Tying up a few loose ends

What a great visit with my kids! Way too short but such a wonderful breath of fresh air!

So, now it's back to the grind. This little guy seems to have the right expression for how things went the rest of the day!

First thing I had to do was return the USB/Parallel adapter to ECP because it was wrong. They didn't have what I needed, but he gave me the name to ask for - USB - DB25.

Then I stopped at Home Depot because my cordless drill power supply went caput; but they didn't have one. So, on to Lowe's to see if they did -- nope, said it was no longer being made, etc, and so I just bought a new drill. The power supplies are about as much as the whole darn thing anyway.

After I got back home, I found the USB - DB25 on the web, called them to be sure I was getting the right thing, and ordered it.

Next was to get through all the registrations on my laptop, router, mouse, and Care Pack, and get the rebate form. Well, easier said than done. The router was a joke! Sign up, okay. Did that. Register -- you have to be signed up. I did! Sign up again. "You don't have anything registered"! No joke Dick Tracy. Ring around the rosey with that and then I called the only 800 number I had for Linksys - which was tech support. On hold, menus, another phone number - foreign accents - finally after an hour of tenacious determination, I got it registered.

The mouse wasn't too hard, but the Care Pack (extended warranty) was. Again, after a fight with the web page, I called HP and they convinced me to mail in the written form would be the best and then told me where to find the rebate form.

Of course all this needed printing and my black ink cartridge was empty. So, I had to stop and take care of that, put the printer through the alignment. Now all that's left is to find the bar code and get it in the mail. Jeesh!

Next desired task to do was to set up my network. Oh, boy. No, I had no idea what I was doing. It said everything had to be hooked up to each other, and I don't know what that meant. I unplugged the router and printer from the desktop and plugged them into the laptop and had to name each computer and the network. I don't think it took at all. It will have to wait till John can have some time to help me - or I can get somebody. Maybe HP will help me - but not now!

After that I wanted to set up my external drive to do a scheduled backup on the laptop. I have the directories all named the same as they are on the desktop; so if something changes on one, it will just overwrite. If the external drive isn't available, Iomega will find a place on the C drive to back it up files until the external drive is attached again. Boy, that little device was well worth the money. (um, it's gone up since I bought mine - or else I got a good sale.)

So, that's about it. I did find my cable to my cell phone, and maybe now I'll sit here and see if I can get it to work. Then again, maybe I'll try to focus in on the news, though they're not covering much that I'm interested in right now.