Category: Personal

There’s a nasty storm blowing through the Bay Area today. At first the reports had it that the worst impact would be up by Napa, where flooding is always a problem with heavy rains. But no, instead we got nailed with a bunch of power outages, including one Chez Lux.

As I was driving back home from work I saw some flashes of lightning and hear reports of a few small outages, but didn’t think much of it until I pulled off Highway 92 onto El Camino Real and BLAM! out went the power. I was passing by a Safeway at the time — one moment it was all lit up, the next moment nothing but a few emergency lights. A bit shocking, but also kind of neat to watch. You don’t get a front-row seat to the show like that very often. It seemed to be a fairly localized outage, because everything was still lit up as I pulled up to my intersection, but as I was waiting to make the left turn onto my street, POOF! More blackness. Not quite so cool; we have plenty of candles & energy bars in the emergency kit (plus a propane grill), but I really wasn’t in the mood for trying to make a hot meal under the circumstances.

Instead, I drove a few more blocks until I found a parking space, called Scott, and found an open restaurant for a bite of dinner. The lights were still out when I got home, so I changed into jeans, grabbed a flashlight and my laptop, and moseyed over to Starbucks for some coffee, electricity, and Internet access.

It’s not quite the evening I thought I was going to have, but it could have been a lot worse.

We’ve dumped Comcast for Internet connectivity and gone back to DSL. It’s not as fast, but 4 multi-day outages in less than 2 months is just way too much downtime.

Between work and school I’m finding myself more and more squeezed for blog time these days, and the semester is only going to heat up more over the next several weeks. I want to try to keep to a minimum of a post a day but it’s getting really hard to do even that some days. I’ve also cut the blogroll down a bit to help reduce my read time.

Seriously, I’d (almost) rather be doing my Finance homework than shopping for a new digital camera.

It shouldn’t be that hard. I have a very nice SLR camera I use for what little high-end photography I do, so the digicam is just for day to day snapshots. I don’t have a long list of “must have” features. I have a reasonable budget. There’s a ton of cameras out there to choose from.

But that’s the problem. Even narrowing down the options to just two or three manufacturers, I still have dozens of cameras to choose from. And narrowing it down beyond that gets really tough. Every camera has a huge list of features, all with plusses and minuses. Every camera has both positive and negative reviews. But how to decide? Should I really care that a cover ‘seems flimsy’ or that a few people complain about blurry photos? How do I know if these people are being too nit-picky or pointing out real issues?

And the online guides are not all that helpful. Take Digital Photography Review, which several people pointed me to for guidance. There’s a very long list of features you can use to search their listings, but if you don’t narrow your choices down enough, the site only gives you the first 10 options back as a result. You don’t know if that’s the first 10 of 12 or 120, so you don’t know if those 10 cameras are a representative sample or not. And a lot of those choices, I either don’t know or don’t care about the option in question. What the heck is ‘white balance override’, and why should I care about uncompressed format types? Beats me. In short, if I cared more about high-end digital photography, it would probably be very useful, but for a hobbyist like me it was too much.

CNET’s search was more useful for my needs, but still tended to produce too many results for me to effectively deal with. A list of 125 possibilities is just too much for me to deal with. I don’t want to have to spend hours on this. I just want a list of 12 or so good options so I can pick the one that I like best.

Scott’s trying to be helpful and searched out two options for me to look at, one Sony, one Canon. It’s a help, but I’m still feeling paralyzed by all the choices I have. As much as I want a better digital camera, it’s actively stressing me out trying to pick one. I suppose I could go to the nearest store that sells digital cameras and simply buy one rather than over-analyzing the situaiton, and I might end up doing just that if I can’t get my head around all the information.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

Or am I making it too hard?

So a Comcast tech showed up before 8:00AM and fixed our Internet connection. As suspected, it was NOT anything we did. Some hardware downstairs needed to be changed, and the splitter here was also a problem. Those have both been changed out for ‘better’ equipment. We’ll see if that’s the end of it; at this point I don’t really trust anything that a Comcast tech tells me.

So now we get to wait and see if it goes out again or not. This time we’re hedging our bets and have placed an order for DSL from our old DSL provider. We won’t be able to get the 6MB download speeds that Comcast promises, but I’ll settle for slower downloads if the damn thing just stays up and connected 24/7.

The home access outage has put me wildly behind on a number of things but I will try to get back up to speed in the next 24 hours.

I’m feeling pretty grumpy this morning. Home ‘net access is down AGAIN — this is the third time since 2006 began and I’m really starting to wonder why we didn’t just get DSL. We brought our modem over to the Comcast office and got a new one, which was supposed to solve the problem, but it didn’t. Comcast said that they have to schedule another service call, and oh by the way, we’ll have to pay for the service call. Um, I think not. We’re using 100% company-supplied equipment and Comcast did the installation and set-up themselves less than 6 months ago. Any problems we’re having are not caused by us, and we should not have to pay for the service call.

Plus, Scott didn’t get me anything for Valentine’s Day, which is also making me feel grumpy. I’m not a high-maintenance kind of girl. I don’t expect expensive gifts or even flowers (although they’re always nice). I would have been happy with just a card. But not getting anything kind of rankles.

And yes I know, V-Day is a totally artificial holiday, I have a wonderful husband who loves me very much and shows it on a regular basis, yadda yadda. I know all of that. That does not change how I feel. If I can find the time to pick out a card for him, he should be able to do it too.

I’m on campus now and need to get some stuff done before classes start. I have the iPod cranked and hopefully that will help improve my mood.

Too much to say, not enough time to say it. Not feeling like doing hit and run blogging either. Bleh.