I’ve been having a bit of fun over the past few weeks. One of the biggest things I’ve been doing is helping out Diana’s sister.
Angela has finally left her abusive boyfriend of three years, and is looking to try and straighten out her life. Both Diana and I feel that Angela is committed to it this time, so I’ve been helping her when she’s needed someone, since Diana’s at work during the day. While I haven’t minded offering my assistance, it has taken away from some of my normal activities, and left me to fall behind a tad in housework. I had been intending to do a nice round of cleaning last week during the break, but was unable to do so. I’m hoping to make up for it over the weekend.
I had also been experiencing a few interesting glitches with my computer, so I backed up everything I had and started back from scratch with a clean install of Vista, and have been fighting to get things back to a normal state over the last week and a half. I’m still not sure what was causing my problems, and really wish I could figure it out. The issue I had been having was having various programs trying to access the ‘net on odd ports. Stranger still, was that these programs were trying to access sites which they had no real relation to. I think that iTunes may have influenced the behavior somehow, for that was the last program I had installed/updated before the oddities started occurring. Also, the ports trying to be accessed were multicast related, which is what the included Bonjour service was wanting to toy with. I dunno. Weirdness. Since then, I have re-installed iTunes, but disabled Bonjour. No problems as of yet.
I did manage to start toying around with one project over this past weekend. I pieced an old tower back together (the Dell if anyone’s keeping track) and installed Win2k on it. I have it hooked up to the router and have it acting as a web-server/media recorder/back-up server. I’ve been using it to record streaming media for playback at a later time, and I’m hoping to set the notebooks up to do automated backups to it every so often. I don’t wanna go through the hassle of losing data again. The web-server part is mainly something for me to tinker with. I don’t plan on actually allowing the thing to be online serving up a site, though that would be interesting. I don’t think Southeast would allow me to have that traffic anyway. Out of curiosity I tried to see about accessing the computer over the ‘net, but I get hit with the login prompt for the modem. I’ve thought about calling them for the login info (they flashed it with different firmware, so the defaults don’t apply–I tried to reset the thing, but it doesn’t seem to want to), but haven’t.
I started back to class this past Monday–I’ve got two classes on campus, and one online. Monday night was accounting, Tuesday was OS troubleshooting. Didn’t really manage to do much in either on those first nights.
I can’t wait to get things sorted back out, and get back to my regular routine. I’ve been so out of the loop. I have no clue as to what’s going on anywhere.
Well, I haven’t much time left before I go out to get Angela’s kid. Oh, yeah–I’m baby-sitting. Tonight’s the first night, and then there’s a repeat tomorrow. Don’t know about next week. It’s only temporary, and it’s not interfering with my schoolwork. She’s in the process of getting assistance with childcare, but until then I agreed to help. Yep. I’m a sucker.
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