Friday, January 30, 2009

Long Trek

My best friend of 16 years, Katrina, (wow....over 1/2 my life) needed help with her computer. She lives in Wylie, TX....which is on OTHER side of Dallas.

Kelli and I live in the "Mid-Cities"...named so because its a group of cities between Dallas and Fort Worth.  Living here we can work or play in either city.

Katrina isn't the only one there. Eric and Angela also live way the hell out there. Being so far "out there" we don't visit them often. Most of the time when we visit Eric and Angela we meet somewhere in the middle. Katrina and Kelli would meet up often to have lunch....but then Katrina got laid off.

For the past few weeks Katrina was having computer problems. I tried walking her through the issue over the phone and through chat....but it didn't work. I said I would make it out there to fix her computer...today was the day.

I left home at 11:30. I put her home address into my navigation system and began driving. The navigation system took me the way I knew until I exited the tollway. At this point it had me go an odd way. Katrina lives off the same main highway as Eric and Angela. When I used the same navigation system to go to their house it took me the way I knew. For Katrina's house it took me on back roads. I checked the preferences and they were all set for the fastest way...same as for Eric and Angela. I followed the navigation system....blindly.

Eventually I got there.  She had 4 problems for me to fix. Within the first 10 minutes I had 3 of them fixed. Over the next 1 1/2 hours I worked on the last one.

Katrina's husband is in the National Guard. They use USAA for banking. USAA has a nifty deposit system. When you want to deposit a check you simply scan it into their website....and it goes straight to your account. Very easy. The problem is that when the JAVA application loads on the website and she clicks on "scan"....nothing happens.

I tried uninstalling and reloading JAVA, clearing cookies/temporary internet files, adding the site to "trusted sites" and reloading the scanner driver. Nada. I the tried Firefox (she had been using Internet Explorer)...same thing. I then thought maybe it was a Windows account issue.  I made a new Administrator account....same thing. I disabled all antivirus/spyware/phising software. Nada. I left defeated. The whole time I just kept uttering "maybe you should just buy a Mac". I never could fix the issue. Al I could offer was to backup her data and restore her computer.

The drive today was the second longest trip I have taken in my car at 84 miles round trip. The longest trip is to Eric and Angela's house at 85 miles round trip.

Talked to Kelli about Paris. She said London would be better...they speak English. Good point. London it will be.

We like the game Scene It on XBox. Kelli normally wins...she sees waaay more movies than I do thus scores better. Many times she hasn't seen the movie that the question is about....but she has read the book. Hmmm yeah.

I am in the process of upgrading the look of Byrd in the Sky. I am moving the post over one by one (cut and paste) from the current LifeType log to Wordpress. Wordpress is what powers Stillageek. I looked for software that could pull the blogs out of the current database and move them to the new one.....but had no luck. I should have all 180 blogs moved over by the end of the weekend...maybe.

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