Morning computer calisthenics...

Taking a break, with about 300 words left in the current item...

The HP started acting up again today, with all applications going to "Not responding" pretty much upon first mouse click, and a look at Vista's "System Stability Chart" showed a dramatic change for the worse at about the time we arrived in New York. A Google search suggested the problem might be related to memory, which I initially dismissed, as hammer came with 3 GB, but on a hunch, I disconnected the second monitor and rebooted, just to see what would happen.

After a little initial sluggishness on the part of the mouse, the machine settled down.

My troubleshooting may not be of mathematical quality, and I can't tap out "qed" at the end, but it seems to have worked.

It's a little disappointing not to be able to use that extra screen real estate, but not as disappointing as having to spend copious amounts of daylight figuring out why one's system acts like it's running Windows 286.

Back to work!

Cheers...

UPDATE of 10/10: It may be that removing the second monitor did nothing at all. I just started up hammer and programs such as Word and Firefox are basically being unresponsive, and that's with only one display working.

The last 10% is another 90%...

I had planned to be done with the engineering documents by noon, but a bunch of post-translation details, and the despeckling, caused me to finish late, and then I compounded the situation by accidentally sending a tmp file (0 k in size) instead of the translation.

Everything seems to be back to normal, now.

These past fewe days, I was supposed to have been going through stuff here at the house, to figure out what to take back to Pagosa, as part of my "Hey! Let's bring all our stuff together in one place!" brainstorm. Galina, of course, would like to economize on the truck rental by getting rid of as much junk as possible at this end, and I have no objection in principle to this idea.

But instead of going through stuff, I've been working, which is good news for the bank account, but doesn't do much for the pile of stuff in the basement.

Galina and I dropped by the IKEA in Hicksville, and on the way we passed by an AT&T store. I stopped in and asked if, considering I lived in a part of Colorado where there was no AT&T service, I could buy an iPhone and use it as a prepaid phone. My next question was going to be whether I could then use it overseas in such a configuration, but the bottom line - at least from AT&T - was that if my area wasn't covered by their network, I couldn't use an iPhone.

Ah, well... perhaps the BlackBerry Storm may do in a pinch. It will be offered by Verizon soon, and that's who my current carrier is.

Cheers...