Notes From Munin

So today I had plans to do stuff, like go grocery shopping and maybe head to Wal-Mart and pick up a few things.
Then I remembered that Brian was going to be bringing the power cord for the LCD monitor over today, and I had no idea when that would be, so I decided to wait at home and hold off on doing any real shopping.
So I waited for a while, deciding to start on a project I’ve been meaning to take care of for a while, namely transferring the various recipes I have printed out from regular sheets of paper to index cards and finally making use of my recipe box.
I was making use of my scanner and OCR software to quickly input the recipes (which is why my recipe for Minestrone soup calls for “1 cars” of tomatoes instead of “1 can”), but after a while I realized that many of my recipes were printed out from www.cooks.com, and that I could just go back there and copy the text and paste it into the index card format.
After a while, as I knew it would, this got extremely boring, and I realized that if I was going to make Minestrone soup, as was my plan, I would need to get started on it soon. So, since I needed a few things to make it, I decided to walk over to Safeway to pick up what I needed.
On my way there Kathleen called and told me that she and Brian would be over with the power cord shortly.
Because I wanted to be sure to be home in time for them I ended up rushing my way through Safeway and forgot a couple of things.
Once they stopped by I wrote them a check for the remaining money I owed on the 17” LCD (I’d given them $100 in cash yesterday), and the money for the new widescreen LCD (whose arrival I’m eagerly awaiting).
Shortly before their arrival I’d started on the soup, and I finished up after they left, then walked back over to Safeway to get the other things I needed.
Once I got home I started on some “computer hygiene” tasks, primarily moving some files off to CD in order to free up some hard drive space.
I also started on the laundry, and in time ate my soup.
A couple of hours ago I started the process of burning a DVD. It’s going to be a four hour process, as it has to re-encode the video files (and is doing so in less than real-time). I’m sure that at some point it will fail to successfully burn the file and all that time will have been wasted.
In the meantime, though, Hugin is pretty much useless, as all its resources are devoted to the DVD burning process.
Speaking of Hugin, once I started the DVD burning process it started the process of pissing me off, as it kept dropping the wireless connection to my network.
This is an all-too frequent occurrence, but it was really pissing me off (even though I wouldn’t be making use of the connection anyway) tonight, because it’s just so inexplicable. It’s clear that the router’s signal is perfect, and that Hugin can see that the signal is perfect, but it just refuses to actually communicate with it.
I’ve decided that, since the router is close enough, I’ll just connect Hugin to it with an actual cable, but that’s pretty irritating, and sort of defeats the purpose of having a wireless router.
What’s particularly confusing is that Munin, a much older, lower-quality system has no problems maintaining a wireless connection, and does so from a much greater distance.
The distressing part is that, whenever I get around to buying a new computer, the current Hugin will become the new Munin (and the current Munin may become garbage, or I might find some other use, and some other name from Norse mythology, for it), and in that case the inability to maintain a wireless connection will become a major pain.
And on the topic of major pains, because Hugin is currently tied up, I’m writing this on Munin, which, due the way things are set up, is not really conducive to comfort.
After all, Munin’s primary purpose is for casual use and for watching DVDs in the kitchen.
Several times now I’ve made reference to writing an entry detailing my take on female comic fandom and women in comics in general.
This was, of course, inspired by Wendy, the young woman who took me to task for seeming to think that there was no such thing as female fandom.
She has also been very eager to see me deliver said entry.
Unfortunately, that’s not going to be happening tonight, given the current conditions.
Sorry.
Tomorrow I’ll be having an extremely long day, spending most of it at headquarters for a training class, and then going straight to cooking class.
On that note, I’ll end this entry. Hopefully I’ll have something more interesting to write about (like female fandom) next time.