Comparison Chaos:

I don’t know how many of you are like this, but I am. My parents, mostly my mom, have taught me to comparison shop before making any purchase. It is always best to be an informed shopper in a consumer market where the buyer normal gets taken advantage of. So this has been my practice over the years.

However, this past Wednesday I ran into a comparison shopping issue that had me absolutely baffled. I was in the grocery store looking to buy some ground beef for the TP dorm guy’s night cookout. I was doing my frugal duty trying to figure out how to get the most for less. The problem that I had was that the weights on two different items were in different measurement systems!

Now, I realize that I should remember the conversions from math, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember at the moment. I’m standing there in the store baffled that I am even in this predicament. I mean, this is Canada is it not? Last time I filled my gas tank up I was charge per liter, not gallon. If you’re gunna measure your meat in both pounds and kilograms on separate packages, give me the choice to fill my tank on gallons!

Final Instructions:

I hate Windows. Anyone who know me knows the prejudice I that I have against that cursed operating system. I just spent the past couple of hours working on formatting and reinstalling everything back on Brent's machine.... he has seen the light and we just picked up his brand-spanking new iBook today...he's selling his old machine to Steph. My main frustration was with the chip set drivers... the same issue that I had before.... here are my instructions to her in the event that she needed to reformat:

"If you EVER need to reformat this computer, here are some steps of instructions to get the chip set up and running:

DO NOT DELETE THIS FILE: Hours of grueling, painstaking, salvation-losing hours have been spent to figure this confounded machine out. Save this file on as many disks, print outs, emails, CDs, or 8-tracks that you can. This is here solely for your benefit.

Step 1:
Insert the orange PC100 SystemBoard CD-ROM into the CD Drive (will not work in floppy)
Step 2:
Find the VGA folder. Inside there is a folder labeled “M741LMRT & M748LMRT” (the bold one is this motherboard’s model number). After that, find the “Win9x” folder and inside find Setup. Double click and follow instructions…. You should now have restored the use of your monitor’s color capabilities. Restart.
Step 3:
Right click on your “My Computer” and then click on Properties. Find the tab that says “Device Manager”. If there are peripherals (those handy devices that are inside your computer that Windows can’t recognize without a driver) that have what look to be yellow caution signs or red x’s over then, it is generally a good idea to right click on them and find their properties. For example: You go into the Device Manage and there is a funky looking file name with a yellow question mark next to is that is labeled Sound Device. The logical solution to this problem is to click Update Drivers, “Search For Better…”, (click) Browse, Find folder “Sound”, then “Drivers” in the CD drive…
Step 4: Restoring your LAN and Ethernet capabilities:
This part is the toughest of all to figure out and I hope that this helps. Go through the same “Update Drivers, “Search For Better…”, (click) Browse” step. This one is a little trickier. After that, find the LAN folder, then “Win98”. Make sure that it is load files from the CD, not the hard drive (it will indicate by icon where it is finding the file). If it doesn’t, Skip back to the screen that has the “Search For Better…” option. Choose the other option, select either file offered, but click “Have Disk”, then Browse. Try the same “Win98” folder. It SHOULD take this, but while installing it may ask you for a DM9PCI.DOS file. Insert the burnt CD labeled DRIVERS. This following location is that of the file it is looking for: D:\dm9012115 Folder\Win2k_9x . Insert that into the search field. Installation should finish and it should run.
Step 5: Optional
If steps 1 through 4 do not work in any attempt to revive your machine, please purchase a baseball bat, mallet, or some other form of bludgeoning item, take your CPU tower out side and beat the living/dying crap out of it. Use whatever profanity or combination of expletives to release you from this torment. After you feel better, use a friend’s computer and go to www.apple.com and look into buying a Macintosh…. You don’t need chip set drivers for those.

Sincerely,
Damien Gula"

The Cattle Mentality of a Cow Town:

Hey everyone, I realize that it has been a few weeks. I think I have found a system in which I can get a blog in edgewise. School and the demands of the campus have been keeping me busy... as for today, I have 6 hours of classes and a lunch meeting.... not to mention that I WILL thank my M.W.F. 2- 3 hour constitutional right after Pastoral Ministry.

I need it especially today. I caught some form of the plague and have been drinking nonstop... I honestly thing I made 8 trips to the bathroom last night....enough of the details, now to the topic at hand.

I’ve been in Sussex, New Brunswick for 2 years now and I’ve always walked to where I needed to go. Now that I do have a vehicle, I still walk. I do some driving, but not a whole lot... gas is expensive in Canada, and they charge per liter! Bah!

Gas is not the only reason that I choose to walk or not go at all. That reason is that which influences the title of this blog: the Cattle Mentality of Sussex drivers. I hate driving in this town... more over, I hate driving in New Brunswick. It is seriously like joining a cattle herd. I bet that somewhere on each car native to Sussex that there is an ear tag with their number.

I drove Brent and I to Saint John for the weekend (NB’s port city) and it took us probably an hour to even get out of Sussex! Part of that was that we need to head down to the bank for him, but that’s it.

I wish that there was some way to light a fire under drivers here. I wish that someone would hand me the prod and have me go nuts on the herd.... Sussex would never be the same.