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      Tuesday, October 01, 2024


skystuff
12:49 PM - 10/01/2024

The topic: New category
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Skystuff - trees, birds, clouds, sunset, sunrise, satellites...if I'm looking up and taking video or photographs?  I'll be sharing it.

The first video is from June, when I caught one of the rockets from Vandenburg AFB.

If you watch closely, you can see debris falling from the trail.

      Friday, October 04, 2024


otherstuff
07:47 AM - 10/04/2024
The current weather is in the middle of a week long heat wave - I'm hating it
I'm worn out from the heat and dark house and fan noise

The topic: What a morning
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Around 4:45am, the dog starts barking. No idea why. It's dark, his eyesight isn't great and I kind of thought he was barking at his bed, thinking there was a cat in it (his bed is next to my side of the bed). Brian finally got up and showed Jingles that the bed was, indeed, empty.

Dog stops barking. For about ten minutes, then starts up again. Damn it. We keep telling him to stop. He doesn't. (Is this actually a Lassie moment and he's telling us that little Timmy fell down the well?) I drag myself out of bed, throw on a teeshirt, and follow him out of the bedroom. I follow him to the back of the yard (for those few, if any, of you ever check out the weather cam, hope you enjoyed the show). He walks over by one of the avocado trees and lifts his leg (mind you, he's still wearing the diaper that he's been wearing since last night, the one I put on him before we go to bed). I just shake my head and go back to bed. He's back in the bedroom shortly after. And starts to bark again.

I reach over, grab the dog bed, lift it up and let him see that there is no cat in it. Oh, well, that's cool. He climbs into it and goes back to sleep. It's about a quarter after five at this point. blah

We both get out of bed before 5:30. Get dressed, I take the dog's (heavy, wet) diaper off (some mornings it's bone dry), walk outside to toss it in the trash (bins are out front) and I see Fluffy, an old feral guy who's been around for years. I've started feeding him if he's around in the morning.

Back inside, I turn on the computer, give the cats their morning Temptations (it's how I take a headcount each morning). Walk outside with Carol and Fury, where they get their own little piles of treats. Toss a few out onto the grass so the vultures who have already inhaled their treats will let these two eat their's in peace.

I walk back into the office, grab a handful of treats, put them in my pocket, head out to the garage, take two cans of Fancy Feast from the cupboard and dish those up for Fluffy. Go out front, he's ready, he's closer than he's ever been to me, but he still growls and hisses. I set down the food, empty my pocket of Temptations next to the soft food and head back inside.

Once in the office to start the online day, I see that this weblog isn't up. An error message. "Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; No Preferences Found". Just a blank page. I did a small amount of research and ended up contacting my host. Turns out they're having a coding problem with the SQL database on the server. Obviously, it's fixed now.

So, let's get this day started!

141031028

jingles    feral   

      Monday, October 07, 2024


crankypants
11:28 AM - 10/07/2024

The topic: What I hate most about my job
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Yeah, I work from home, but I also do all of the paperwork for the company. Accounting, invoicing, generating shipping labels...

The part I hate? I mean I really, really hate? Shipping.

From start to finish.

I make the labels put on the products, the ones with the name of the company. The cost for 250 sheets of labels right now is over $150. I print the labels off on a laser printer and cut them out with a Silhouette. There are ten labels per sheet.

Due to the kind of paper used I can only print so many sheets at a time or the printer jams. A real PITA to unjam.

Then, the Silhouette print and cut doesn't always work right. The blade loses the outline of the labels and gets all skewed and the labels are ruined.

Well, I printed out a bunch of label sheets Saturday and am going to try using the Curio2 to do the cutting. Unlike the Cameos, where the paper goes into the machine and cuts out that way, with the Curio, the media being cut stays stationary and the blade moves over the stationary media.

Then UPS keeps changing the website. It also has a problem with zip codes that cover multiple towns and cities. Earlier this year, I had to void out nine labels because the UPS website kept changing the name of the city. Even using the preview option before printing, the city still would have changed. It wasn't saving the correct address, but would save with the incorrect city. This was increasingly frustrating. I felt bad for the customer, because he was getting a notification for each label generated, whether it was right or wrong.

And don't get me started on shipping to Alaska, Hawaii or Canada. Canada especially. So many forms, so many hoops. And, when part of a shipment is lost?

Filing the claim is a stinking nightmare. Back in August we shipped five boxes to Canada. Four reached their destination, the fifth was lost. $685.00 package.

We waited a couple of weeks to see if the box was found, it wasn't and Brian built another unit and we sent it out. That was when I filed the actual claim.

I uploaded so many documents and finally, they announced the claim was closed. I was pissed off and started finding every email I could find for UPS and emailed each and everyone, uploading all of the documents and letting them know this has dragged on for over a month.

Last week, one of them responded with "oh, I see the missing document, we'll be sending a check within the next couple of weeks".

I hate shipping.

      Monday, October 14, 2024


geekstuff
10:32 AM - 10/14/2024

The topic: When we last visited the calamities at the cathouse
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So many FML moments in the past week. Just things that I don't understand and I can't get them to work properly and it's making me want to scream! My poor husband...

And it's all on the internet.

In last week's episode, I had found a way to do the photo slider comparison. I am having very little luck finding a place online to do it, affordably. The sample I used last week is on a website that you can only have three "widgets" of this type. They are hosted on that website. It doesn't matter if you pay by the month or by the year. What you're paying for is a subscription to have three of these sliders hosted on their system. If you want more? You have to change the information on one of the existing widgets. Which loses the current version. So, huge BOO! to that.

Now, there are plenty of free codes out there that will do this for you. They consist of three different pieces of code to get it to work. HTML (which I am familiar with), CSS and Javascript. The last two may as well be a foreign language. Wait. They ARE a foreign language to me. Once I get it figured out, I should be okay, but my brain keeps changing the subject.

Next, I got some great video of the outdoor feral (Fluffy) having a little discussion with the recent newcomer, Nolo (Not Loki). I want to share it, but I'm in part of it and I'm trying to erase my existence from this little piece of video. There are programs that do this, but they come at a price.

Then we got a different camera for the entryway and set it up. All of the cameras are Reolinks. All of the cameras have memory cards to save the videos and I also have an external hard drive to save them as well. The problem is, the hard drive seems to reset at midnight and all of the previous videos are just gone.

I'm working on that right now.

But three things I'm doing that I wish I already had done. 

Back to work.

      Thursday, October 17, 2024


otherstuff
09:48 AM - 10/17/2024

The topic: Crazy week
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I've been banging my head against the wall with internet technical stuff.

First, our security cameras are supposed to save every video to an external hard drive, which they do. But then, the next day, over half of the previous day's videos have disappeared. Then by mid-day, the entire previous day's entries are just gone. I've contacted their support many times and they still don't understand what the problem is. Frustrating. I've spent the last five days downloading the videos that actually save to the individual cameras on SD cards to a hard drive. It's very time-consuming and I don't want to take away PC power from doing these downloads, so I haven't had a chance to try some of the coding stuff I want to try.

We also have some packages that have to ship to Canada. I use the USPS website to generate the labels. This started on Tuesday. I still haven't done the labels. Why? The USPS form keeps saying the shipping address is invalid. I had a difficult time getting Brian to understand what this means. It means they won't finalize the shipment without a valid address. What about using a flat rate box? he asked.  Well, okay, let me try...nope, our address is still invalid. Try one of the neighbor addresses. Still won't take. I spent almost an hour with support on Tuesday, she had to send the problem up to a higher level. I got an email from them marked "resolved".  Just damn.

I replied with screenshots of the problem and still no response. I sent another (new) email to their support this morning letting them know that because of their non-support, we'll most likely not be offering USPS as a shipping option in the future. Brian is going to go to the local UPS Store to have them ship it via USPS (which is a service they offer). The customer requested USPS, so we're kinda stuck.

And I just keep on keeping on.

      Monday, October 21, 2024


otherstuff
07:05 AM - 10/21/2024

The topic: Knocking on wood…
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After playing around with the programs that weren't working the way they should be working this past week and a half, it looks like maybe it's all good now. I sure hope so.

The camera videos are still there. I'm backing them up a couple of times a day, just in case, but it is really nice to login and see them still where they're supposed to be, not lost in the ether forever. Still, keeping an eye on them. Just in case.

We did have a little burp with the Plex system. And it was all because of closed captions in television shows. Almost 40% of the dialog was missing. We have a lot of ambient noise here and when people whisper, the volume goes up. Then they get loud and it blows us out of our seats. I had to completely uninstall Plex on the PC (I used Revo portable to do this, great software, right now it's on sale, two years for $15, and let me tell you, it's worth every cent; it gets rid of all the bits and pieces of software left behind), then I reinstalled it. It was a PITA to have to wait to have all the media reindexed, but it's great now. The only "grrr" moment was when I lost all of my playlists. But I did have most of them saved as different extensions and used MusConv to convert them back to Plex extensions and they're working, too.

I cut Brian's hair yesterday, vacuumed, and dusted.

Because of the problems with the closed captioning, I also got the headphones working again. Brian has his, I have mine. I use one of these, there are cheaper versions, but they aren't the most reliable in the long run. This thing is great. I did lose the manual, so I found the English version online, downloaded it, printed it out in color, trimmed it down, and made a cute little booklet out of it, highlighting the parts that are pertinent to me. As I've been doing for a while, I used an acrylic pen to mark the connections on the unit that work with my application. (So, the next time I have to do this, it doesn't take me over an hour to figure out why it's not working, which is what happened yesterday.)

All in all, it was a good weekend.

I was disappointed to find out that I'd most likely missed the opportunity to watch the comet, but it won't be the first time I've missed something spectacular. We did have clouds last week then this weekend, when it's clear, the comet has pretty much faded. So, I'll just have to wait 80,000 years to see it, I guess.

      Sunday, October 27, 2024


geekstuff
11:22 AM - 10/27/2024

The topic: Slider test
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Fingers crossed...it was working, then I couldn't save anything, so I had to figure out why and now I have it figured out, let's try this again.

 
 
 
 

 

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lisaviolet is seventy something, married with no kids, takes care of lots of cats, likes taking photographs, loves Southern California weather and spends altogether too much time avoiding her responsibilities.

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