Circadian Rhythm Band

Up till almost 4 am, almost plotzed at work at 4 pm but was woken up by needing to do some brain-engaged writing.
Lunchtime, picked up a pair of Netgear plug-n-play wifi-N repeaters. Fast food for lunch because, well, time.
Home, installed the repeaters but they did not seem to be repeating. Open box units, probably were set up for someone else's network. Screw it, I needed to crash.

Tried to get to sleep, Domino did her spynx thing next to me. That was about 6:30, last look at the clock I remember was 7:30. Woke up at a little before 11. Got dressed, drove to Denny's for dinner. Excellent service for a change. No wi-fi there, so finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself and switched to Slave Girl of Gor when I was done.

Back home, found the setup guide for the repeaters which was missing from the boxes. One by one reset them, paired them with the router, fired up the Ultrabook because my main PC does not have wireless and setup needed a PC which would connect to the repeater by wireless. The wizard is a little out of order, but in about 15 minutes I had them both set up with unique SSID names, and the same login and password, and was able to connect to each of them. Tivo, unfortunately, at 1 am locked me out of network setup because there's a software upgrade coming at 2 am. Stupid, it only takes 5 minutes to change the network settings, and the update might fail with the current setup. I did get the blueray player set up, and played an Amazon Prime video, it was a much better connection. Put one in the bedroom, and hooked up the squeezebox radio to it. Much better signal, but it showed that the intermittent play from Thailand's Fung Fung Fung station is not due to my network. Bummer. I get other stations from Thailand which are more reliable, but they have too many loud commercials. One thing about Thai radio commercials is they either sound like ads for a relaxing spa treatment or they sound like ads for a monster truck rally. Often the ones which sound like ads for monster truck rallies are ads for a relaxing spa treatment. :-(  

Spent a lot of $ today. Also bought a replacement connector for my camera's GPS unit (they have improved it by making a flex curled cord instead of the straight one which keeps popping out). Cord was $12, express shipping from HK $30. Non-express would take a month. Bought an iPod 6th gen on eBay, now that two 5th gens have crapped out intermittently on the car audio system. I'm blaming the battery. Also bought a battery replacement kit for the 5th gen. Both of those will probably go on eBay "for parts".  Also plopped some change into my Discover card to keep me below the limit. It's a low limit, but 0% interest. If I keep rotating money through it, I get cash back. My Chase card started charging interest (it had a 0 balance but a late submission from Kaiser for $10 cost $11.09) so I put that card away.

Bought some Safeway Select 78% chocolate the other day, and it's pretty good. I'd say 7 out of 10.

Plans for later today:
Use my free Starbucks drink card, and take my netbook there for upgrades
Maybe hit Baycon. Maybe. I've had enough of Fanime, and just don't get steampunk so no clockwork alchemy
If I didn't have a concert Sunday I'd have taken the train to Sacto for the jazz.

Expletive

In another world, on another timeline, I would have dropped everything for either of two friends who seriously need a younger version of me in their lives.

Netbooking

It's after 3 pm and I haven't done much except sit in front of the PC at home. That's how it feels, although I did a lot of little things. Took out the garbage, which is usually a thing accomplished a little at a time, but today all the garbage cans were full - both bathrooms, the computer room, bedroom, kitchen and even the shredder. On average the shredder only gets full every 3-4 months. Have I mentioned how much I HATE the phrase "The perfect storm"? Because there is nothing perfect about destruction. And there are so many thousands of combinations of weather which can produce a killer storm. And because it just sounds wrong. So don't be telling me this was a perfect storm of garbage, because I'll cut you.

Every Saturday at 7 am the PC does a backup of the boot drive to a network attached drive. I use Windows Backup because it's free and mostly works. It was still running at 11 am, even though it should only take half an hour. The backup needs 240GB of space, the drive was down to its last 72GB. Stupid Windows Backup should have errored out, but it hung instead. I stopped it, cleaned up six of the previous 8 backups (which stupid Windows Backup ought to have done - it's set to only keep the last two), and started both a system and drive C backup.

Some of the problems I've been having with the car's in-dash system may be due to it having been loaded with the wrong firmware. Someone at the refurb place I bought it from jumped the gun and loaded 1.7 which is not supported on my system. I put 1.6 on an SD card and tried to install it from there, but reading the instructions, they want it on a USB drive, but the USB port is in the back of the unit, I can't get to it, except the iPod cable is plugged into it. After I finish this I'll walk over to Microcenter and see if they have a connector which can either split the iPod connector into iPod + USB or convert it (gender bender, basically) to USB. I would expect I'm not the only one who has needed such a cable.

There have been many more double-wide people passing by than usual. Must be three or four fan conventions in town. Baycon is about a mile away.

Not many people in this place, which seems odd. We're right next to AMC theaters, which had 3D and IMAX, and it's a bit chilly and windy for a BBQ. I would have expected more folks going to the movies. I guess not.