornell and I currently have the soundtrack! Yes, I’m cool like that. lol. For my musical needs, Amazon MP3 has proved to be the best way for me to feed my current music habit. I got the newest Pussycat Dolls CD (Doll Domination) and Fergie’s “The Dutchess” both for less than $3 and in mp3 format to boot! I can’t stand the iTunes music store which is in line with my disdain for a lot of things Apple (AAPL).

Things that I’ve been up to:

  1. Maggie’s sweet 16 birthday party: It took place last Monday and I wasn’t sure I would be able to make it. Thankfully, I asked for permission to leave and we were able to surprise the cute birthday girl. 🙂 I had a lot of fun and danced my feet off! I finally learned the Macarena (shut up) and I fell in love with Katy Perry‘s song, “I Kissed a Girl”. So much so that I’ve bought her CD and I will see what she’s made of. That song in particular reminds me of Pink’s older music. In fact, since her party, I’ve become slightly obsessed with learning “group” dances like the macarena, the electric slide, thriller, et cetera. lol.
  2. Work: This goes without saying ‘cos it pays the bills. 🙂 It’s getting progressively busier, but thus far, I think I’m staying on track. I’ll know what the deal is when we get to large animal anatomy. It promises to be super-busy then.
  3. Entertainment: I’ve officially become addicted to Hulu. I recently got into watching The Office and I am amazed that it took me this long to get into it. I simply love the show and one of Matt’s friend (JB) is a fellow Office fan so he’s going to lend me his season 1 DVDs. 🙂 Sheer bliss.

Anyhow, that’s about it for now. Cheers!

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!