Varied and Sundry

Why, for the love of all that is holy, is the grease from cooked pepperoni so vibrantly red?

There is now an HP LaserJet 4000 sitting in my basement, hooked up to the print server via parallel cable. It came with two extra boxes of toner, which was good. The toner in the printer had a damaged roller, which was printing lines down the side of the paper. Swapped out the toner, and all was good. Soon, it will have an ebayed JetDirect card, thereby removing any issues between Vista, Samba, and the little technology demons that like to mess with my network. :)

The Epson Photo Stylus 780 is pronounced dead after many, many long years of faithful service. It’ll be going to GoodWill for their electronics recycling service.

I’ve been irritated with the way Firefox works under Ubuntu, but then, it’s always been that way. It’s always had issues. It figures, now that I don’t have problems with putting the laptop to sleep or into hibernate, that Firefox would crash literally half of the time I resume from either situation. I’ve tried installing Firefox 3.5 (Shiretoko), and it only crashes a third of the time. However, page load times are ridiculously long. This version of Ubuntu doesn’t seem to play nice with Skype, either. I’ve thought about trying OpenSuse, like George has recommended so many times, and I’ve thought of testing the release candidate for Windows 7. I’ve heard good things about the latter from , and have more Windows-only devices than I’d like to admit, so I think I’m going to take that route.

All my servers are still Linux, so I don’t feel like I’m abandoning the “cause” or anything. I am interested in the price point that Microsoft will offer for those upgrading from the free RC to the full-blown version.

We’ve had nearly a week without Hunter or Aidan, and it’s been pretty quiet, overall. Becoming Mr. Mom while is at class has been a little rough, as Cian does not like her being gone for extended periods of time. It would have been far more rough had all three been here, of course. We pick Hunter up from his grandmother’s after gets out of class today, and we pick Aidan up from his dad and stepmom tomorrow. The dentist and doctor appointments are about to begin en masse again, but I’ve got a few good books to bring to read in between “No! Put that down!” and “Stop hitting your brother!” and “Do you want a time out?”

I had an eye doctor appointment yesterday. It turns out that not only did DOC sell me shoddy frames and then close their Frandor location, they warped the right lens when they made it. My new doctor found little ripples caused by compression, which is usually applied at the time of lens manufacture. So, my prescription’s only gotten a little bit worse, and I’ve picked out new frames. Rather, gave me quite a bit of help in picking out new frames. Apparently, she’s not down with my idea of Nerd Chic. Heh. Then again, it was fun to pick out the ridiculous ones and say “Aw, c’mon, these are great!”