Snowy Weekend
Dec. 8th, 2003 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dxmachinaSo, I haven't posted much other than memes and quizzes for a couple of weeks, and even those have been kind of sporadic. I've had lots of things to write about, but just haven't managed to motivate myself. Even the impetus of being stuck in the house most of the weekend due to massive snowstorm didn't help. It snowed here for about 42 hours straight, starting just before it was time to leave work Friday night.
The ride home was one of the scariest I've ever done. Took me almost an hour to drive eight miles. Now normally, I don't mind driving in the snow. In fact, I can be downright foolhardy about it. It doesn't usually scare me. But Friday there was a little bit of rain just before the snow started, which froze when it hit the roads, so by the time I went to drive home there was about an inch of wet snow on black ice. It was downright nasty. There was no traction of any sort, and I had absolutely no confidence in my ability to stop the truck. Plus, it was drive time, so a ton of other people were on the roads trying to get home, and none of them could stop their vehicles, either. There were fender benders all over the place. It wasn't that I in fear for my life, or even of injury. No one was driving fast enough for that to happen. I just didn't want to hit anything, or be hit by anything.
It worked out. I got home okay, and then I did two smart things. I parked the truck as close to the end of my driveway as possible, and I shoveled the walk, despite thinking that it was all for nothing because of the forecast for snow all night. Turns out that because of the direction the wind was blowing, the path I dug never filled up. The wind just blew the snow away. Made things a lot easier when I had to shovel out the end of the driveway on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Got around a foot of snow, total, which remarkably low considering how long it actually snowed.
Spent Saturday and Sunday hanging around the house. Saturday was devoted to installing a 120 GB hard drive as an additional drive in Speedy (giving me a total of 180 GB of storage in that machine), and then transferring files over from the the old #2 drive, and from Flash. I wanted to install the #2 drive in Flash, but I get a windows protection error anytime I try. I'm beginning to suspect that the main drive in Flash (which turns out not to be a Maxtor) is incompatible with the Maxtor drives I've been trying to add as #2's. Feh. I did solve one other annoyance. The autologon service on Speedy hasn't worked properly since I installed ZoneAlarm on the machine, which is apparently the result of some sort of bizarre timing problem that occurs occasionally with the TweakUI tools and fast processors. The fix turned out to be just to add a little VBscript to make the machine wait for 200 milliseconds before running the service, just so the OS has time to catch up to the processor. Or something. Anyway, it worked, so now I don't have to hit the enter key during start up anymore.
Sunday I spent in the basement, finishing the trimming the last twelve shelves for the bookcases, which means all that's left to do is sand, stain, and urethane them for the project to be completed. I was sort of forced to do the trimming, because I needed the router for a couple of seekrit projects I'm working on, and I didn't want to have to try to set it up for the shelves again. Once the router was freed up, I did a little work on one of the projects. Still much more to do.
Much more to talk about, but Access is annoying the living dren out of me, so I have to go work on that for awhile.
The ride home was one of the scariest I've ever done. Took me almost an hour to drive eight miles. Now normally, I don't mind driving in the snow. In fact, I can be downright foolhardy about it. It doesn't usually scare me. But Friday there was a little bit of rain just before the snow started, which froze when it hit the roads, so by the time I went to drive home there was about an inch of wet snow on black ice. It was downright nasty. There was no traction of any sort, and I had absolutely no confidence in my ability to stop the truck. Plus, it was drive time, so a ton of other people were on the roads trying to get home, and none of them could stop their vehicles, either. There were fender benders all over the place. It wasn't that I in fear for my life, or even of injury. No one was driving fast enough for that to happen. I just didn't want to hit anything, or be hit by anything.
It worked out. I got home okay, and then I did two smart things. I parked the truck as close to the end of my driveway as possible, and I shoveled the walk, despite thinking that it was all for nothing because of the forecast for snow all night. Turns out that because of the direction the wind was blowing, the path I dug never filled up. The wind just blew the snow away. Made things a lot easier when I had to shovel out the end of the driveway on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Got around a foot of snow, total, which remarkably low considering how long it actually snowed.
Spent Saturday and Sunday hanging around the house. Saturday was devoted to installing a 120 GB hard drive as an additional drive in Speedy (giving me a total of 180 GB of storage in that machine), and then transferring files over from the the old #2 drive, and from Flash. I wanted to install the #2 drive in Flash, but I get a windows protection error anytime I try. I'm beginning to suspect that the main drive in Flash (which turns out not to be a Maxtor) is incompatible with the Maxtor drives I've been trying to add as #2's. Feh. I did solve one other annoyance. The autologon service on Speedy hasn't worked properly since I installed ZoneAlarm on the machine, which is apparently the result of some sort of bizarre timing problem that occurs occasionally with the TweakUI tools and fast processors. The fix turned out to be just to add a little VBscript to make the machine wait for 200 milliseconds before running the service, just so the OS has time to catch up to the processor. Or something. Anyway, it worked, so now I don't have to hit the enter key during start up anymore.
Sunday I spent in the basement, finishing the trimming the last twelve shelves for the bookcases, which means all that's left to do is sand, stain, and urethane them for the project to be completed. I was sort of forced to do the trimming, because I needed the router for a couple of seekrit projects I'm working on, and I didn't want to have to try to set it up for the shelves again. Once the router was freed up, I did a little work on one of the projects. Still much more to do.
Much more to talk about, but Access is annoying the living dren out of me, so I have to go work on that for awhile.
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Date: 2003-12-08 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-08 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-08 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 06:13 am (UTC)hmm, not an ark. My guess is Trojan horse.
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Date: 2003-12-11 06:45 am (UTC)What kind of truck do you have, DX? I'm assuming a decent size, what with all the moving. I've been learning the intricacies of driving in 4WD lately. Very strange.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-11 11:44 am (UTC)I have Chevy S-10, which is smallest of Chevy's pick-ups. It's the same chassis as the Blazer SUV. The Ford equivalent would be a Ranger.