Worked today. Out of the last 5 holiday days I potentially had off (2 days at Thanksgiving, 2 days at Christmas and now the day after New Years), I have worked all 5 of them. Never hurts to get paid and extra 8 hrs when you don't have plans. However it does make it hard when all your co-workers come back to work rested and ready to work.
I took the oppurtunity to contact Dell about my home laptop, which we have had a nightmare of a story about. Since purchasing our Inspiron 5100 in 2003, Dell has sent a brand-new replacement laptop and sent out an engineer to replace the Processor and heatsink/fan. Both times, the laptop got hot and would randomly turn off. Personally, I think there is a major design flaw in their Insprion 5100 (which is probably why they don't sell it anymore, but what do I know.)
I chatted with Dell India Support (it is so much easier chatting with India than it is talking to them.) Anyway, they had me do the dumb things like used compressed air to blow out the fans, then take out the battery, cd drive and wireless card) to see if there is something wrong with those parts. Of course, that did nothing except waste my time, however I played their little game. Next they asked me to run their diagnostics against the laptop. One problem, I didn't have the disk and Deni couldn't find it at home. So I spent about an hour trying to track down a floppy drive and 4 floppies so I could download their utiltiy disk and test it out. During this hour long chat, my laptop turned off 3 times, as it got hot. But nothing is wrong till the dang diagnostic says there is a problem.
I finally get a floppy drive and make the boot floppies. I forgot how SLOW floppies are. No wonder they aren't used anymore. Waiting on the floppies, made me remember back in 1996 after my mission when I worked at Stream, I answered phones for Compaq and people would call in to purchase their 96 floppies that had Windows 95 on it. OUCH. Can't imagine installing Windows, or any other Operating System from floppies. Very Painful. We have changed quite a bit in the last 10 yrs. Wonder what another 10 yrs will do. We will probably laugh that DVD's only held 4 GB and took us 10 minutes to burn a disk.
Anyway, I finally get the 4 disks made, boot off of them, and before the dang computer can boot by putting all SLOW 4 of the disks, guess what, my computer gets hot and turns off. Of course, I told the Dell India rep that this would happen, but we need to run the diagnostic to see what the problem is. Grrr.
I finally borrowed a buddy's CD and ran the dignostics and guess what - it all checked out.
After I chatted with Dell, I did blow out the computer with compressed air, as they asked me to do. I can't imagine that blowing air into my computer magically fixed it, but so far so good. The computer is cooler and has been on for most of the night.
Around 8pm Deni and I were downstairs attempting to get the kids to bed. Actually I was cleaning up in Sydney's room, Deni was putting Ryan's clothes away and both kids were upstairs. All of the sudden, I heard a massive noise, as if a piano had been pushed down the stairs and then a deafening thud, followed by crying. I jumped up and ran to Sydney's door to see Ryan laying at the bottom of the stairs on top of a round snow sled we got for christmas with a horrible look of pain on his face. Apparently he thought it would be a good idea to get on the sled and slide down the stairs. He later told me he had tried to stop (ha). Ryan hit his head on the door frame. Had it been 6 inches to the left, I think we would have a huge hole in the sheet rock. After a few minutes of crying and some pain reliever he settled down. I kept him up for another 30 minutes to watch him as I was afraid that he could have a concussion. He came upstairs and layed on our bed and I read him a book. Afterwards he read a beginner book to me. It is fun to hear him sound things out and then for it to click and he know the word.
