Dented the Jeep last night
Last night I had the mower (heavy ride-on ZTR style) up on the trailer as was driving to a friend’s house to cut their grass. Normally, I load the mower so that its tail is facing forward. This time, I loaded it face-first, since the tires were a bit wet from the grass, and it wouldn’t grab the trailer and climb up. This caused the trailer to be a bit tail heavy, which is bad. You want it to be nose heavy, to encourage it to stay down on the hitch-ball.
Anyway, long story short, the hitch came up off the ball. The safety chains were still attached, but the trailer was fishtailing all of the place at this point, going nearly sideways at times, tires smoking when it was perpendicular to me. I’m really thankful it didn’t flip over. I’m also thankful no one else was around at the time, or it might have hit them. Once I got it slowed down, the mower (still firmly strapped to the trailer) slid forward and dented the rear hatch of the jeep. That’s the sum total of the damage from the whole incident, aside from any wear and tear on my cardiovascular system from seeing the mower dancing behind me.
I’m _really_ thankful that things turned out so well. I’m sad about the dent, but it’s just a dent.
HDTV, I has it
I bought Melissa an HDTV for her Xbox360, last night. It’s a Samsung, 30 inch CRT, model TXM3096WHF. It’s capable of 480p and 1080i. I freely admit that it’s not terribly high tech, but it’s better than the aging (and whistling) 27″ SDTV that we had. And it cost $65, so you can’t really beat that with a stick. (:
I’m enjoying learning about how to hook things up and setup things up for an HD system. The xbox looks very pretty at 480p. I need to hook up the DVD player via the component cables and learn how to set it to widescreen mode.
D610 and Windows 7
I have a Dell D610, which is a fairly modern business grade laptop. It needed a fresh OS install (it still had WinXP Home from the person I bought the lower part of the machine from). Since I had a beta copy of Win7 that I hadn’t tried yet, I opted to install that.
Turns out, the video chipset in the D610 (Intel 915) will never be supported by the Windows 7 driver architecture. So much for trying out windows 7, on that machine anyway.
Mom’s baking powder biscuits
4 cups flour
4 tsp sugar
4tsp baking powder
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
2/3 cup shortening
3/2 cup buttermilk or sour milk
Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix all dry ingredients, then add the shortening and milk. Bake till the bottoms are brown (for 15-20 minutes, depending on size). When they’re baked, split them in half, butter them, then cover them liberally in fresh, sliced strawberries. We normally eat this for dinner in my family. (:
Mostly better
Got a wicked case of food poisoning Thursday night. Friday was basically a loss. Saturday, Melissa and I both feel mostly better, but we’re still a little slow and tired from basically not eating Friday. We assume the culprit was Panda Express.
Un-finalized DVD
I’m trying to recover video from a mini-dvd. It was recorded there via a sony camcorder, but the camcorder was dropped before the disc was finalized. Now nothing seems to be able to read it, not even in raw mode. I’ve tried using ISObuster and NERO to repair the disc. I’ve tried reading the data off in raw mode using dd and ddrescue. Nothing I’ve done can see any data there, even though I can see that there’s data on the disc with my eyes.
Anyone have any ideas? It’s to the point where I’m thinking the simplest way to pull the data off might be with a high resolution camera, then programatically converting the image back to raw data…
What’s that?
Lately, Emmy’s standard query has become “What’s that?”. It’s fun, because it shows how much she’s really soaking up about the world around her. It also shows which pieces don’t have names for her yet. I know that for Mel, this is a trying time, since she gets that question all day long. For me, since I work away from her all day, I get it less, so it’s more endearing.
Two year olds are a trip.
Scrabble board from the other night
I ended up winning this one 272 to 261. The board was cramped the whole game, but it was still fun. Melissa got it for me for my birthday. (:
DHS, protectin’ mah checkin’
Melissa and I opened a new checking account yesterday[1]. It was all normal except for two items. First, they referred to my social security number as a “tax identification number”. I don’t know if that’s the bank’s phrase or a government phrase. Either way, disconcerting.
The other oddment was that I had to fill out a form for the DHS that detailed my “expected usage” of cash, wire transfers and online transactions. I had to estimate how often each of those would occur as well as their mean values and maximum values. What a joke! I was seriously tempted to define a few variables, then answer all the questions in terms of those variables. I don’t think there’s any way[2] to give reasonable values there. The woman that opened our account as much as said that we wouldn’t be held to anything on the form. Our government at work. :\
[1] - Our old bank sold all of its Indiana branches to another bank. Our account was not opened in Indiana though, so now we’re without a local branch. I wasn’t too happy with old bank to begin with (this isn’t the first time their system has left me high and dry), so we are moving to a locally owned bank.
[2] - Short of some extensive datamining on my checking records, which don’t even have all the data that DHS wanted.
2008 taxes finished
I finished filing my 2008 federal and state income taxes today. What a pain. I used Intuit’s online federal preparation system. That cost $30, but went fine. Rather than pay $35 to file the state taxes (which are easy, even with itemezation) I tried to use Indiana’s i-file, their free online service. Somewhere along the line, I missed the boxes to fill in how much state and local tax had been witheld from my paychecks, so the state thought I owed them a lot of money.
Which meant that I had to file an amendment (because the ifile didn’t have a “go back” at that point) in writing, explaining the mistake and pointing out that the state owed me money, not the other way around. Anyway, the amendment and my federal forms are all in the mail as of today, so good riddance.