I’ve only had my HP Pavilion dv1311se for two months now and have had problems with the temperature running high — so much so that it’s shut down now about three times on me because the temperature reached a critical level. All three times my laptop was on a flat surface, specifically the kitchen table and my desk at work. I take very good care of my laptop and it’s always either upright on my desk or is safely tucked away in my laptop bag. It doesn’t get dropped or receive any abuse apart from the design and web development that I do on it.

After this third meltdown, which occurred after playing mp3’s for roughly an hour and a half (that’s all it was actively doing basically), I got on with HP’s online tech support and asked them where I could find temperature/fan information. While they couldn’t give me information on how to view those temperatures [the dv1000 series is running an inferior BIOS which doesn't provide that information], they did give me a list of things to do, including a power drain, resetting the system BIOS, acquiring the latest BIOS version and flashing your current one, re-intalling power management, and disabling automatic restart.

I’m not sure if these things will work, but I’m certainly going to give them a try. If you’ve got a dv1000 series and are having overheating problems like me, give these things a try. Remember though… keep those vents CLEAR of other things like fabric or other things that prevent circulation. This series seems to run pretty hot and you need all the ventilation you can get it seems.

Here’s that list of things to do:

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Filed under: General
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2K — Why?

Almost 6000 Iraqis have died — both civilians and security force members.

Filed under: Awareness
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Well, this evening as I was going out and getting wine and bread for group [which I didn't make it there as I was feelin' sick], I stopped at the liquor store to get the wine. Well, as I was signing my credit card slip, the lady at the counter pulled out a flask-size bottle of some sort of hard liquor and rhetorically asked the lady behind me “the usual?”. That got me to thinking.

When I worked at Caribou, it was common to see the same people every day getting their medium, skim, sugar-free vanilla latte, asking them “the usual?” — as if we needed to ask. So then I was thinking, I bet there are plenty of instances where you wouldn’t want to hear (or overhear) the question, “the usual?”.

• The liquor store (a la my own experience)
• Your local auto service center
• Local police precinct 215
• A psycho therapist
• Michael Jackson’s fan club phone-in hotline
• Jim in plumbing department at The Home Depot

Any others?

Filed under: General
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Well our heros at Apollo Heating & Venting came today and installed our brand new Lennox furnace today. This morning we woke up to a house temperature of around 55 degrees. Yes, it was quite cold. I think tonight we’ll be setting the thermostat to like, 75… just because we CAN.

Oh, and I’m going to take this moment to tell you how EVIL and TERRIBLE the company First American Home Buyers Protection Corporation REALLY is. When you buy their home warranty you really aren’t buying a whole lot in terms of protection; if you don’t read the fine print you’ll most certainly find out when you try to make a claim. So with our whole furnace fiasco, the previous residents didn’t follow through with the recall set out by the manufacturer — the previous owners were contacted but no one ever followed through. So the furnace breaks down essentially because of their neglegence and the warranty WON’T cover it. I thought the warranty was to protect us?

I guess not. So if you’re considering First American Home Buyers Protection Corp for the home warranty, think again. If you want a bad home owners warranty, you could try them. But I’d look elsewhere, someplace that does cover some of the prior owners’ neglegence.

Anyway. So we got the new furnace installed and everything’s running GREAT. It’s so nice to have a warm home again.

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Filed under: Home Ownership
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Well, it’s been an incredibly busy weekend for me with regard to the web. I’ve launched three websites in all — one of which you won’t be able to have access to.

We just launched our company Intranet homepage redesign. I loathe calling it a homepage, but that’s what it is… and there’s lots of interesting things that I incorporated into there, including some of my first C#.NET programming.

I also launched the new website for Fuzzy Slippers Studio and a placeholder site for FS Music, the label run by Rich Leone of Fuzzy Slipppers Studio.

Part of the huge rush surrounding launching those latter two sites is the release of Debbie Duncan’s new CD with FS Music. It’s a GREAT CD and has really been getting great reviews among jazz critics and various media groups. I hope to have samples of her music up sometime early this week.

But I think I shall be sleeping in now. It’s been a looooooooooooooooooooooooooong weekend.

Filed under: Websites
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Looks like the prognosis on our furance is a bit worse — I didn’t realize that our furnace was as old as it was, originally bought in 1986 and due for replacement in about four to five years. I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to just throw away $1,000 into something I have to replace for $3,000 in a few years.

So now begins the process of finding the right furnace, the right installer for the right price.

Filed under: Home Ownership
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With the coming of Fall, we’re typically greeted with the picking out of pumpkins, doing the fall colors drive, and the winterizing of the home. Well, I guess it wouldn’t be life if we didn’t throw in a few curve balls.

We’ve got a big driveway (long anyway) and were pretty decided on the fact that we’d need a snow-thrower and that a shovel just wouldn’t cut it. So we ended up dropping $800 on one that would sufficiently get the job done and not break on us in the middle of February. So… that went on the Home Depot card.

Lovely.

Last tuition payment coming up soon for Natalie — that’s gonna hurt a little. Another $500 sucked from the marrow of our bank account.

And as if these things weren’t enough our FURNACE broke down last Saturday. I came home to the smell of burnt circuitry (a familiar smell from the days when Jamison blew up his bass amp in my basement) and a cold house. Lovely. I thought it would be something simple like the ignitor going out.

Nope.

Apparently there’s this metal overflow container that rusted out and spilled water all over some circuit board, the transformer, and a few other items creating a veritable fiesta of burnt circuitry smell throughout the house. This job is going to cost us over $900 to get our furnace back in working order again. Here’s the kicker.

Three years ago, the previous owners of our house were notified about a recall for this metal overflow container on their furnace, to spend $300 and replace the item with a plastic container instead. THEY NEVER ACTED ON THE RECALL whereby sticking us with the bill.

AAAARRRGGGHH!!!

Now I understand money may have been tight for them… but $300 as opposed to $950??? Let’s see… which one might be the cheaper of options? I’m going to try and work something out with Bryant (the manufacturer) and see if they can’t get involved in the game.

Anyway, kinda feelin’ the crunch. I was going to get new tires on my car, but that’s gonna have to get put off even further. :-/

Filed under: General, Home Ownership
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When I first was hired at the ‘MO, I saw just how bad their intranet was—a massive proverbial junk drawer of pages and sites that had no real strong brand/identity tie with our current brand. It’s BAD. Real bad. So I made it my goal to bring about an overhaul of their intranet and make it not only more intuitive and conforming to brand standards, but something worth everyone’s use.

Looks like my desires are going to come sooner than I thought they were. I’m in the process of putting together a proposal that will soon go before upper management for approval and backing, giving a co-worker and I the sign-off authority to proceed.

It’s going to be a huge undertaking, but with possible great benefits. I think I might smell a raise in the future if those goes well.

Filed under: Development, Websites
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I’ve been looking for a good, free rhyming dictionary that I could download for my laptop, but haven’t found anything worth keeping. I tried one from AnalogX, but the words it would return were so obscure that that they were simply unusable. And what made it worse, is that it didn’t even return simple results for single syllable words.

I did try another free one that was based on a command prompt with a GUI interface, but I couldn’t figure out the dictionary part of it. Apparently you’re supposed to download one. No thanks.

So I bit the bullet and bought one for $20 from writeexpress.com and it works GREAT. Returns a lot of words and can handle multiple syllables. You can try out the one and two syllable results online at the website, but the software offers more possibilities.

Worth the $20 if you need that added help in coming up with stellar rhymes.

Filed under: \\\ ETC ///
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So last night I blogged about how I was pretty much ready to just throw the towel in as far as music goes. Well, I met up with an old friend, Brian Ricke, after the wedding. We talked a little about life and what’s been going on. I happened to mention that I just haven’t been doing much of anything lately with music. (more…)

Filed under: Music, Spirituality
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