Life with Pratts – Page 55 – Prattling before the Pratfall

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Ding, dong, the Bush gone… well, almost. Not been posting much. Sorry! We went out to eat two nights in a row, but not tonight, because it snowed today. Still working on Eric’s computer.

To gain control over the failed drive I put it in an external PATA-to-USB case I saved after the 80 GB drive in it failed, not too long after I copied everything on it to a 160 GB USB drive, that has already been replaced with a 500 GB drive. I ran CHKDSK on the drive and it fixed a bunch of index errors. Then booting into safe mode I took ownership of all the folders of interest and I got everything worth getting off it, but I’ll still probably junk the drive, because it’s five years old. I’ll make the 2-year-old 200 GB D: drive the primary and install XP on that.

KB307545

This is what I’m looking at right now for Eric’s PC:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

Not fun. It was fine yesterday, and now it’s anything but. AAUGH!

Looks like I’m going to have to resort to putting the primary drive into a USB case, attach it to my computer, and see if there’s still a file system on it. Agg-oh-knee.

Christmas, forty years later…

This is the 40th anniversary of my parents moving us to Massachusetts. Christmas of ’68 is indelibly associated in my mind with $1 Peanuts books and the Beatles record called “The Beatles”.

I don’t listen to the White Album every Christmas, but I’m glad that Fantagraphics made it possible to revive the Charlie Brown tradition by publishing The Complete Peanuts. I posted a picture of last year’s books, and I’ll start a new tradition by showing you this year’s books. One of them has a serious printing defect, but all of the pages are there so I don’t mind.

$Complete Peanuts, \'67-\'70$

We enjoy getting a few new ornaments every year, and Carol bought this one with Snoopy and Woodstock.

Tenth Season Opener

Here it is, the first snow of the winter, and we’re promised about a foot of it, so I’m glad the snow thrower started right up and is ready to go. This will be its tenth season.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/DEC/SnowThrower.flv 480 360]

Cooking with electricity is OK

Carol and I sometimes talk about the fact that our neighborhood doesn’t have natural gas service, but we’re surrounded by streets that do. The last time we had that discussion was in August, when heating oil was heading for $5/gal. But now with heating oil $2.50/gallon or less, I’m reminded of the downside of natural gas.

Bulb-ous

It’s always something. Got home late tonight, after what I admit was a fairly successful sojourn of Christmas shopping. Carol reported that the light under the over-stove microwave oven was out. So I got a Phillips head screwdriver and removed the cover.

Both bulbs were out, which seemed a little strange. The bulb on the right came out easily, but when I tried to unscrew the bulb on the left it looked like this.

Kenmore/Whirlpool over stove microwave oven

So… not knowing which circuit breaker the microwave is on, because most of the breakers aren’t labeled, I took a pair of insulated needle nose pliers and deliberately shorted out the socket. There was a little explosion, and knowing the bulb’s current comes straight from the 120V outlet, I could assume that the circuit breaker would pop with no damage likely to the microwave oven.

With the power off, I was able to get the screw cap out of the socket with the pliers. Then I took the other bulb, intact but burned out, to Lowe’s — a five mile drive — checked the wattage (40), and bought a couple of replacements.

Got back home, installed the bulbs, and screwed the glass cover back in place. I went downstairs, reset the circuit breaker, went back upstairs, turned on the lights and — voila! — problem fixed. And after all of that I didn’t feel like writing about anything else.