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The UW Husky Varsity & Alumni band trip took off for Europe today. I signed up about a year ago when I had a good full-time job and expected to have plenty of vacation time. When my parents went into hospice back in December, I canceled. I had paid $1k of the $2500 fee by then, which the contract said should have been fully refundable, but as it turns out the contract wasn't between me and the band or me and the travel agency, but between the travel agency and the band. Apparently the band had decided up front that they were not giving any refunds. They didn't bother to tell me. The guy in charge of the arrangements forgot that I was not at the orientation meeting because (a) I'm 800 miles away and (b) I didn't hear about the trip until afterwards.
I did buy the travel insurance, but their spiel was that the insurance was for during the trip, not before. However, they sent me forms which suggested that with a doctor's note about the condition of my parents, there was a chance of getting back what the travel agent wouldn't refund. I think a copy of Mom's death certificate will do.
I finally have copies of all the checks I sent, and was going to do the application last night, but my printer died. So I'll do it tomorrow, expecting the replacement printer will be here then.
Busy day at work. Some routine tests with a new 52-inch TV set were interrupted by an emergency HTML editing project which four of us managed to finish in a lot less time than I'd expected. It was nice to be able to do something web-ish. We do a lot of XML tweaking, but most of our HTML is hard-coded.
Tomorrow morning I am supposed to have a one-on-one 2-hour photo shoot with a model who was part of a group shoot about a year ago. She's from LA, and was visiting the Bay Area this week. I haven't heard from her yet, and need to because she wasn't sure where she was staying. I was going to shoot in her hotel. She has my cell phone number, and was supposed to call earlier in the week. Maybe she decided to go to Sacto tomorrow after all. There's another shoot I might be able to go to tomorrow afternoon if she flakes.
When I got home the CPU cooler had arrived which had been recommended to me for my motherboard by three people on Amazon who had installed it on the same board. There's a cut-out in my case for a backplate to be installed, so I figured this cooler would install without taking out the motherboard. The backplate is a little longer than the cut-out, and the nuts which hold the cooler's screws in place were too thick to fit between. SO I took the whole @#$%^&*( machine apart, and it still took half an hour to line everything up so all four screws were seated correctly. Would have worked better for Brahma or if someone was here to help.
Also found out the hard way that the backup battery in the PC is dead. Keeping the unit unplugged for three hours set all the BIOS settings to factory defaults, and it lost its clock time. The irony here is that to change the battery will also set the BIOS to defaults. However, this BIOS can save its settings to non-volatile memory.
Had a small heart attack when the machine was back together again and refused to launch Windows, with an error message telling me to remove media from a drive. Had already done so. Turned out I'd missed a setting, and the machine thought the two big hard drives were DVD drives. Fixed that and everything came up fine.
I did buy the travel insurance, but their spiel was that the insurance was for during the trip, not before. However, they sent me forms which suggested that with a doctor's note about the condition of my parents, there was a chance of getting back what the travel agent wouldn't refund. I think a copy of Mom's death certificate will do.
I finally have copies of all the checks I sent, and was going to do the application last night, but my printer died. So I'll do it tomorrow, expecting the replacement printer will be here then.
Busy day at work. Some routine tests with a new 52-inch TV set were interrupted by an emergency HTML editing project which four of us managed to finish in a lot less time than I'd expected. It was nice to be able to do something web-ish. We do a lot of XML tweaking, but most of our HTML is hard-coded.
Tomorrow morning I am supposed to have a one-on-one 2-hour photo shoot with a model who was part of a group shoot about a year ago. She's from LA, and was visiting the Bay Area this week. I haven't heard from her yet, and need to because she wasn't sure where she was staying. I was going to shoot in her hotel. She has my cell phone number, and was supposed to call earlier in the week. Maybe she decided to go to Sacto tomorrow after all. There's another shoot I might be able to go to tomorrow afternoon if she flakes.
When I got home the CPU cooler had arrived which had been recommended to me for my motherboard by three people on Amazon who had installed it on the same board. There's a cut-out in my case for a backplate to be installed, so I figured this cooler would install without taking out the motherboard. The backplate is a little longer than the cut-out, and the nuts which hold the cooler's screws in place were too thick to fit between. SO I took the whole @#$%^&*( machine apart, and it still took half an hour to line everything up so all four screws were seated correctly. Would have worked better for Brahma or if someone was here to help.
Also found out the hard way that the backup battery in the PC is dead. Keeping the unit unplugged for three hours set all the BIOS settings to factory defaults, and it lost its clock time. The irony here is that to change the battery will also set the BIOS to defaults. However, this BIOS can save its settings to non-volatile memory.
Had a small heart attack when the machine was back together again and refused to launch Windows, with an error message telling me to remove media from a drive. Had already done so. Turned out I'd missed a setting, and the machine thought the two big hard drives were DVD drives. Fixed that and everything came up fine.
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