I can't believe I did this

Last week I screwed up. BIG TIME! The rough draft for our final project was due on Tuesday July 20th. And for some reason that I cannot fathom I somehow forgot that. We talked about it in class the week before, about what had to be included and how long the draft had to be - I remember all this. And at the time we went over it in seminar I knew it was due had the end of week 6. But when week 6 ended I hadn't submitted it, despite the fact the the discussion board for that week was an after draft outline, it just didn't register that that meant the draft was supposed to be turned in too. In fact I remember thinking that it was a good thing that the first draft wasn't due for this class until next week because I was putting together a formal outline for another class that was giving me problems and was thinking it was good I could concentrate on that and both things at once. It didn't hit me until 2 days later that I'd missed the deadline on the assignment. So I spent that thursday night transcribing my handwritten paper and editing it on the fly while I went along, creating a title page and re-doing my reference page so I could submit it late, contacted the professor by email to confess my screwup and fighting with my computer because microsoft word wouldn't act right. I wound up writing it up in wordpad, saving the document and emailing to myself, switching computers downloading the email and opening it as a word document on a computer wher microsoft office was working right. Formating the paper to hopefully meet APA standards. All of which took until the wee hours of the morning before I could submit it to the dropbox. All of that because I had a major brain fart and screwed up. Dang I hope this week is better.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! It works. i set up my repaired computer - and discovered that I have a bad usb port and had to scrounge around to find a usb/ps2 converter to hook yp my mouse. Found one after searching for about half an hour and hooked it and rebooted the system, everything was looking good windows loaded up with no problem the mouse worked fine, I tested the keyboard out and that worked great. I'm thinking alright everything's copacetic and then I ran a program that had sound and got total silence. So I'm setting here in the middle of the night - did I happen to mention this 2:30 saturday night - checking cables and wires, shutting and down and rebooting the system as I am adjusting things and getting absolutely nowhere. Talk about frustrating. I know I have to get this fixed before my first seminar this week on Wednesday. So after being gone most of sunday - I spent most of monday trying to figure out what was wrong with no luck so i switched to my backup system. Now I already knew my backup system had no internal sound it needed external speakers to work at all but I set it up and low and behold - no sound speakers or not. I was not a happy camper I did not want to go back to using the loaner - it's just a little bit better than a video game. It has a small hard drive loading microsoft office stretched it to capacity, has no ps2 or parallel ports so I can't hook up my printer and no cd or floppy drive so I can't save files anywhere but on the hard drive. Like I said a toy. Anyway before switching back to the toy I decided to try one more time with my system so I hooked it back up again checked volume levels on the system and then turned the external speakers off and on and put the volume on max and whaddayaknow IT WORKED. There was sound. Now all I've got to do is get my microsoft office software to work right again and will be well.

good news/bad news

This week has been somewhat - problematic. The good news is that both of my computers that died are back from being repaired and I can stop using this loaner that I've been on since the week before last terms finals. When I first saw I had "ahh isn't that acute little toy" moment and it was for a while. Mainly because by the time I got the thing my systems had been done for 4 days and I had a final to take within 3 days and was started to get a little desparate for a replacement. The problem was that as time went on and I used ot more and more the drawbacks to the little toy became clearer. First , it really was a toy. It had very limited memory or hard drive space. Loading office 2007 on it pretty much put it at maximum capacity, and as time went out it locked up more and more often. Usually it worked alright during seminar - except this week. This week it wouldn't cooperate at all. It locked up and crashed 3 times during seminar. Each time requiring a system reboot. I think I got about 10 minutes total of class time this week. It totally sucked. That was the bad news. Hopefully before next seminar I will have set up and tested my repaired system and it's backup and the toy can be regulated to something the kids can use to play games and surf the net.

this week's comments

As can be inferred by my last posts I love read. And I read a lot. I really enjoy books that are character oriented and character driven and because of that I read a lot of romance novels. Now this is nothing against other types of books, I read Science Fiction and mysteries as well, I just prefer that they be more about the characters in the book rather than the space ship or the intricacies of who done it and why. Most romances are about the characters and their relationships so I find them easier to relate to and I need to connect with what I'm reading in order to really enjoy it. Having said all of that and as if my opinion really matters in the grand scheme of things. Here is a short list of wht I consider really good writers: David Weber, especially his Honor Harrington series; David Eddings, unfortunately now deceased, but is Belgariad and Tamult series and sequels are some of the best to be found in the fantasy field; Nora Roberts writing as herself or as J.D. Robb; Elizabeth Lowell ; Iris Johanson; Linda Howard; Kay Hooper; Jayne Ann Krentz aka Jayne Castle aka Amanda Quick; Christine Feehan; Sharon Sala aka Dinah McCall are all truly excellent writers and of course there are those older great writers like Anne McCaffrey, EE "Doc" Smith, Andre Norton, and Louis L'Amour. If you haven't read any of them which I highly doubt, give them a try you might like what you find.

what's happening now

Well, BooksforPeople, finally took the lat of the books away yesterday. They gave me a receipt for my donation - estimated 8000 books. Between what I gave them and what I gave away 2 years ago to the Dorothy Brown Schools, I estimated I gave away about 15,000 books to charity. I hope they go to someone who will appreciate them I know I did, mostly. Now all that's left is to unpack the boxes of books that I kept and shelve them, hopefully is some kind of organized fashion so I can find things when I want them. I also pretty sure that I lost about quite a few books that I wanted to keep - at least 4 boxes of books were damaged while they were in the garage. The books were in pieces and had to be thrown away. I hate that. So along with sorting through what I kept, I need to track what's missing that I wanted and start looking to replace them if possible some may be out of print. But we shall see what happens there.