Luna Tail

Well you know how I love YouTube. I have a number of videos there, mostly of the dogs, some of my birthday party. I hope to get more, and I want to put up a short clip of our new foster dog, Jessi. Well, Superbad is a new movie that is coming out, and it looks like it’s pretty fun. And on August 1, 2007, Youtube will have some fun and entertaining clips you might want to check out.

If you head on over to the official Superbad website, you’ll find ringtones to download (I have no idea if my phone supports these but I’d like to find out), wallpaper, and buddy icons. I love buddy icons… I have one on my IM application and they are always fun to change. You’ll need flash installed to view the website. I had to reinstall flash just now, man I forget the zillion little things that have to be reinstalled when you get a new computer.

So go check out Superbad and let me know what you think!

Okay I’m back online, and I have a new laptop. Only $550 (well, $750 after upgrades and 3 year warranty) so I’m happy. Nicer specs than my old one too. And I am liking Vista and the wide screen display.
I got it from Best Buy:
Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Notebook with AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TK-53
Product Details
Product Height 1.6″
Product Width 10.1″
Product Weight 6.8 lbs.
Product Depth 14.1″
Processor Brand Mobile AMD Athlon(TM) 64 X2
Processor Speed 1.7GHz
Display Type WXGA high-definition widescreen with BrightView technology (1280 x 800)
Screen Size 15.4″
System Bus Up to 1600MHz
Cache Memory 512KB on die Level 2
System Memory (RAM) 1GB (I upgraded to 2GB)
System Memory (RAM) Expandable To 4GB
Type of Memory (RAM) DDR2
Hard Drive Type Serial ATA (5400 rpm)
Hard Drive Size 120GB
Optical Drive Double-layer DVD±RW/CD-RW
Optical Drive Speeds Drive speeds not available
Direct-Disc Labeling Yes
Digital Media Reader or Slots Yes, digital media card reader
Diskette Drive No
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 (UMA)
Video Memory Up to 287MB
Personal Video Recorder (PVR) No
TV Tuner No
MPEG Yes
Modem 56 Kbps*
*Capable of receiving 56 Kbps downloads. However, current regulations limit download speed to 53 Kbps.
Networking Built-in 10/100Base-T Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 connector)
Wireless Networking Built-in high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g)
S-Video Outputs 1
Additional Audio/Video Connectors 1 SPDIF digital audio out
Audio Altec Lansing
Speakers Built-in
PCMCIA Slots 1 ExpressCard 34/54
USB 2.0 Ports 3
IEEE 1394 FireWire Ports 1
Parallel Ports None
Serial Ports None
Game Ports None
Notebook Weight Standard (more than 6 lbs.)
Battery Type Lithium-ion
Pointing Device Touchpad with on/off and dedicated vertical scroll up/down pad
Operating System Windows Vista Home Premium
Included Software Microsoft Works; Adobe Acrobat Reader; Hewlett-Packard QuickPlay, Photosmart Essentials; muvee autoProducer Basic Edition; Roxio Creator 9 Basic and more
Included Accessories Hewlett-Packard mobile remote, ear bud headphones

It even has a remote! LOL. How fun. I like the specs, I think it’s a great deal. I had to drive 30 miles to pick it up because all the local stores were sold out. But I needed one NOW and so I’m happy. Anyway, I’ll be back to posting regularly soon, today is gonna be super busy, though.

Well, I took the laptop apart again, and jiggled some connections to make sure they would stay, and they all looked good. Then I put it back together… and now it’s back to doing nothing. No lights come on, no power, no charging. Hrmph. And I even got all the screws back in (i’m actually one short lol).

So I’m pronouncing the thing dead. I’m going to go buy a new one. Probably an Acer, with an extended warranty! So for a week or so I’ll be on my desktop. Ugh. I did get it to connect to work, though, so I can work from home.

Taking it apart was a lot of fun, anyway. I did it three times and got pretty good at it. If I played golf, I could take a cart apart, and figure out where all the golf cart parts go.

Well, as per my husband’s advice (he is the computer expert in our house), I disassembled the entire laptop. It was actually quite fun. I got the plans from the HP site and followed them precisely.

I vacuumed it out, and there was some awful messes of dog hair in there. Ugh, the drawbacks of dogs and technology together. So I vacuumed it out, then reassembled it.

The good news is.. it is charging the battery. It did start up! But the battery is way low, only 1%. Not sure why, maybe the power connection was bad and my battery drained. It still won’t quite stay on, but maybe after the battery charges for a few hours… I can only hope, eh? We figured we probably can’t hurt the thing more by taking it apart.

Yesterday it wouldn’t even turn on, with or without a battery. So this is progress, I think, and I didn’t spend any money on someone to tell me what was wrong.

My husband thinks it will probably be okay now. I sure hope so! Cross your fingers!

Oh, I have about 12 screws I didn’t get back in… oops. If it charges and works, I’ll get them back in (I hope).

Unfortunately it seems my laptop broke today. It’s a compaq Presario M2000, I’ve had it for about a year and a half. I only had the one year standard warranty.

It will not power on. It will occasionally, but not consistently. We are thinking it’s the motherboard that has gone bad. Either that or some part of the power, though I’m not sure how that works. I will be taking it into the shop tomorrow to see if they can tell me how much it will be to repair.

Hopefully we’ll be able to retrieve everything on the hard drive. I may not be on the web much until I get a new laptop. Or get this one fixed. We’ll see, I’m on my old desktop now, good thing we have this computer. But the old huge monitor is really bothering my eyes.
I miss my laptop.

I just have to say that I love my Zoloft. It’s amazing. I never have had this much patience before in my life. I can go shopping for modern office furniture, and household furniture, and actually say what I want and express my concerns.

This morning coming in on the shuttle to work, I actually asked the driver to turn on the air conditioning. It took some effort on my part, though. I was nervous about it. Thinking I could sit there and suffer and it wasn’t too long a ride… but then I got up the guts and I asked. That is a huge thing for me.

I have so much more patience now, I’m amazed. And I can even sit and just relax, which is weird.

For my whole entire life I have always felt rushed and stressed, and still it is a very odd feeling to try to be at peace. I don’t really know how. It’s a foreign feeling to me. I like it, though, and I’m learning to accept it. My doc said I should be on Zoloft for life and that is just fine by me. I’m really liking these changes! Of course my anxiety is not 100% gone, but probably about 70% gone.

I have no idea why I am not in bed yet. There is a fun thunderstorm outside. I’m trying to fix my utahdogs.com website… because I’m trying to create a subdomain and it’s messing things up. Why a subdomain would mess up a regular domain, I have no idea. I think I figured it out. No thanks to my host support, which was non-existant.

I also need to figure out how to do URL Redirects with mod_rewrite on apache. Such fun. All these things to learn. I’m also coding a little page in PHP/MySQL for a dynamic Alexa list which is fun to do. I’m probably 50% of the way done, I hope to get more done over the weekend, then I can make it look nice.

Anyway, off to bed I go. I have such a hard time waking up. I want to post about that, when I remember, and am not so tired.

After my chiropractor appointment today (man that is helping a ton) I went to look at dressers for our spare bedroom.

We need a huge dresser. Absolutely huge. We have no where, hardly, to put our clothes. Our closets are small, and we have no folding space, and our one little dresser is just a tiny thing.

I saw a really nice one that they would even custom make for me, with another drawer and wider, which would be perfect. $1,350.00… I don’t know if I can justify that, though! I went to RC Willey and looked at some, they were all small, not want I wanted, and still too expensive. Hrmm…

And I have been watching what I eat again, finally. I haven’t needed any diet pills, but sometimes I really think I want to try them!

You might not know it, because I don’t talk about them much (I’m too addicted to dog sports) but we do have cats. We have two. One is a black cat named Phoebe, and this one is Littles, our calico mix.

In our basement we have soft tiles and we have all our animals’ names in the tiles. This is a cute picture because Littles is laying on her name. If you click the picture you can see the full image in your browser window.

Littles is pretty uncat-like. She is not very coordinated and falls off things. But we love her, and we hope she has many years left. She is our oldest animal at 11 years old.

I have a habit that I started when I was very young… probably in my early to mid teens. I pop my knuckles. And try as I might to stop, I never have been able to. I still wish I could stop. Mostly because my knuckles, both hands and feet, always ache.

I have often used some different products to ease the ache. I have used Icy Hot in the past, and it works pretty well, but a lot of the time it seems like it doesn’t quite penetrate deep down into my joints and muscles. So I am trying a new product called Freeze It which is supposed to do about the same thing, but better.

I really like the product so far. It is a gell, and it really absorbs quickly into my skin without leaving a creamy residue that I have to wash off my hands with soap and water. And as I sit here with having just put it on my hands and feet, I can feel a nice sharp cooling sensation getting into my joints. I really like it, and I think it’s going to help ease the pain I have in my joints and muscles. And as I get older, I realize that I’m not as limber as I used to be, and after agility, jogging, or camping, it comes in handy!