Category Archives: Internet

Feb28

salad

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All I wanted was a salad. I’ve been living on popcorn and bananas for two days while I rebuilt Windows and Microsoft Office. Something green sounded really good. Also the sun was shining.

Back Yard Burger apparently went on break and just left the people in the drive-through to sit and wait on her return.

McDonald’s was stacked up so I tried to go in and order at the counter.

But the door was locked. Also they don’t even have salads anymore.

I somehow drove right past the Wendy’s on Yates.

Is it even still there?

So I ended up in Germantown. They were out of the salad I wanted but the one I ended up with was quite good.

The lettuce was very fresh and the chicken was still hot. The tea was also freshly made but they were out of straws so I’m waiting until I get home to drink it.

I mean, my antivirus software assassinated my laptop last week so I’m not very trusting of the cosmos right now. Gravity could fail at any moment.

The first quiet spot I found to rest and eat lunch happened to be Germantown Cemetery.

I like dead people. They are sometimes surprised to see me but they never turn me away and they don’t bug me too much. I see one guy is a Mason. Another has a plinth but no monument. Maybe that is the monument.

Another has a fine looking obelisk but I will have to return to investigate when it’s not so marshy. The recent storms have left piles of debris in the parking lot that look like giant wads of freshly spat tobacco and I am reluctant to tread there.

Plus I have three more hours of CNN in Ukraine to edit.

The dearly departed glance at one another and, one by one, slowly fade from view. And I know what they’re thinking: extra greeters will be needed in Europe’s corner of Heaven tonight. So that’s where I’m sending all the spare beats of my heart for today, just in case it will help.

❤

Photo by Steve Masler, June 19, 2015.

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Jun19

what I did on my Facebook vacation

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My part-time job as TV news editor has been sort of hateful lately.

So on Thursday, when all my assignments were preempted yet again by another assassination, this time in front of Parliament, I opened my Facebook page to a string of hateful posts related to other crises in America.

I’d had enough.  So I started my weekend a little early.  And I took time off from Facebook.

1. On Thursday afternoon, driving down Walnut Grove,  I laughed out loud at a Blue Screen of Death on a digital billboard.  I’ve never seen one that big.  Maybe another media conscript was feeling mutinous.

2. On Friday, I walked to the Art Center to buy origami paper.  I decided to step into Inz and Outz Gift & Cards, thinking I’d shop for Father’s Day.

Y’all should have told me what that place was before I went in there.

I didn’t buy any cards.  I did, however, consider some of the leather thongs.  Bet those zippers get awfully hot in this heat.

3. On Saturday, I perfected an origami envelope for a direct mail project and designed an outdoor sign, a non-digital one.  No BSODs here.

Sidebar:  I used to have a recurring dream, working at my old job as a graphic designer.  Today I’m literally living that dream.  Life is full of surprises.

4. On Sunday, I was grateful, grateful, grateful for so many things.  I’m grateful that I have air conditioning in my entire apartment now and my butter doesn’t melt if I leave it on the table.

I’m even grateful for my part-time job as TV news editor, even if it does make social media unbearably redundant some days.  There’s lots of love at that job.  My co-workers bring it every day.  Otherwise, I just couldn’t cope.

Actually, there’s lots of love at all my jobs, some of which necessitate my using Facebook.  I just have to remember that I have a choice:  I can unfollow people or pages that post stuff I don’t want to read.

I am one lucky girl.  I live in America.  I get to read about it all, the bad and the good.  Life is full of surprises.  It’s also full of choices.

1. Today I choose to be grateful.

2. Today I choose to show up for the love.

Sep2

gamesssss

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In most circles of geekery today, I would not be considered a gamer.  That doesn’t stop me from referring to myself as one.

Why?  Because when I get tense, I find an online game to distract me from work and make me feel superior to myself.

Since I am tense during most of my waking hours and some of my sleeping ones, I pretty much play online games way more than a silverish lady should.  And “gamer” is a much nicer label than “fanatic” or “nutjob.”

Now it happens there’s been an all-out war against the much-despised Flash platform that locks up your browser, hogs your memory and requires updating every 3.2 days.  Firefox even blocked it for two days in mid-July 2015.  And while Adobe “fixed” Flash, the latest FF/Flash update left my favorite king.com games unplayable.

I refuse to play games on Facebook because “the popular social media site” (as they say on CNN) wants too much of my attention.  It wants to rat me out every time I play Candy Crush.  And it keeps asking me for stuff, like all my pictures, my email address and sensitive information, like whether or not I shave my legs every day.

So this week when I got tired of watching the wheel of infinity/browser timeout on king.com, I wandered over to Google and found my way to the Famobi game site.

Aside from the grammar-twisting hyperlink labeled “What is HTML5 games?” and a few misspelled words, it’s a nice, quiet little place to go and waste some time or reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s, depending on your perspective.  There are typical match 3, bubble shooter and mahjong selections, all sorted into tabs at the left side of your browser.

Girls?  There’s a Girls section?

I resisted looking at it for days and then curiosity got the better of me.

There are a lot of makeup games in that section (as in putting it on your favorite actress’ face), one called Fluffy Egg (I cannot figure out why this game is gender specific; it has nothing to do with reproduction), a few about baking (see previous comment) and one called — I kid you not — What Does Your Boyfriend Look Like?

In order to avoid barfing on my keyboard, I quickly went back to the home page and located a few games that you might enjoy.

I think if you click on the pictures it will take you there.

If not, the Web address is html5games.com.

Don’t tell the authority figure(s) in your house I told you about this.

FastFoodTakeawayTeaser JuicyDashTeaser SpeedPoolKingTeaser UltimateSudokuTeaser

Mar10

Migrating MS Office

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I have an auxiliary part-time job: managing Windows 7.  My Dell Inspiron’s warranty expired about the same time that it began having problems:  USB weirdness, spotty sound card issues, random loss of screen image.

So I bought a backup unit to work on when I finally had to send Big Blue to the shop.  It’s another Dell, not as powerful, not as wide = not as heavy.  So it’s ideal for traveling.

But getting it set up for work has been aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaughhhh.  I have reinstalled MS Office twice, downloaded multiple apps, spent 4+ hours on the phone with Microsoft Support (more a good faith gesture than anything else.  I really didn’t expect them to provide solutions.)

So The CatWirks has a new Category here on the blog just so I can remember what I did the next time this happens.

THE IMPORTANT STUFF:

1.  Secure your computer.  Download these apps from majorgeeks.com and run them.  They are my most trusted source for freeware and general tweaking advice.

  • Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
  • Spybot S&D
  • HijackThis

MajorGeeks has a whole section on how to set these up.  It’s at http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

It’s a lot of reading, but it’s quicker than dealing with Microsoft Support.

Do this at night when you’re doing the laundry or something.  You don’t want to try to do this during work hours.  It will send you over the edge.

2. Delete the registry key:  instructions for this is at http://wordprocessing.about.com/od/troubleshootin1/qt/wordregentry.htm

3.  Boot Word and create a new template from scratch.  On a blank document, set your default font, paragraph, etc.  Go to Word Options and set those preferences.  Name it Normal.dotm and remember to select “Word Macro-Enabled Template” in the Save As Type.  Leave it on your desktop.

4.  Navigate to the Templates folder — mine is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office.  If you can’t find yours, go back to Word Options\Trust Center\Trust Center Settings\Trusted Locations and you can find the pathway there.

  • Close Word.  Rename your Normal.dotm template (the one in the folder, not the one on your desktop) to something like Old.dotm.  Then drag the new Normal.dotm to your Templates folder.
  • Delete all the other templates in the folder.  They’re probably screwed up, too, and you can create new ones from Normal.dotm when you get that one working right.

Reboot Word and see if it works.  If it doesn’t, try something else.

P.S. If you bought a version that has “non-commercial use” tattooed into the title bar, here’s a hack for that:

I bought a copy of Office 2010 Home and Student edition and was appalled to find “for non-commercial use” appended to the title bar of each Office application in the suite.  You can use the steps below to remove the stupid admonition from your copy of Office.
  1. Open regedit
  2. search for the term “non-commercial”.  Edit them as you wish.
  3. Usually you would be all done here, except that the clever folk at Microsoft have the applications reset these registry entries on opening the application, undoing all your good work!
  4. Right click on it in the tree, select ‘permissions’, then ‘advanced’, then the username (not system, it is the user who is opening and operating the software) and then ‘edit’. I guessed with this bit and allowed all items to be set to ‘allow’ except ‘Set Value’ and ‘Delete’ which are set to ‘Deny’.
  5. Repeat for each user.
  6. Seems long-winded but it worked for me!

Source: msmvps.com

via jonathonball

 

I’ll be adding to this later and rearranging stuff, so stay tuned.  And good luck.