House Buying

So for the past few months (for my wife longer) we've been looking for houses to buy. We finally found one (no not the one in the picture, this is the internet and I'm not about to post EVERYTHING to the public). It's been completely remodeled and almost everything is brand new. We started the long and painful process of buying it last month. Things flew at first. I got all the required paperwork and anything requested to the lender and our agent within an hour of the request (most times within 5 min.). I wanted things to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, and they did up until last week. We were supposed to close on the thing this past Monday. Then we found out that there was a complication with the mortgage insurance. Once we got past that now there is something else. What a pain in the butt. We are hoping to close today. That remains to be seen. To anyone that hasn't experienced buying a house it is now clear to me why people, once they get a house, tend to stay there until they die. Aside from the fact the moving is a physically tiring thing and a pain, getting everything bought and signed and cleared is just as much a pain in the butt as moving. We have NO debt and great credit, but these guys are picky.

Oh and another thing, when you look around and you use the little calculators to calculate your payment on the house keep in mind that is for the house ONLY. You have to top that off with insurance on the house and insurance on the mortgage and insurance on the insurance and THEN you gotta sign that in blood and give your first born and a few fingers and toes of the second born in some cases to assure them that it's all going to be ok. You have to explain every aspect of your life to them so they can document it and have you sign it. This is all on a house that is NOT a short sale. I don't even want to think about what a short sale would be like. A nightmare from the abyss is my guess.

Aside from all the crap you have to go through to get the house it'll be nice to have a house finally. No obnoxious neighbors through the paper thin wall. They will at least be in a separate building. Space to put our junk. No more fighting for parking. Me, I'm looking forward to not moving every year. Something a little more permanent will be nice.

Dreams and Reality

So we've been looking at houses lately and we found one that we like. We placed an offer last night and went home rather excited. I was having one of those too good to be true dreams. I was dreaming about the garage and how I was going to put things. I was cleaning my car and getting excited that I had a place to put the motorcycle out of the weather. I was in this process when I woke up and was really thirsty. I don't usually get up at night but I was really thirsty. So I got up to go get a drink. I went to the kitchen and got a drink and was on my way back to bed when suddenly I was aware that I had discovered two things. The first was that the dogs were not in their kennels as they should be. I knew this because of the second thing that I had discovered that was now under my foot. The little playdough makers had struck again! I have no idea how I missed the entire mess the first time down the hall but I had a direct hit on the way back. I cleaned off my foot and Natalie worked on the carpet. At 3:30 AM this was not what I had been dreaming about. The house we placed an offer on has brand new carpet in it. I am hellbent on saying that the dogs are NOT allowed on it. So let it be written so let it be done. Amen.

The Turn Signal

Before                                                      After


So I have to say right now I am SO proud of myself, but first the story:

This last fall there was a day when the wind was blowing harder than the big bad wolf. I was at work feeling the building shake a little. When it was time to come home I was pulling into my parking space when I realized that something was already in my spot. I park both my car and my motorcycle there. I have a cover that I put on my motorcycle to preserve the poor thing through the weather (until I get a garage or a shed, hopefully sooner than later). In this case it was what gave the poor thing enough surface area to allow the wind to blow it over. Trying to avoid the four letter words that were screaming around in my head I got out of the car and went to survey the damage. The cover was still tightly strapped on so I stood the poor thing up and immediately saw chunks of plastic on the ground. I pulled the cover off and noticed right off the bat that the poor right rear turn signal had had it. It's flexible but not that flexible. Luckily I had turned the handle bars the the left and it fell to the right so not much else was hurt. The right foot peg was flexible enough to avoid to much damage and had pretty well saved the rest of the bike from scuffs and scratches and the cover was ripped in a place or two but not too bad off (I paid $90 for it and it's held up pretty well under the abuse). The handles bars were a little bit bent from the initial plunge to the ground but it didn't look too much the worse for wear. I wasn't happy but it wasn't totally destroyed either. I threw the cover back on the poor thing and parked it and parked the car and fumed on the way inside knowing that if I wanted to ride it in the spring that I'd probably have to do something about the turn signal.

Well today was that day. I've never been a big mechanic. I can do things here and there. I feel pretty good when I change the oil in the car or give the things a car wash. I poked around on the internet and noticed a turn signal on eBay for twenty seven and some change. So I ordered one of them and awaited the shipment. I looked around here and there to see if there was anything on how to replace a turn signal online. There wasn't a whole lot other than a little on the wiring. I figured that I'd have at least a couple of bolts to remove and I'd have to take the seat off to get to the wiring. After I got off work I raced home today knowing that the signal had arrived. I had just reinstated the insurance on the thing so today is the day! I opened the mailbox and discovered my package awaiting patiently. I tore into the package and ran up to grab my tools and begin the surgery.

Amazingly the signal still worked but the bulb wouldn't last very long in the weather so I had to replace it. I pulled the cover off the motorcycle when I got to it and began removing bolts hoping that I wasn't going to totally mess this up (I have done things like this before with less than desirable results). I monkied around enough to get the seat off and loosen the bolts on the light, but the way the wiring was it was holding the light in place and the wire was also run through some plastic tubing to keep it neat. After playing around enough I got the wire out of the tube and pried the old broken light off (I only ended up slitting my wrist once this whole ordeal which is pretty good considering I usually rip myself up pretty good). I got the new light on and even slowly weaseled the wire in through the plastic tubing and hooked everything up and then realized that I needed to thread the bold through the wire so I could bolt the thing on again. So I pulled the wire through the tube again and put the washer and bolt on and tried again. I managed to get the wire back through after messing with it for about ten minutes. I rerouted the wires and tubing back where they came from and plugged everything back in. I put everything back together and put the key in. I tried the left signal first to make sure it still worked. I'm happy to say that it did. then I tried the right signal and much to my surprise it worked! First try and everything! This is such a rare moment that something worked on the first try that I almost didn't believe it.

Anyway there you have it. I was so happy that I took it out for its maiden voyage. I filled it up for a whopping six dollars. The handle bars are still a little goobered up but I'll get them bent back into shape and it'll be almost like it never happened.

I know that this really isn't that big of a deal, but it is to me. It's something that my dad would have done and me being able to fix things like he did just really makes my day.

Playing with Windows 8

The new WINDERS AIGHT is out (at least the beta) and it's free to play with. You can find it here as well as other places. I've been running it both in a virtual machine and on a spare computer I have laying around and for the most part I like it. Installing the thing was pretty fast. I installed it on a virtual machine at work in less then ten minutes from booting from the iso image to logging in for the first time.

It links to your hotmail or other Microsoft account and syncs other windows 8 machines so all your machines are alike. It uses the sky drive for your documents. There are screenshots all over the place for the start menu but here is another just in case you've not seen it. If you stuff your mouse in the top left corner of the screen like I did in the picture below it shows your running apps (in this case the desktop) and so far the only way I've found to close open apps is to right click on them here and click on close.

The desktop looks like Windows 7 minus the start menu orb. If you stuff your mouse in the bottom right corner that brings up a little sidebar menu with (from the bottom up) settings, devices, start, share, and search.

One really cool new feature that I discovered is the bottom three things on the General Settings section. Remember how your computer slows down over time because it accumulates a lot of junk in the windows files? The fix for that was to format and start over every so often (after backing up all your data of course). There is a "Refresh your PC without affecting your files" option that will do all that for you now. Just throw your windows disc in, click on get started and when you come back 30 minutes or so later you are ready to log back into your now refreshed computer. It keeps your files and apps in place. (Putting your mouse in the bottom left corner brings up your start menu that takes you to the start screen.)

It removes anything that you installed on the desktop but it leaves a file on the desktop called Removed Programs. Here I just had Google Chrome installed when I ran it just to test it out.

As a System Administrator I like the look of the new task manager. This is the simplified version:

Clicking on More details brings up something like this:

There is a lot more info on the processes running as well as Performace, App history, Startup, Users, Details, and Services:

I really like the search online option for when you are trying to find what in the world a program is.

This is just a basic overview from playing with it for an hour or two. It was definitely designed for a touch screen as the start screen is a pain with a mouse. It would be nice to have the option to have the start menu back but they have done away with it completely as far as I can find. For the most part I like it and I think I really could get used to some of the new things with it, but I think the start menu will hold me up for awhile. IE10 doesn't look like anything is new aside from the number from version 9 (I'm a Chrome lover myself).

IT Funnies (At least to me...)

So I have decided I need a column of some of the goofy/ridiculous requests I get at work from time to time (usually from the same people over and over). Mind you most of these people are nigh unto genius in their chosen profession...they are just lacking in the technology department. I'll try to update from time to time.

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I had a guy bring a laptop in that he said just stopped working. I played with it a bit and eventually pulled the battery out to look at it and found some water running around rather freely. When I asked him if it had gotten wet his reply was "I have had a little spill on it before, yes, bit it worked after. Does that look like the problem?"

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One thing that drives me crazy is when people try and diagnose their own problems. I had a guy complain that a program wasn't letting him save to a certain drive. I looked it up and found that he didn't have any rights to that drive so I told him to fill out the paperwork needed and I would get him rights to that drive. He replied back and said "As far as I am aware the only difference between myself and the other annalists is that I am not an administrator. So I assume that I need to become an administrator to relieve these problems."

To me that's like going to a doctor with a broken leg and telling the doctor you have a problem. After examining things the doctor says you have a broken leg and you tell the doctor no I think something is wrong with my head. The doctor won't argue with you there (if you are arguing with a doctor about something he has worked on for years there probably is) but encourages you to take care of the leg.

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Another fun request I get from time to time are things that don't make any sense at all. Like "My computer speakers are not working and it says I need a flash drive.??" or "My battery for APC says it's unable to communicate??? I can not print stuf now." (These are both from the same person by the way). What do speakers have to do with a flash drive or batteries with printing? Nothing. That's like saying that someone broke my window and now my washer isn't working.

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From time to time people like to dump things on the IT bunch thinking it isn't their problem. Things like that rile me up. I know it's not professional of me to blow up in their face so I write little nastygrams and on occasion share them with select people. Here is one of those little nastygrams, but first a little background. There is a program that they run here that stores all the company's paperwork. It runs on a server and after installing a plugin for Internet Explorer they can view said documents. A request came in to make sure that all computers in the building had this silly little plugin installed. I was looking for some direction as to what computers needed it and I was basically told it was my problem and that we should be keeping records on all this. Well here is my little rant on that:

"Well if it isn’t your problem then who’s is it? True we support your systems, but on the other hand they are YOUR systems. What happens if the power is off and you need an MSDS sheet hmmmm? What do you do then Sherlock? This is the first time I’ve heard anything about this so don’t get your panties in a wad if it takes us some time to get this sorted out (especially if you are not willing to help at all). I wouldn’t come to you wanting some DNA work done and tell you to figure it out on your own as to what I want done, so don’t expect us all to be mind readers. You are welcome to bow down to our administrative rights, but don’t crap a brick when something as MINOR as this comes along that can be fixed with a simple installation of a plugin. You have plenty of little minions at your bidding. They’re busy (as we ALL are) but would thirty seconds kill anyone to throw us a friggin’ bone here? It’s sad that I have to go DOWN the chain of command to get any sort of helpful response (I emailed _____ and she was more than happy to at least point me in the right direction). So go wash your shorts, take a deep breath, and mellow out. We’ll get it done. You don’t treat customers this way, and if I were you I definitely wouldn’t treat someone this way that could be the all merciless god over your computer access (I wonder what happened to your files? Oops. Is that what the delete button does?)"

I get a little excited at times I know. I love my job I really do but as in all jobs there are things that can drive you crazy.

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There were a few people downstairs that were having a problem with a printer. One of the people sent in a helpdesk request to have it fixed. We played with it and got with our good friend Google and found that it wasn't the printer, but Word causing the problem. Word likes to override the printers print options and use its own. We relayed that message to the person and he insisted that wasn't good enough. We set up a "separate" printer to select the tray they wanted so all they have to do is select the printer and it would use the tray that was wanted and they insisted that was a "work around" and wanted it fixed. They wouldn't listen to me or my coworker so they called the folks that work on the printer and got them out here. An hour later we got an email from the person that put in the ticket saying apparently it is a Word problem and there wasn't much we could do about it. I guess he needed three opinions before he would believe anything. I sent him the article from Microsoft stating that it was a Word thing and he didn't believe me until a printer guy said the same thing.

Well that's all I can think of for now. I'll add more as I go along. There will be plenty more!

Food For Never

It looks like once again it's time for a little story. Last year my wife was laid off from working at Purse-onality in Gardner Village. It slows down around there after Halloween. My wife happened into a job in a round about way. To shorten the story as much as I can I'll just say she found a job. It is a company called Food Forever. They sold food storage and were just starting up. They hired Natalie on the spot and had her work a few hours after her interview. At first things seemed dandy. She was working nights, but we could handle that. Natalie helped around the store and after a week the owner came to her and told her that he wanted her to put together a seminar in St. George for that weekend and that he was making her over the St. George area. Needless to say my stressed out wife slapped together a seminar in less than twenty four hours and with help from friends and family in St. George we were able to round up around 25 or so people to be there. Not bad for having almost no notice. The owner paid for our gas to get there (but that was it). We stayed with my wife's family (keep this in mind for later). Everything went surprisingly well for something slapped together with almost no warning. The owner was rather pleased and had no trouble enlisting me as some free labor. I went initially to support my wife and I was enlisted in hauling a lot of things in and out of the building where we had this little seminar. I wouldn't normally have a problem with this other than I felt like I was the slave he could crack a whip on. My wife brought in over 3 g's of sales to the store from that seminar (that's over $3,000). In the seminar the owner promised my wife in front of everyone there that she was going to get commission off of anything that was sold. He also said any orders would go through her and that she was over southern Utah. (Wait a minute he just told us St. George!)

So after all this we went on our marry way. After all was said and done the owner was pleased with my wife's efforts in St. George and told her to put together something in Cedar City. This is where I stomped my foot and decided this was all a load of crap. Problem number one that I had was that my wife was told that she was doing all of this. She was never asked anything it was just a command not a request. Second problem was she was getting paid nine bucks an hour only when she was in the store. This accounts for nothing done outside the store (Putting together seminars, calling people, etc.). Problem three she was treated more like a slave than an employee. The owner told her what he wanted and it was never questioned by anyone. This goes for anyone that worked there. There is a lady there that works around 80 hours a week and gets a flat nine bucks an hour. No benefits, no paid holidays, just screwed over and over and over again because that's how desperate she is. So desperate in fact that she takes the owners side no matter what the cost. Fourth problem I have is that the owner knows how to play people. When my wife went to quit the first time he knew how to work her. He promised her he'd work with her and pay her for going to St. George and that they'd work out a commission system. Two weeks later when nothing had happened (and after a few other things went on that further pissed me off) I went in from work to talk to the scum myself. The weasel never showed up. So I went back to work and told my wife that she was done there.

So on December sixth she called and told them she was done. The owner was (supposedly) bummed out (because he knew he lost a very cheap slave). My wife was told she would get her last paycheck on payday. They got her a check alright but it never cashed. We tried over and over and finally went into Food for Never and complained. The excuse was it was the banks fault (LAME). They said they were in the process of changing banks and that they would get her a check, oh and by the way can we have the list of people in St. George? I had my wife use it as leverage. She told them they could have the list if they gave her what they promised: The hours she worked + the ten hours promised going to St. George + the commission. The owner trying to work his magic again played the guilt card saying he couldn't believe my wife would push for legal matters and that they didn't have commission in place yet and they paid for all expenses to St. George (which if you remember from above was gas only) and (insert all sorts of excuses here), but the thing that rips my shorts the most was he said "And we still paid you when your husband was in the store and made you unproductive but we didn't say anything about that". Oh really? Last I knew anytime I was in the store I was helping her close.

Well guess what? Today is exactly two months since my wife quit. They promised her (again for about the tenth time) that they would get her check to her today. If it doesn't happen today we'll figure out who needs to get involved so that she is finally paid (Labor Commission). All we asked for is the bare minimum, we aren't even asking for the commission. How ridiculous is that? How are they paying current employees if they can't pay one that hasn't worked there for two months?

In conclusion I will say I shaved quite a bit out of this story so it doesn't end up as a novel. When my wife first started working there I believed heavily in the store and their product. I still believe that they have some good things to sell and some good ideas but I cannot support someone that sucks this bad. If they can't scrounge up a lousy $300 to pay an employee that hasn't worked for them for two months I don't think that they deserve to be in business. Come to think of it I never do remember seeing a business license anywhere...

Blunders at work

So I've decided that I'm going to post a few of the biggest "Are you kidding me?" type things I've done at work. I'll update from time to time as it's inevitable that there will always be more to come.


I had one request to come look at one of the phones. They had replaced the headset because it was sounding fuzzy and now that they had replaced it weren't getting any sound at all. I tested the speaker and got a dial tone on both lines with no problem. With a brand new headset it had to be the connection. On the back of the phone there are two plugs with pictures by them. One with a handset and one with a headset. They were plugged into one labeled AUX on the other side of the phone.


We had gotten a request saying that someones laptop wasn't turning on. They brought it in and sure enough nothing would turn on. On pulling out the battery I discovered water and lots of it. Upon asking if it had gotten wet the reply came: "Does that look like the problem?"


I had gotten a request for one of the lovely cubes saying that it wasn't working. I tend to put off requests for these, and after putting it off as long as possible I headed down to see what the issue could be this time. Upon looking at the thing I discovered EVERYTHING had been unplugged (Power, monitors, everything. Genius Point!). I plugged everything back in turned it on and advised that they leave things plugged in.


There was an issue with one of the printers not wanting to change printing trays. After looking around we found that it only occurred in Microsoft Word. After looking around some more we confirmed that it was a Word issue and that Microsoft had officially claimed it as well. I had told the person that had asked us to look into it that it was a Word issue. One of my coworkers had told him the same thing. The person called the printer service company and had them send a tech guy out to look at it. After all this I get an email back stating: "I spoke with [tech guy], a senior tech from [printer place] and he confirmed that the weirdness going on is a Word issue, not a printer or driver issue." Does it really take three (or four if you count an official statement from Microsoft) opinions to convince you that we already told you that?