Postal Problem

We have a lot of vehicles in the family. Momoko owns two. I own three. This is one vehicle for every member of the family, plus a truck for the occasional haul. You can imagine it gets pretty hectic when friends with cars come to visit.

This is one of the reasons that I widened our driveway. It is three cars wide in the back, and two cars wide where it meets the street. We can park a lot of cars in the driveway. However we only park four cars in there. The truck can stay in the back blocked in. But the other cars need to come and go.

That leaves one car left over that I park in the street. Our US Mail carrier has been trying to talk me into moving that last car into the driveway too. Sheesh. These rural Postal workers have it good. They drive up to all the mailboxes. Not like the old days in the city where the Postal carriers would walk from house to house.

This week I got a note from my carrier. She said that unless I moved my car into my driveway, she would not deliver my mail. I got out and measured over 15 feet from my car to my mailbox. Plenty of room to drive up and drop the mail off right from her vehicle. What kind of craziness is this? Time to talk with the Postmaster of my city.

New Router Project

Little Kat complained that our Internet speeds were slow. He said the cause was that we opened up our wireless router to anyone. I told him to put a password on the network access. He could not. Then he proposed I buy an expensive new router.

I looked at the specs of the new router. They were impressive. But they were overkill. I only pay for a certain low bandwidth from our Internet Service Provider (ISP). Higher speed access to our router will only get jammed up in the pipe to the ISP. I did agree to buy a new cheaper router that Little Kat could lock down.

The router came quick. Little Kat added encryption that required a password. That way nobody could use the wireless connections without knowing the secret password. Next step was to update all the devices in the house to use the new router. Easier said than done.

I gave Little Kat the CD-ROM that came with Momoko's laser printer. He tried and tried but could not get it to work with the new router. Momoko was inconvenienced because now she could not print to her printer. I told Little Kat that he needed to get that printer to work before messing up any of the other printers.

Eventually Momoko could not take it any more. So I had to help Little Kat. We reset the settings on the Momoko's printer to factory defaults. We were able to verify that you could print to it if you connected your computer to it directly. None of the normal install programs allowed us to set up the wireless access.

We decided to connect the printer directly to the new router with a cable. Then I used an optional utility from the manufacturer to spy on the printer network settings. I also tried a back door I knew about, and we got lucky. We were able to set up the printer using a browser.

Had to figure out things such as the printers internal password. We also needed to recall what the security settings for our new router were. But now we can print wirelessly to Momoko's printer using the new router. Next I plan to let Little Kat set up the other printers in the house. Hopefully we can then move all the other devices over to the new router, and retire the old router.

The Call to Work

I have been working on a large project at work. Somebody messed up and set the schedule too short. I brought the issue up. The resolution was that I was going to get another guy to help me with the task. That guy is quitting the company today. So I have been hustling to try to get the project done on time.

Another group on my project had been asking for help. They were trying to test out some software that the guy who is quitting wrote. They were having major problems. I told them I was behind schedule, and could not help them unless my due date was shifted.

I got a manager on the phone. He told me this other team's work was priority. He said I could have more time on my large task. That's all I needed to hear. I figured out their problem and went back to my own job. Then this other team encountered more problems. I told them the same thing as before - I did not have time to help.

So I called up the manager and asked whether I should continue to help this other team. He gave me the go ahead. Yesterday after leaving work, I got a call from the manager. He was wondering how long it would take to resolve their latest problem. I said a couple days. He told me they needed it done in one day to meet their deadliness.

Nomrally I do not work hard to meet a deadline unless I was consulted in the first place to set the schedule. But sometimes you need to be a bit flexible. I told the manager that I would come in early today to try to get things accelerated. I start work at 4am, cut some corners, and got the team rolling again.

I do work early or late from time to time. But when I do, I don't work overtime. I just leave early as well. Therefore at lunch time today, I am declaring it the weekend for me.

Exam Time

I stayed up late last night. Watched a bunch of Breaking Bad espisodes. Wrote some code to practice for my college class midterm exam. This morning I woke up early. Had to be ready for my handymen to come by to work on the house. They replaced two windows upstairs. I have identified those windows as our escape routes if there is a fire in the house and we need to escape by window.

I ordered casement style window replacements. These are where the window is the size of the opening, and the whole window hinges out leaving the full window space open to climb out. During the day I had a number of people at work asking for help. I gave them some time, but I needed to work on my own task. The guy I am working with is leaving the company this week. I need to complete his work and mine. Not sure if I will make it on time.

My plan was to eat a small lunch, then grab an early dinner before going to class this afternoon. Had an Italian sub for lunch. Maybe I should have skilled the oil on the sub. My stomach did not feel well near the end of work. I left work an hour early to lay down a bit. The family was worried I would oversleep and miss my exam.

I set an alarm to be safe. I turned on the wrong alarm on my clock though. Luckily I did not oversleep. My midterm exam had two parts. I finished the first part in no time. The test was auto-graded. Got a 100% on that one. It boosted my confidence. Then we had to write a couple programs for the second part of the exam. Ha ha. The instructor just chose exercises from our textbook. I do all the exercises on my own. Easy A.

Got My Desk

Little Kat comes down to my study every day after school to do his homework. This seems to be the only way to make sure homework gets done on time. The problem is that he took over the table upon which I had my home computers. I got one main computer that I do most of my work on. I also have an older Windows 8 computer that I write apps on. With Little Kat in my study, I had nowhere to put my laptops.

I thought I found a solution a few weeks back. Was shopping for a new chair for Little Kat's room. I spotted a nice L-shapred desk for cheap in the office store. Unfortunately it was sold out. Not just in the store. The thing wasn't even available for order. Just this weekend I saw the desk on super sale again. Woo hoo.

Today I decided to drive my truck to lunch. Kit Kat's morning class got cancelled. So I had to move her car out of the way to drive my truck out of the driveway. Had a cold cut sub to eat for lunch. Afterwards I went to the office store. Sure enough, they had one of my desks in the back warehouse. It was priced really low.

I backed the truck up and got myself a desk. I was not able to connect the two sides of the desk to form an "L" shape. There is not enough room in my study for that and the table Little Kat uses for his homework. That's okay. My L-shapred desk is just in two pieces. Each piece holds one of my home laptops. I am good to go.

More Breaking Bad

I have been binge watching Breaking Bad episodes. Season one went by too quick. I guess it was a half of a season. It only had 6 or 7 episode. Season two had around 12 episodes. I just finished watching Season three.

Near the end of the season three shows, I realized that I had seen some of these episodes before. Guess I must have been switching channels late night and ended up on the AMC channel. Of course I had no idea what the show was about when I jumped right into a season three episode. Now I have the whole back story.

This series just keeps getting better and better. Got two more seasons to go to get to the series finale. I believe all the episodes are available on Netflix, where I download and watch them. My bro advised me to check out the Vampire Diaries next. Good stuff.

Phone Switch

My bro is an Android phone owner. Well actually he was an Android phone owner. He somehow lost his phone last week. It was a Galazy Samsung one. That is one of the more popular Android phones. That was too bad. I think it was his first really good smart phone. I figured he would just replace it with another Samsung Galaxy.

Today my bro came over to watch some movies with me. He told me he bought an iPhone 5c. He got one in white. He showed it to me. I have seen a lot of iPhones before. So I was not that excited. My brother said he had trouble downloading the YouTube app. I guess that is the killer app for the iPhone.

My brother then started trying to download the YouTube app to his phone. He was walking around trying to multitask, attempting some kind of app install. That is not like him. He told me a couple times that he would have to go back to the store where he got the phone to help get the app installed.

Then I figured out what this show was about. I asked my bro if he needed assistance getting YouTube installed. He jumped up and screamed yes. Again, this is not like my bro at all. He normally never gets excited. We spent some time getting him a Gmail account for email. You need an email account to get an Apple account. Weird huh? Then we had to set up and verify his new Apple account.

We struggled for a bit. But I have learned to keep at it until you get the job done. We got the app installed after about 20 minutes. The rest of the apps should be easy to install now that he is set up. My bro played some test video on the phone to be sure YouTube worked. It looked sharp.

The main take away from today was that my bro is not like the family in my household. In my house, everyone is taught to ask for what you want. Otherwise you don't. My bro just does not have that style of communication down yet. A shame. But I guess that means I need to listen more carefully and ask questions to drive the conversation he is trying to have.