Lafayette Life

Ha, what a joke. I have complained for 5 years that I could not fit a mower from the back yard to the front, or vice versa, without lifting it over the concrete A/C pad. So finally we put in a pool/spa and got rid of most of the back yard. Most, but not quite all. Still a few feet here and there of grass to trim. Too much for a string trimmer, but not enough to buy a 2nd mower. So what’s a homeowner to do? Answer, buy a small, people-powered push mower - a REEL mower. I researched them, and purchased this 16″ model.  It’s cute. It’s fun. It’s lousy.

I am not kidding, I need to run the mower back and forth about 4 times to get the same effect as a power mower. Now I know why Briggs & Stratton was so successful. But, by golly, it’s small, convenient, portable, and fits in the storage shed. I’m keeping it. But that means I have to keep up with the mowing each week. It does much worse on long grass, and is no good at all on tall weeds. They just lie down.

John mows like a maniac

I’m putting these photos on the web for the experts in stone work to give us advice on cleaning slate that was ravaged by recent pool construction. Everyone else can ignore these.

The web hosting company fixed the problem with my uploads, and so I have loaded dozens and dozens of photos from 2010 for you to enjoy. But to enjoy them you have to visit the Photo Pages. Click the Photo Pages on Lafayette Life, on the right side of this page. Look, there it is, in plain sight. The title is The Media Pages, and the very next thing is the link to the Photo Pages. Hey, I made it a bookmark, don’t you think you should too?

I wondered if my internet was fast. This is a funny thing for several reason. My geeky IT friends at work tell me, “You should get cable internet - it’s really much faster than DSL.” Or whenever people come over, I want to show them a funny video or funny photos, and it seems to take forever to load. At least that’s the perception. And finally, I wonder if I am getting all the Internet speed I am paying for with “Fast Access DSL” as hyped by AT&T.

So I visited the websites www.speakeasy.net and www.broadband.gov for some independent speed tests. After running repeated tests, and comparing to other places such as Grandmere’s, I find that, yes, I’ve got very fast Internet speed. Yay. Thanks, American Telephone and Telegraph Company and Alexander Graham Bell South.

I had a problem. I wanted to copy about 900 photos to a SD flash drive, for Grandmere’s digital photo frame. I have done this before, and I thought it would be a snap. NOPE. I failed and failed, and felt like a DOPE.

First, it would give me a strange error, cannot copy file, error code -0036xxxx whatever. I thought to my self, Oh, maybe it’s those punctuation marks that the Mac can handle, but Windows cannot. So, I looked on the web, found a utility called “Better Finder Rename”, tried it out, it removed punctuation marks (commas, apostrophes, ampersands) from the file names, bought the software, used it on 1700 files, and tried again. NOPE.

Then I checked the error code more closely, and it said the Mac was trying to copy these invisible files with resources that, once again, Windows can’t handle. But there was a very fast and free solution: Open the terminal and type Dot_clean. So, I did that. Then tried the copy again. The first 100 files went fine, and then it said “No room, disk full.” NOPE! What? The disk is NOT full. That was only about 6 MB of a 2 GB drive. It’s not full. It’s NOT full. IT’S NOT FULL.

Then I looked around for more error codes, and found something about FAT16 vs. FAT32. Oh, gee. This flash drive was somehow formatted for FAT16. That’s like 1984 technology. OK, quick trip to the Disk Utility, reformat the flash drive to FAT32, and like ‘that’, it works.

You know what they say, “It ain’t over ’till the FAT lady sings.”

Just think I expanded my vocabulary. Watch out, everyone who is playing “Scrabble” with me. I will cross the Rubicon to get you.