Holiday Traffic Laws

Apparently red is the new amber...at least until the malls close on Christmas Eve.

Backup Issues Solved

Whenever a computer has a near death experience I'm always very careful about backing up and insuring I will be able to access all the pictures and music that I have. This time around I found the ultimate backup solution, the Lexar Echo MX.  It's a flash drive that comes in a variety of sizes (I grabbed a 64gb on sale at Future Shop) and has backup software on board. Simply plug it in, XP recognizes it, XP reboots and it's ready to backup. I'm using it to backup my external hardrive which stores my 29gb itunes music collection. The initial backup took less than an hour. I'm currently sorting pictures before adding them to the filters.Might seem like overkill as the external hardrive is almost exclusively used to store music but it has moving parts that will break at some point. I simply have too much time and $ invested to let it get turned into stray 1's and 0's. Most of the stuff I listen to is parked on other memory cards so I hope it is safe.

includes an 'always on' visible capacity meter

One of my New Year's Resolutions will be to blog daily in 2013, among other things. More on that soon.

New Computer Blues

Normally a new computer is something I look forward to. When our Dell decided to crash Thursday I looked for a replacement and picked up a Sony Vaio laptop with the new Windows 8 OS. The touch screen was a nice novelty but I had to use a mouse to work with it. Things are very different from any other OS. It's more like a phone than a desktop. I started missing some of the software I rely on and decided to look into repair rather than replace. The weekly Skype session with Cullen sealed the deal as it was slow and blocky.

A new graphics card was far cheaper and luckily my diagnosis was right on. It took about half an hour to swap in the new card and install the software. Learning the new OS software would have been a much longer process and about $750 more. There were a lot of programs that just don't have Windows 8 versions ready yet.

As much as I prefer a real tree at Christmas I wasn't really looking forward to picking one out in the rain so we grabbed an artificial one on sale, added some new decorations and voila, Merry Christmas!

Wild Weekend

It was a wild weekend of hockey in Thunder Bay. A tournament each for the 9-10 year old and 11-12 age groups produced four kicking penalties along with the 'usual' bevy of checks from behind and a stick swinging 9 year old. Fun stuff. It took about three hours to go through the game sheets and process the suspensions.

Meanwhile Northwood had a usual weekend of games. A total of 3 minor penalties, no screaming, no injuries. And I got my first win behind the bench in about 10 years. I have to say it was too much fun.  I was dreading it all day but once I got back there and realized I knew the kids names I got into it. The team is currently in last place, not far out but we were up against the second place team. It was a tight one but something I told one of the older forwards worked to get us a goal and then he scored another on the same shift to put us up one. We held on for another period and snuck out with a 2-1 win. The kids are still hilarious. These two five year olds can't sit together because they are cousins and they will fight. Why do I have to cover for the defenseman, I'm the center. Next weekend it's back to the other side of the rink, none of the coaches took me up on my offer to swap jobs.