Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Hard to believe how much stuff accumulates in a utility closet. We just had to clean ours out - got two large bags of trash, four multiply-nested bunches of boxes, six cans of paint, two dozen or so cans of spray paint, a couple dozen puzzles, a dozen or so games, three bags of foam and assorted other packing materials we wanted to keep, plus a huge load of assorted stuff that gets shuffled to the garage for long-term storage. We also now have two large boxes of cardboard and other paper items for recycle. Whew!

We need to clean it out because that room is where the AC/Heat is at - and it will all be ripped out and replaced with a shiny new heat pump tomorrow. We also get to clear off several walls and make sure there is a clear path from the AC room to the exterior wall, which means more cleaning and moving stuff tonight.

Hopefully we will have the branch out of the yard today or tomorrow. Looks like $200 is the lowest bid. Sheesh. Why is it so hard to find a bonded, licensed contractor to cut up and take away a large tree branch? Out of five people we contacted, only three ever got back to us - and the bids were $200, $300, and $400. Some spread, eh?

I was tempted to just get a chainsaw and do it myself, but the way it is wedged into the tree and the sheer weight of it makes me not want to touch it - it is a dangerous hunk of wood as it lies right now.

At work yesterday I installed and configured a new computer with Windows 2000, applied the 38 patches and security fixes, installed Norton and a few other gewgaws, and it booted fine several times before I left. This morning, I get the dreaded blue screen of death. STOP 0x00000040 BAD_POOL_CALLER, etc. Basically something in the software is hosing the kernel memory pool right at the beginning of memory. Lovely. The last thing I did was install Norton and GoBack. Disabled GoBack, then installed a few utility apps, like Freemem and a few others.

Reinstall begins now.