Printer Hell Concluded

It just occured to me that I have left the Printer Hell story hanging without telling you what happened in the end. How did this story end? I wound up taking the printer to another local company to a man who has been working on them specifically for the last 23 years. Well, anyway that is the story he gave me and since his shop had nothing but printers and printer parts strewn all over the place it was a good enough story for me assuming he could get me out of this jam. Sure enough, 3 days later I called this man back and he found out what the problem was. I did a very good job of pulling the printer apart but I did not do a very good job of putting the wiring harnesses back where they go. These printers have more screws, wires, relays, sensors and flags than you can imagine. Apparently when I put the printer back together the last time one of the wiring harnesses did not have the wires routed through the plastic housing correctly and when I used the screws to put things back together some of the wires got pinched to the point that the signal that was supposed to go through them never made the trip therefore the printer was blind to its components and therefore thought that since it could not see itself that there must be a paper jam. So, the printer was fixed and has been back home at the law firm all safe and secure. I am also finding out that the Laserjet 4200 printers seem to go through the fuser assemblies faster than they should. It is not a fault with the printer however it seems that HP has manufactured some faulty fuser roller plastic. The fuser assembly "fuses" image toner to the paper through a series of two rollers that the paper passes through which melts the toner to the paper. What happens is the plastic coating on the rollers starts to wear off on the ends or even peel completely off the roller causing the toner in that area of the roller not to get fused to the paper and creates a streak down that side of the page.

Issues

I have issues. LOL.. Like I am the only one with issues right? I had to leave Duck Ditch USA this afternoon where the sun was FINALLY poking its rays through the clouds to drive downtown into ANOTHER rain storm. It has been raining here for the last 7 days and guess what the forecast is for the NEXT 7 days folks? You got it, MORE rain. I need to find some used pontoons to put on the doublewide and some floaties for the dogs so that when the water continues to rise the pooches will rise with the rest of the mosquito ponds around them. Oh yeah, back to the issues concerning my travels to work today.

I called downtown to the security desk and spoke to both people who were currently on duty and told them that I had two distinct problems that were causing me to hesitate coming to work. Issue number 1 is that my car would get DIRTY again after I already washed it for the first time in 7 days. I washed it because a cat (identity witheld for the time being certainly not to protect it) waltzed all over my hood with its dirty muddy paws. That meant that my car would both get wet and dirty all over again. Why risk that by driving downtown? The second issue and more importantly the most traumatic of the two is that I would certainly MELT if I got wet. Must I say anything else? Well, I did make it downtown and yes my car did get wet and thanks to the wax that is on the clear coat of the paint job I had thousands of little bubbles all over my car that will inadvertently turn into little splotches of dirt when they dry. I did NOT get wet and was able to convince someone to open one of the doors leading into the garage that has a cover over it so I am still a semi solid carbon based entity otherwise this blog would not be happening.

I have decided today that I am tired of working in a dead end job(s) with no benefits and very little pay. I am so tired of it in fact that I am going to try and do something (anything) about it. Yes, I am thankful to God (and my employers) that I am employed and that my nose is 10 mm above the proverbial flood that is constantly trying to drown me like a rat. I know that I know that there are folks in this world (other carbon based life forms) that make less money than me and have it much worse. Somehow that does not make me feel better (for me or them) nor does it help me with my contentment meter. If the meter with a reading of 1 means I am very discontent and the 10 were to signify that I am so content that I can not stand myself then I have broken the glass out of the meter as the needle has slammed PAST the 1 indicator to zoom into negative numbers. I have tried to be content and have been searching high and low and all around for a better job here in the Charleston market. Guess what, the two jobs I did find paid the same or LESS than what I am making now. How badly does that suck Wilbur? I have no clue who Wilbur is since I dont have a talking horse and you need to understand that I have those issues still.

Today Katy and I decided two things are going to happen if it hair lips the governor. ( I guess the one in SC but if yours needs some hair on his/her lip then imagine them ok?) Katy is going to FINALLY become a fully certified teacher in SC (because that is where we have been for the last four years and we are not moving again) and James ole boy is going to find a BETTER I.T. job even if it means going to Soeul South Korea. Well, ok, maybe I will confine my job search to the US of A for now. LOL.. I really do not care to get a passport and go through all the hooey of working overseas. The bottom line is this, we are not getting any younger and in fact we are getting a tad bit OLDER (gasp) and we need to be moving FORWARD instead of moving BACKWARDS. I figure the next step backwards will be to move into the swamp behind us. LOL... My friend Jorge who just got back from Hardees told me about a funny bumper sticker and it made me laugh. "I am spending my kids inheritance" LOL What inheritance?? Get the picture folks? The only thing(s) my children are going to inherit from me at this stage of the game is the dogs and their fleas if they are lucky. LOL... Well, I guess that children inherit much more from their parents other than the tangible or intangible things in their estate.

Did I tell you about the issues that cropped up after I landed on my knees Wed night? I think I told you that I have been partially crippled as I have been healing from the experience. LOL. I am much better today than I was Thursday afternoon however I am not at 100% just yet. Have you ever tried to get off the floor without touching your knees? It is almost impossible folks. LOL... Well, anyway, so much for my issues, onward and upward and FORWARD we shall go.

Ice Pack's to the rescue

I went to work this morning hoping that I could hobble around and still get some work done. That lasted until about 12:20 pm when my right knee told me it had enough exercise for the day. So, here I sit on my recliner with my leg elevated and the ice packs hopefully reducing the swelling which is causing some pain and discomfort. Thanks to broadband and a wireless laptop I can sit here in my living room and still talk to customers and do some things. i am hopeful that by Monday I will be all better.

Ooopsie daisey.....

Our family took a walk with the dogs again tonight. We do this on a fairly regular basis. It is a desperate effort to get away from the TV, Internet and find the time to be together as a family. It also serves the purpose of giving the mutts and opportunity to do their business and give us some much needed exercise. Well, the walk went good up until the point where we were headed down the hill to go home. You know the saying, you must be a redneck if instructions to your house include "turn off the paved road". Instructions to our house includes pass the old oak tree at the top of the hill, drop off the pavement and go to the bottom of the hill and look for 159 Mapleridge Dr on the left. On the way down the hill I noticed the beautiful wolf type dog that is always tied up and does not get paid any attention. My intention was to steer my two clodhoppers over in his general direction when my left foot hit a hole or whatever and down I went. OUCHIE.... Gosh how embarrasing was that. Fall flat on my face in front of the DOGS, wife and kids. Luckily it was dark outside and I think most folks were not noticing my accidental spill. LOL... I guess that the next time that I decide to go for a walk I will do it when it is still daylight so I can see where I am putting my clumsy feet. For now it looks like I hobbled away from this experience with two banged up knees and two twisted ankles.

Where did the AC go?

I love it that the powers to be turned the AC off where I work on the weekends. I know that electricity does not come for FREE and that they are trying to save money, however, I wish that they would have been a little more considerate of their employees and contractors and left the AC on so that we could have been moderately comfortable. LOL...

The other day I noticed that I could not insert a picture in my "myblogsite" blog and wondered what was going on with that. I figured that they were having some sort of glitch with the interface and did not give it another thought. Today I tried to post to my blog there and noticed that the post was not going through because it kept timing out and I still could not insert a picture nor could I upload a file. I was getting the "out of space" error for your blog. Please delete some files and try again. My blog is using a whopping 5.1 mb in space on their hard drive. Whew, that is tough folks, you only get 5 mb of space for your blog. I ran through that in about 5 days with all the pictures I have inserted in my blogs. I guess that is what you get for FREE huh?

In 35 minutes I will be getting off of work and heading home. I will actually have tomorrow off from my week day job even though I wont get paid for it. you have to be an employee there for a year before you get paid for any holidays or get any vacation time. So, that means if Thanksgiving and Christmas actually fall on a weekday this year that I will get the time off with pay. Until then I will just have to enjoy actually having a day off to spend with my family doing whatever might be fun to do. I plan on spending part of the day watching Steven Segal movies at a friends house. We are dog/house sitting for a friend of us who is spending this 3 day weekend in Florida with her boyfriend and during that time we will enjoy the cable TV along with the AC that is running. Our light bills have been running between 190 and OVER for the last several months so we have been trying to leave the central air and heat off as much as possible. I came home the other day and it was 78 degrees outside and 89 degrees inside. OMG... I just could not deal with it so here I go turning on the darn electrical vortex that is going to consume what is left of my paycheck. LOL... SOB... LOL.... SOB. Banging head on my desk now.... It is amazing to me that the cost of living just continues to rise but our paychecks either remain the same or get smaller. Full time employees lose their jobs to outsourcing to India, China and other areas of the world that have cheap labor and/or lose their benefits and get thrown into a part time staff pool. I spoke to an employee of a large corporation that had been employed there for 10 or more years that just experienced that. So much for loyalty and longevity huh?

Are we still lost? I will post a story about this picture in a moment. 

My friend Patty eating at our favorite Tbonz restaurant in Mt Pleasant. This was the first picture the new digital camera took last night.  

Back of Digital camera 

A gift from a dear friend, this is a VERY nice digital camera.  

Knoppix Desktop background screen. Nice aye? 

Blogging through Linux

This is way too cool boys and girls. I am logged on to the Internet using Knoppix 3.8. I know you are probably a bit sick and tired of me blathering about Linux but it is SO COOL. LOL... Ok, enough is enough, i will quit gloating now. Well, not really gloating just excited about a new OS that is DIFFERENT.

So far this evening I have booted our main machine which is a 1.4 ghz machine with 650 mb ram and tons of toys attached. No, I dont feel like listing everything just thought I would summarize the list. LOL... I noticed that this browser does not support rich text editing so I do not have any emoticons to share with you. Sigh... The bootable CD booted right up and it configured my Network Card for DHCP and the only device it is struggling with is my sound card. I can do without that for now I think. There are so many other applications, bells, whistles and gizmos to play with for now. I had Katy bring me a music cd so that I can test the sound and just before I hit the cd eject button I realized that I only have one cd rom device and guess what folks. The OS is running on it. Do I dare to do this and blow up my session BEFORE I save this blog? No, blogging must take a much higher priority right this second. I will try it later though and let you know what happened. LOL.. For now I will play with the version of Star Office and other applications and get back with you later. One thing I need to fix immediately is the resolution settings of the video. This font is WAY TOO tiny folks. I can barely see what I am typing here. LOL.. Later




James Moffitt
http://www.jesus-connect.net/jcmoffitt
moffittj@bellsouth.net

Good morning bloggers

I went to bed around 11pm and mother nature woke me up around 4:45 am for a surprise visit. I am not sure why this could not have waited until 7 or 8 am but anyway. Now it is 5 am and I can tell that mother nature is not going to let me go right back to sleep. So, here I am on the couch with a pillow in my lap banging on the keyboard once again. I can hear a rooster crowing across the street and one up the street not too far from me. I can hear the sounds of the refrigerator humming behind me. Have you ever wondered why roosters crow? I used to think that they did that only in the morning but for some reason that is not correct. The rooster across the street from us seems to crow all the time. Maybe it is confused about the time of the day or it is afflicted with the same loud mouth disease that Sammy the mutt is affected with.
On Sunday night I downloaded an .iso (image) file from www.knoppix.org. Last night I found a program that would allow me to create a bootable cd rom and burn the image to cd. Once I did that i was able to reboot the laptop to cd and run Knoppix 3.8 for the first time. The entire process took about 4 minutes and Knoppix actually saw all of the hardware on my system. The only thing it did not see was the wireless Internet card. However, it did recognize the ethernet card and had I had a nic cable plugged in I would have been able to surf the web via Linux. Cool stuff aye? Now, you are probably sitting there thinking "why in the world would you want to play with Linux when there are so many more applications written for Mickeysoft?" Well, the truth of the matter is this. Hardware and software toys are cool things to play with and experiment. It is all part of the mind candy addiction I suppose. During the day I fix broken technology and after my day is done earning that proverbial pay check I like to spend time playing with technology. I like looking at different things for different reasons. One reason is because it keeps me stimulated and learning new things. Believe it or not there are more Linux and Unix based Internet servers than there are Windows based servers. Mikeysoft has come a LONG long way over the years but initially the Internet ran primarily on a Unix based OS. The last time I played with Linux was with one of the Redhat releases. You had to install it to your hard drive and you also had to know your hardware inside and out. During the install process the Redhat install would query you about this chipset or that chipset on specific pieces of hardware and if you had not pulled the machine apart and written all of those details down then you would have to stop the install procedure turn off the machine and go get it.
Well that is all for now, hopefully you have a good day today. I am going to try and grab a couple of more winks before my day starts officially. It is way too early to turn on the coffee pot.
God bless

blogging in the dark

(softly humming a familiar tune) by the light of the silvery moon...... (humming because I forgot the rest of the chorus and song LOL)... Oh yes, no moon rays in here, but there is the glow of the LCD monitor on the laptop and the sounds of the clickty clack of the keys as I bang on the keyboard. Gizmo is behind me trying to get to sleep and I am at the desk at the end of the bed blogging. Normally I would be in the living room however American Idol took over the living room tonight and I did not care to watch it so I grabbed my bag of toys and the chair and headed for the solitude of the bedroom. So, here I am blogging at the end of the day at the end of the bed by the light of the technological moon at my finger tips.
I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised to find that my blogsite blog is back online again. I have no clue what happened BUT the important thing is that we are back online with this blog. I guess Fortune City forgot to pay their electric bill this month or something equally silly. Why else would my public web blog just not come up?
Speaking of technology, HP4100TN 5 James ZERO... I spent the two last hours of yesterday evening between 5pm and 7 pm pulling the blasted printer apart into a hundred pieces for one last looksie... I even took our HP4000 and put it side by side with that blasted printer to make sure I had the flag and sensor assembly installed correctly which of course I did not. So, I gutted the printer down to the system board one more time and reseated the assembly correctly. I put it all back together and I still get the printer jam error. I figure after about 10 hours over the last 8 days that I have had enough. Tomorrow I will be sending the printer off to a different shop to have it looked at and hopefully Kyle will be able to fix this darn printer.
I spent all day Monday in Charlotte NC at a Nitro Security seminar. We all gathered at the Microsoft complex off of Arrowood Drive. I have never been to Charlotte and I have to say that it reminds me a lot of Austin Texas. Sort of hilly and lots of trees. Anyway, the training was a huge joke. The Systems Enginners were supposed to get technical training from 10 am and 3pm and then from 3pm to 5 pm the sales guys were supposed to get sales training. Nitro provides IDS /IPS services on a network. That stands for Intrusion Detection Services and Intrusion Protection Services. The IPS device is a server that you install with Nitro Security software which is actually a Linux based install process. Once it is up and running on your network you have two Network Interface cards in the server. One runs the protected side of the network and the other card is the incoming data stream from the unprotected side of your network. Typically this server (IPS device) is placed on the furtherest part of your network closest to the Internet. This device sits there and watches ALL the traffic coming into your network via the Internet and through a series of complex rules and profiles it will monitor and respond to different known attacks as well as suspicious network activity. This device also provides network administrators with a robust reporting feature that shows where the attacks are coming from and the ability to show the management person what is going on and how the IPS device is working and protecting the network.
We spent about 10 minutes with the Nitro Engineer who was the one who had all the MEAT we were looking for then he had to rush out and go to Greenville to tend to a new Nitro server install and we were stuck with the man that was there to do the introductions to Nitro and do the sales training. Unfortunatley that went over like a lead balloon because all of the propellers in the room were rotating much faster than his. Every time one of us would come up with a question asking about implementation or integration or functionality his response was I do not know or the demo console does not show this functionality. Halfway into the training class I found out that this was a beta training seminar for Nitro. I would have never known... LOL...
Well, I could blather some more BUT it is midnight and I feel myself turning into a HUGE FROG.... Gribbit....

Knoppix , Wi-Fi and browsers

The June 7th edition of PC Magazine arrived in the mailbox today and I have taken the time to consume it one page at a time. There are several articles of special interest to me. One article is about Wireless Networking and the technology and definitions being used to describe the technology. In other words what are some of the differences between 802.11b vs 802.11g? There are two major differences, one being speed and one being security. The 802.11b standard gives you 4 to 6 MBPS (real world throughput rates) while 802.11g provides you between 20 and 21 MBPS (real world through put rates). The other thing that is different is that (g) provides you with WPA vs WEP that came with (b) standards. WPA is much more secure than WEP. The next article that caught my attention was the article talking about Knoppix which is a FREE version of Linux that you can either download off the Net at www.knoppix.org OR you can actually order a CD with the image already burned on it. What attracts me to Knoppix? The first thing that attracts me is that it is NOT Mickeysoft. Do not get me wrong, I have been supporting Mickeysoft products for over 15 years and I am intimately familiar with its many nuances , bugs and security risks. However, anyone will tell you that Mickeysoft is so problematic because it is one of the most prominant operating systems out there and it is a HUGE target for all the hackers to target. Does that mean that Linux is not suceptible to security risks? Of course not, the operating system is more secure than Microsoft Operating Systems but it certainly is not completely inpenetrable. Anyway, back to what caused me to be interested in the Knoppix release of Linux. The Linux OS boots completely off of a CD rom and you do not ever need to install it on your hard disk. That is right folks, the OS comes in an .iso image format that you can burn to a CDR and you can then BOOT your computer to that same CD and be running Linux Knoppix release in no time. This releast comes with TONS of free software to use as well. If you have a broadband connection it takes approximately 66 minutes to download. I currently have 30 minutes left before my download is complete. You also have to download a .md5 program that will allow you to verify the validity of the .iso you just downloaded BEFORE you burn the image. This process will validate that the .iso image is genuine and is not damaged in any way. The third article that is a highlight in this months PC Magazine is the one on browsers. They compare IE with Firefox, Opera, Netscape and others. Like I said earlier, Internet Explorer which is part of the Mickeysoft OS is a huge target. If you want to run a browser and not worry as much about being attacked because of IE security holes then pick a different browser. The downside to using something other than IE is that IE gives you Active X control support which is used with some website content to run other applications. Most if not all of the browsers listed in the article provide you with plugin support for the many different applications that you might want to run such as real player etc.

myblogsite appears to be down

moffittjc.myblogsite.com which is my secondary blog site appears to be down. I am able to logon to my admin website and create content but the actual public url has been down for most of the day. Hopefully this will be automagically corrected in the next 24 hours and if not I will be contacting Fortune City to see what is going on. Until then, stay tuned here for more updates. Good night...

Another shot of Heather Glisson at Outback Steak House last night 

Heather Glisson at Outback Steak House celebrating Katy's birthday last night.  

A rare picture of BAM BAM with a NATURAL smile on his face. Way to go bam bam... LOL 

Katy Moffitt celebrating her birthday at Outback last night. Happy Birthday Katy!! 

My friend and fellow church member Luke running the computer and Song Show Plus during the service.