Long, Hard day

Slept in again. Same reason. 11 am I was in an online chat with one of Quicken's customer disservice reps. Paula Ma. She was all about telling me I needed an external backup app in order to run Quicken's built-in online backup feature. I told her I'd been using online backup from within Quicken since 2002 (which was a typo, I've "only" had it since 2012), and have never needed an extra app. It took a while for her to say she would try to fix the issue without that. Asked for my subscription number, which I gave her, and then started asking me questions which she should have been able to answer for herself by looking at my account, which I could not answer because the effing program had me locked out. At which point I told her we were done here, and she can tell her manager she lost a customer to Microsoft.

But one of the questions gave me the hint I needed. All I had to do was launch the online backup and click on "reinstall". Turns out what Paula thought was an app in my system tray is really an app embedded in the Quicken backup menu. And now it's working.

By now it is about 1 pm, and I needed to get to Radio Shack in Santa Clara to pick up the HTC phone and switch to Sprint. That took till 3 pm, because Julian, the Sprint rep, had never done a phone number port before, and his computer was not showing the right choices. He was on the phone with three different experts, and eventually one of them was able to hijack the transaction and finish it from Sprint Central. Or maybe just Sprint Bay Area.

When I switched from AT&T to Verizon, the phone number ported immediately, and all my apps started loading from Google backup. Well, Verizon turned off my service in 20 minutes, but Sprint still thinks my phone number is their temporary one. And it may be Tuesday before that gets fixed. Not that I need the phone call feature for the weekend. Wifi works fine, and I've installed email and Facebook and Kindle and the cat cams. That last one took a bit of doing, because the phone couldn't connect with the tablet (which has the camera config file) over wifi or BT, so I had to hook them both up to the PC and transfer the file from the tablet to the PC and from the PC to the phone.

Anywho, when I got into the car and tried to plug the HTC phone into the USB cable, it didn't fit. HTC has decided to use USB C, which is yet another "standard". Sprint guy lost some possible income by not letting me know that, he could have sold me a couple of cables. So I stopped off at Fry's and at first found a bunch for $20 each on a display rack dedicated to USB C, but as usual, Fry's has stuff in more than one location, and I grabbed the last two $10 ones from the huge cable section.

Home, Next big project was home made Southern fried chicken wings. I had 4 lbs thawed and waiting. Had a recipe from online which showed up on two reputable independent cooking sites. The only thing I needed to do was nix the 5 -alarm pepper powder. I don't understand why people think spicy is good. I want to taste the food, not fry my taste buds. I had enough of that in Thailand.

Long story short, it was done at about 7 pm, and was a disaster. Instead of a tight wrapping of crispy breading, the chicken was only spottily covered, with greasy, soft gunk. That, plus potato chips, was dinner. At least the meat was done, and not dried out. The breading tasted great, what there was of it. Half a gallon of peanut oil down the drain. Compensated with an eclaire from Prolific Oven.

I know what I did wrong. Didn't allow the breaded wings to drain between coatings, or after the second coating. But I'm also not sold on the recipe, I was expecting to dip the wings in batter, not marinate in liquid and dredge in flour + spices.

I did get a chance to use the new mortar & pestle to grind some dried rosemary and mint from the garden.

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My last lens sold on eBay for $15 more than the buy-it-now price. I am happy. Boxed it up and will mail it to Wichita tomorrow.

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Made data disks of the 4 tapes' raw mpeg files. One per 8GB disk. I tried to burn labels with Lightscribe, the disks and drives all support it, but Nero's cover designer said they weren't. FAIL, Nero.

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Plans for tomorrow:
PO
Highlight a page in the score I missed
Try to learn the words for the three finales
Do some homework. Probably from downtown Starbucks
Call Sprint if the number doesn't get ported.

The Flag Is Not Flagging

All those adjustments, and now the flag is waving freely, not wrapping around the pole. I'll be taking it down on Tuesday, and may put up the Coast Survey flag in its place, or I may mount a flag pole holder somewhere less breezy. Maybe on the storage shed.

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Slept till 9, was at the PO at about 11 to drop off the last eBay sale. $800 from two previous sales is now in my bank account. That's almost 2 weeks' unemployment $$. Three lenses and a router. I may sell my D90 camera, but it doesn't look like any of the ones listed on eBay have any bids except for one which was listed by a camera store at $1 and is now up to $130. eBay says a fair price is $239, which sounds right to me.

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Before heading to the PO I packed a banana, a pair of sliced hard boiled eggs and a snack bag of walnuts. And a bottle of water. The idea being to have a late breakfast at Baylands. Which is what I did. Lots of RC aircraft being flown, all forms - helicopter, flying wing, fighter jet, Cessna, etc. Just after I sat down, a couple of 50-ish guys arrived with black cases about the right size for a professional video camera, but inside each was a black quadcopter which looked like a $5k model. One guy was showing the other how to fly his. Ultra-stable, and it looked like one had been programmed to come back when the operator gestured to it. Maybe.

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Plan A had been to go to the Tech Museum because BofA has free admission for ATM cardholders. But by the time I remembered, it was too late.

Home, found a section in El Capitan which I'd missed highlighting, did it wrong, so got out the bleach, some water and a couple of Q-tips to erase the highlight. About 10:1 water:bleach worked well. Also fixed another line which was highlighted by mistake. In the process I reviewed all the music & words and was once more impressed by how incredibly stupid the lyrics are. But the plot is very funny, and there are some really clever sight gags in the dialog.
Monday I'll spend more time trying to learn words.

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Trimmed all the MPEGs from the tapes, cut off blank space front and back. And most of the afternoon was spent creating and burning a blu-ray of the first tape. I may have to do that all over again, I did not like the theme which I chose (out of the 4 available) and the menus don't work correctly. Not that menus matter, I set it to create chapters every 5 minutes because I didn't want to have to watch 8 hours of WWI documentaries to see where the breaks should go.

In the process, I discovered that none of my software can make an ISO from a blu-ray disk, even one I created myself. So I went online and found one which could, downloaded it, and it was packed full of viruses. I found another one which was clean and free. It makes a .bin file, and was able to burn copies from that. After I was done burning the three copies I wanted, and printing on them, Norton started complaining.

I had to download a patch and a boot level repair program from Symantec to clean the machine. Also had to remove some Yahoo! crap from the registry. It's all good now. Needed to do that before tomorrow morning's weekly backup, which will be huge with all the video files.

Dinner was cold smoked turkey, huge drumstick, I only finished half. Cole slaw on the side. Canteloupe & Famous Amos for dessert. All this while locomotivating between the computer and burning/copying to the TV and a pretty good CFL football game.  And two episodes of PTI with really lousy guest hosts.

Still have 2 Graham Norton shows to catch up on.

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Located a couple of recipes for what I thought I was making yesterday. In a nutshell - beer battered wings.

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The chorus has been told to wear all black. I don't have a black shirt in my size, and my black pants are kind of small. So I found one of each online.

Plans for tomorrow:
Try to get to the Tech, maybe.  Maybe not - may have to wait till next month, have a coffee date in MV at 5, and the IMAX I want to see would make me way late for that. And it will be a zoo, what with holiday weekend.
If not Tech, then re-do the DVD and try to make two more.