My Commonplace Book

I haven't been around because I'm staying off the web as much as possible, trying to get the house cleaned up for Christmas. My fibromyalgia has been flaring since late spring, and as a result my house has devolved to CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome). Now my daughter-in-laws parents are coming here for Christmas, and they've never been here so I really want the house to look nice.

After running around putting things away and cleaning, I'm too sore to be comfortable in this desk chair, so I go lie in the recliner -- but this computer is a desktop so I can only use it at the desk.

And everything I do on the computer takes soooo long, so I've been restricting what I do to just my volunteer work -- managing the freecycle groups, mostly in email. I try not to keep Firefox open very long because it has a memory leak and really bogs this thing down.

I was thinking one day about why I still don't even have my Alaska pictures done yet, let alone all the others I've taken, and I realized it's because going through them takes sooo long. Everything takes longer than it should because this computer is so old and memory-challenged. It only has 256 MB, and the 40 GB hard drive is so full that virtual memory is extremely slow. I'll click on something in Firefox and wait ...... and wait ...... and wait ...... while the hard drive churns away and bits of programs get swapped back and forth in virtual memory. Defragging the hard drive hasn't seemed to make even a dent in the time that I could see.

But now I'm getting a new computer! Well, it's not new, it's a hand-me-down, and I'm not getting it until at least next summer, but at least it's something to look forward to! My brother gets a new computer every three years, and when we were talking on the phone on Thanksgiving he told me he's going back to a Mac this time. (He was a devoted Mac fan for many years until he needed some software that was only available for Windows, and had to switch. Now that Macs will run Windows-based software, he's going back.)

So I immediately offered to buy his old one. He always buys top of the line in everything, and although he uses his computers extremely heavily, he also takes excellent care of them, so I knew it would be a good one. He said he'd think about it.

Last night he sent me an email:

Wanted to share my thoughts with you so you'd know where I'm at on my Dell 9100 laptop. At the moment I'm targeting next summer to replace it with a new MacBook Pro.

I found the 9100's packing box in the garage, so I'll be able to ship it to you. It has 3 good USB ports and one that works only sporadically. It also has a Firewire 400 port, digital and analog video outputs for an external monitor, and of course an Ethernet port. It has a 15" (diagonal) display, a 60 Gb hard drive and 1 Gb of RAM, with Windows XP Pro installed. Other than the one USB port, the laptop is in excellent condition. If you google Dell 9100 laptop you'll see a number of descriptions and reviews.

I'm not interested in charging you for it, even for the shipping cost. You're in tight financial circumstances, that's all I need to know. We're running fairly lean ourselves these days, but by next summer we should be able to buy the new computer package. Once I buy a new computer I generally leave the old one in place for three months in case a need arises that I forgot to address on the new one. Once I have the MacBook Pro up and running, I'll see whether I can get by with one month this time.

The only things that could bring this plan down would be (1) my physical condition declines substantially, (2) our financial condition declines substantially, or (3) the Dell 9100 experiences a catastrophic failure.

A catastrophic failure wouldn't have to be a motherboard or something expensive. Back in 2001 I bought a Micron desktop computer that ran fine for several years. Then it's hard drive crashed permanently. Okay, I thought, I'll get a new hard drive, maybe a bigger one. I took it to our local shop. The tech ordered a new hard drive for me and replaced the broken drive. But when he started it up, it didn't work. Turned out all the new hard drives were incompatible with the three-year-old BIOS. I told him, okay, put in a new BIOS. He did. Then he discovered that the new BIOS was incompatible with the old motherboard. I wasn't about to pay for a new motherboard, so I had him remove the new hard drive and BIOS, and deepsixed that computer. That's when I bought the Dell 9100. Actually, I expect the 9100 to stay in top condition as it has since I bought it in 2004.

That's the plan for now. Let's pray that we can make it work.

Love,

Oh, boy! It has 4 times the memory this one has, and 50% more hard drive space. And it's a laptop, so I can sit in the recliner and surf, listen to real-time streaming audio anywhere in the house, or take it with me to show photos on, and all the other uses for a portable computer.

There are so many other things I need to buy more than a computer, especially some things for the house -- refrigerator, dishwasher, carpeting, painting, and new sliding glass doors (2) and front door and basement windows (2).  The doors and windows are original cheap builders' crap, and by now, 30 years later, they leak like sieves; I replaced the rest of the windows when forced to by the condo association because they were foggy, but I couldn't afford to do the doors too, and omitted the basement windows as well since they're under the deck and don't show.  The rest of the stuff was last replaced more than 20 years ago. The carpeting and paint are worn, the refrigerator has a lot of problems, and the dishwasher doesn't clean the dishes.

So the default computer plan was to stagger along with this one indefinitely unless it died, which it (thank goodness!) shows no sign of doing. So waiting till next summer won't be a hardship -- at least I have something to look forward to now!

I need to get back to work now, but I couldn't resist writing about this!

I have Comcast cable service. Well, sometimes I have cable service. Lately that hasn't been much of the time.

My Internet connection has been on and off for quite some time. For awhile it was mostly on, going out at random times for several minutes to a half hour or so then coming back on -- it was incredibly annoying, but usable.

But then at the end of last week it started being off more than it was on. Between being out of the house for one thing and another, and the connection being down much of the time, some days I wasn't able to get online at all. My freecycle co-mods were covering for me, but I felt bad about not doing my share of the work -- there are only three regular mods in my main group of over 2,000 members, and only four regular mods in my other group of over 6,000. So what little time I could get online was devoted pretty much exclusively to catching up there.

After getting off the phone with them the other day I was so frustrated that I was a little sharp in a message I sent to my co-mods. As soon as I had sent it I realized I had been too critical, so I sent an apology, and a description of the horrific phone call.

( Rant about Comcast's 'service' )

But meanwhile I haven't read anything at all here in days. I haven't been posting many comments in my recluse mode, but I was at least following along. Now I have no idea what's been going on. I'll try to catch up as best I can. If there's anything important going on, please tell me!

I have two problems with Mozilla and add-ons. One is about Firefox and the other is about Thunderbird.

1. Firefox
Has anyone else noticed a problem with Firefox and GoogleMaps? Starting a few weeks ago, I've been plagued by browser crashes almost every time I use GoogleMaps -- and only when I use GoogleMaps. Is there a known incompatibility that needs to be fixed, or do I have a problem with my computer?

Could it be one of my add-ons that's causing it? I did install some new add-ons not too long ago, but I'm not sure if that's when it started.

( FF add-ons I use )

In listing them I remembered that I had installed Get directions from Google Maps 0.4 at some point -- could that be the one causing the problem? I just disabled it, and I'll see what happens.

In listing them I also noticed that there are a few that I'm not using at all. Is it better to clean things up by deleting or disabling them or just leave them alone in case I remember to use them?

2. Thunderbird
For the last several months, Thunderbird has refused to update my add-ons. When I try -- or when a new update comes out and the program offers to update them -- I say yes, and then when I click the Update button, I get a dialog box for each add-on with the same error message:

Thunderbird could not install the file at [file address]
because: Download error
-228

Four or five of my add-ons have been updated, but I can't get the newer versions to install. Does anyone know what Download error -228 is?

I've tried reinstalling Tbird and then doing the update, but I still get the same result.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

Are these good results?

The FAQ says that these are the "last mile" results, and advises that "Most web browsers display kilobytes per second, but service providers typically advertise their speeds in kilobits per second. To find your speed in kilobits per second, multiply your kilobytes per second by 8." But it's not a very informative FAQ, and doesn't make clear which one they display!

I did it three times in a row and got some varying results. Or are they reasonable variations for a 2-minute span?


                 

Knology.net has an interesting speed test. I'm really surprised at the result I got:

Your download speed is 9.24 Mbps
Upload speed is 938 kbps

At 9.24 Mbps, download a:
    - 1 MB file in <1 sec
    - 10 MB file in 9 sec
    - 100 MB file in 2 min
    - 1000 MB file in 15 min
    - CD in 10 min
    - DVD in 1.1 hours

On the chart at the website, that's practically Ethernet speed -- it gives cable modem speed as 3 Mbps! I didn't think my download speed was anything like that.

I thought maybe it was an anomaly and tried it again, and got 5.94 Mbps, 9.20 Mbps and 9.53 Mbps. So I guess  that really is what I'm getting. It's much faster than I expected. Is over 9 Mbps typical for a cable modem these days?

It's nice to get a result like that, but it's bad news because it means I definitely need a new computer. Things take forever to load because the video card doesn't have any dedicated memory of its own, and the whole computer only has 256 MB. It takes so long for pages to load into the computer and come up on the screen that the fast download speed is wasted.

ADDED: I couldn't resist trying a few more times. Now the speeds are in the range of 5 to 7 Mbps. Someone on my street must have come online.

ADDED: I'm going to stop! I really am! But first ... it was back up to over 9 again a few times, and then back down to 5.88. I guess the neighbor is pausing to read pages or write emails or something. =shrug=

I just had an extremely weird error message from Thunderbird (my e-mail program). I had not tried to delete anything, and I was in my LJ comment notice folder at the time.

I clicked "Get Mail" and got this dialog box:

The DELE command did not succeed. Error marking a message as deleted. Mail server mail.comcast.net responded: parked opposite the north end of Old Dairy Farm Rd when I saw them =

HUH???

I finally figured out that it had probably picked up a snippet from a message in my birding listserv folder, but how and why it would do that, and why I even got the error message at all, are completely beyond me.