AC Capehart capehart

[rant]

As you probably know, we bought a house recently. With that sort of thing comes taxes. For the actual sale itself, the state takes 2%. 1% is paid directly to the state by the borrower, the other 1% is paid by the borrower first to the seller who then pays it to the state.

Then there are property taxes. Because I own property, the state lays claim to some of my money based again on either what I paid for that property, or (often worse) what it thinks I could get for it if I sold it.

Maybe not everybody else knows about this, but I sure felt out of the loop when I discovered it. I saw my first PhotoStamp today. The photo’s of my uncle’s first grandchild. It was on a card he sent my mom. MY MOM knew about photostamps before I did. Sometimes, I get the false impression that because things in Altoona seem to move slowly, that things outside of Altoona also move slowly. Thinks like this forcefully shatter that illusion.

I was “backing up” the hard drive on my XP machine because it looks like I’m going to have to re-install XP. “Backing up” is in quotes because I’m really just skimming over the drive looking for “irreplaceable” stuff. I don’t have proper backup and restore media or software. And a proper restore would restore my XP problem anyway.

The XP problem is that I can no longer install anything. When I try, I get a message like “Setup failed to launch installation engine: The RPC server is unavailable.” I confirmed in the Services (Local) section of the “Component Services” administrative tool that the RPC server is, in fact, running and even started the RPC Locator service, but to no avail. Web searches turned up that I should have the DcomLaunch service running, but when I can’t find it in the services menu, and when I try to do it manually from the shell (with sc config DcomLaunch start= auto), I get “The specified service does not exists as an installed service”. Since I have no idea how to get XP to just re-install the DcomLaunch service, I’m going to do a wipe and re-install. It’s no fun. It hurts. But, really, it’s a lot like (excuse the similie) throwing up. It stinks. It burns. A lot of junk comes up. But when it’s done, you feel better. You’re purged and empty. And before long, you start putting at least the essentials back in.

One of the things that I’d meant to do with this blog is some technical-review sorts of things for my toys. I don’t tend to get a lot of tech toys. I don’t make enough money to get a lot of tech toys. But I do get some, and I’d like to talk about ’em so that you could have some idea if you would like to add them to your tech toy-chest. Actually, this won’t be a proper review, as I’ll not be detailing all of the operational minutiae nor giving a well-reasoned pro-and-con list. I’ll just be sharing my excitement for this new toy.

I accidentally went to mass yesterday. I’m going to pause for a moment and let you re-read and marvel at that sentence; I accidentally went to mass yesterday. (Sidenote: Carolyn says that since I didn’t stay for communion, I didn’t really go to mass. Read on for the details.)

I was taking my dad on a tour of Altoona. We went to Lowes and Advance Auto, but also to the Wopsy Trail and the Horseshoe Curve. One of the sites in Altoona is the large Catholic cathedral downtown. After watching the 4:20 Amtrak whiz along the curve up over the hill towards Pittsburgh (it was only about 12 minutes late), we went to see the cathedral. I was interested to note as we approached that an elderly couple was also on their way up the stairs to “visit” it as well, and there were a few more folks around, but all in casual clothing, so I really thought nothing of it.

I got this mail today. It cracked me up. I can see how it might work for a really big organization or ISP. But for a personally-owned/managed vanity domain?

`Dear Accapehart Member,
We have temporarily suspended your email account accapehart@accapehart.com.

This might be due to either of the following reasons:

1. A recent change in your personal information (i.e. change of address).
2. Submiting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
3. An innability to accurately verify your selected option of subscription due to an internal error within our processors.
See the details to reactivate your Accapehart account.

I’m having trouble sleeping, so I thought I would “pen” this entry which I’ve meant to do for a while now…

So, the other day, Carolyn and I were walking to the mailbox a few blocks from our house. We go there because the pick up is early-ish (11:30 AM) and we seem to have good luck getting our DVDs back to Netflix pretty quickly when shipped from there.

I’m trying the bk lifestyle today. It’s been pretty nice, but I’ve found it a bit distracting. The grandkids are next door. It was somebody’s birthday. There was lots of running around and swimming, etc.

I guess I should explain what I mean by the bk lifestyle. My friend bk is doing editing work for the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He does this predominately on his powerbook. When he’s in Charlottesville, which he is this month, he spends most of his time doing his computing on his back deck. He plugs the laptop into a power outlet that his wife had run out to the back deck for this exact purpose, and uses his wireless network for internet access. Add to that a fan for the hot days, and he’s set.

OK, I’ve known CSS is cool and powerfull. And I’ve tried to start to make the shift (including for this blog itself). Some links have come across the Neon Guild for which I was apprciative. (I’ve collected them in my wiki.) But I was blown away by the CSS Zen Garden. All of the CSS stuff that I’ve done has still required that the things I want designed to have special s or

(and wirelessed!)

The electrician has come and gone. And while he’ll be back, it should be just to put a space-saving breaker in my breaker box to split out the circuit that feeds the computer UPS. And so, we’re taken care of. In the two bedrooms upstairs, we have 2 data ports, one phone and one cable TV. We have 3 data and 1 cable in the den (that reminds me, I should go ahead and pre-order my Xbox 360), 2 data in the living room, one in the entry hallway for the wireless access point, and each of us has 3 data lines and one phone line for our desks in our basement office space.