Sunday, August 28, 2005

Both of my brothers lost power for 1 - 2 days, and the part of Miami in which I grew up received 18 inches of rain.  We got only 5 inches by comparison and feel as if we escaped another close call.

I'm watching this storm strengthen over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and know that wherever it goes, hell will follow.  Some are predicting the Florida panhandle yet again, where they're still recovering from Hurricanes Ivan & Dennis.  Others are saying this will be the one that takes out New Orleans.  They're comparing it to Camille, one of the worst storms ever.  It's as powerful as Andrew was but it looks bigger.

Friday, August 26, 2005

At the last minute it deflected south (all hail the lucky Goat Milk!) and hit Miami.  I escaped relatively unscathed although I lost power on & off about 8 times, never for more than 20 minutes or so though. 

Thursday, August 25, 2005

My friend is having her surgery today in NYC, and we are preparing for a hurricane to hit us.  It's supposed to be only a minimal one (which still sucks), but it's aiming right for us.  A good friend of mine said that he wonders why meteorologists waste millions of dollars on equipment, when they could just hire me.  I've had a migraine that won't go away since Sunday.  I knew this was going to be a bad storm since before it strengthened.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Today is the 13th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew hitting Miami.  I spent the day working with my manager and monitoring the Weather Channel as there is a home-brewed storm forming off the coast of Florida.  It's predicted that Tropical Storm Katrina will strengthen to a hurricane and hit us by Friday, maybe even a direct hit to where I live.  Is this the year my luck runs out?

Thursday, August 18, 2005

This morning my friend is at Sloan Kettering getting their opinion on her stage 4 cancer and how treatable it may be.  I see why people pray now.  It's something to do in the face of the chaos of the universe.

Since I don't pray per se, I'll just go score some universe karma points by rescuing another baby lizard from the pool.  Those little suckers sure are cute!  I love baby lizard season.  =)

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

My sister called me to let me know about some freak-ass study with red contact lenses and how they magically cure migraines.  I don't really believe it, but ...  I can't really afford the luxury of not trying it.  It's seems non-invasive (besides sticking my fingers in my eyes while under the grasp of an angry migraine), so I'm more willing to try this than say, anti-seizure medication with just one or two known side effects.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

FFS, what a few weeks I've had.  Yeah, I know ... whine some more please.  :p  My home PC died 2 weeks ago when I drove over to the library to pick up Harry Potter.  I came home 10 minutes later to a black screen --- not an encouraging sign.  Of course, out of all the PCs in my house, this was the best one.  I tried switching out the video card.  Nada.  I tried all kinds of diagnostics. which basically just said "Hi you're fucked!".  The next day, I called the place that built this but they were closed on Saturday.  I got brave & desperate and went to CompUSA to buy a new hard drive.  $200 & 300 GB later, I still was fucked.  I finally disconnected everything after hours of fiddling and called it quits.  On Monday, I took my PC with the new HD to the original place.  They said my HD was full of bad sectors.  They also sold me a cheaper (and smaller) one than CompUSA, added more memory, fans, and got me set up.  When I asked if they could slave my broken HD into it to see if I could retrieve any files, I was told it wouldn't boot with it hooked up.  Wow!

I hate hardware issues.  I'm so challenged.   :\

So by mid-week, I had my PC back and needed to reinstall everything and try to recover what data I could.  Fortunately, this is published on the web, so I could copy and paste it.  I lost some data, but I look at it as a housecleaning.

One day later, I had my HD replaced in my work laptop and went through the whole stressful process again.  Of course this time I had warning so everything was backed up to the minute, but it still sucks.  Also, my email wouldn't synchronize properly so I had to call my Help Desk and troubleshoot that for 2 days until I got fed up and started raising my voice.  Grrr, it was a simple fix finally that they said was a known problem.  HINT:  If you have a known problem, try that first.  Sigh.

So basically I've been mucking around reinstalling software & tweaking my settings for weeks now.  I'm almost comfortable again, and I have pretty new backgrounds.  =)