Our RV Adventures

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Jan and I were on the road down to the Clear Lake area by 9am this morning, with our first stop in Pasadena to take a look at a client’s wireless printer problem.

The trip should have taken about an hour and 15 minutes, so I allowed an hour 30.

Not enough, apparently.

There was a tractor-trailer on fire on I-45 S which meant our 1:15 trip took 2 hours. But as bad as that was, it wasn’t the worse thing about the trip.

That was when we were stuck in traffic. and the guy in the truck to our left opened his door and threw up all over the road right in front of us . . . over and over, again and again. But finally, still gagging a little, we got to the client’s house.

When I was there for another problem a month or so ago, I was surprised at how slow their DSL internet was. Speedtest said it was 0.15 Mbps. Not 1.5 Mbps, like a decent 3G signal, but one tenth of that.

He said he had checked with the phone company and they said that was within the limits of the service they promised. So I told him to check with his cable company. So when I got there today, he was gushing about how fast everything was now. And Speedtest said he was getting about 10 Mbps, over 66 times faster than before. No wonder he was gushing.

But this speedup was the cause of the problem that I was there to fix. When the old WiFi network was replaced by the new one, his wireless printing setup disappeared too.

Checking the Epson Workforce 520 printer upstairs, I found the printer’s WiFi wasn’t even turned on, much less set up. But after about 10 minutes I had it up and running. Then it was just a matter of configuring each of their 3 computers. The only real problem was getting one printer through the McAfee firewall on that one, but that was it.

Then it was on down to Webster to meet our son Chris at King Food, pretty much our all-time favorite Chinese place. Jan  and I both had our usual Chicken with Hot Garlic Sauce and Jalapenos, XXXXXX spicy.

And we all had enough to have leftovers. Great!

Then it was on to another client down in League City to pick up laptop that needed fixing. Next it wass back up to Friendswood for a truck wash at our favorite place, Ocean Express. I don’t know what they use for a wax, but the Dakota comes out looking shiny as new.

After that it was across the parking lot to drop off our winter quilt at the cleaners. We have two quilts for our bed, a heavier winter one, and a lighter summer one. We used the heavy one this winter, so now we’ll clean it and stow it away with the kids, until this winter when we’ll swap them back, then cleaning the summer one.

Next up was haircut stuff. After dropping Jan off at the SuperCuts, I headed back to Lou’s Barber Shop. Lou’s been cutting my hair for almost 25 years. And he knows exactly like I want it. I think that it’s because after all these years, he has a complete set of my haircut records.

We next stopped at the  Krogers for gas, and Chris’ to drop off Piper’s repaired laptop and pick up our mail. And after a Starbuck’s stop for Cinnamon Dolce Lattes, we were on the way back to Lake Conroe.

And this time, with our Garmin GPS showing a 50 minute slowdown, and the SigAlert App showing a big accident at Beltway 8, we slipped over to the Hardy Toll Rd. for a straight shot north at 65mph.

Coming into the park, I ask the ranger about yesterday’s power outage. He said it wasn’t the park’s problem, but the electric company was repairing something down the road a bit..

On another note, this is not my thigh with measles. This is why Miss Karma is getting de-clawed as soon as we get her spayed.

One of her favorite things to do is to ‘climb’ my leg to get up so she can snuggle on my shoulder. And when I say ‘climb’, I mean it’s like how telephone lineman climb poles with the spikes on their boots.

As far as the spaying goes, I called this morning checking vets in this area to see how much it was going to cost. One place wouldn’t even give me an estimate without bring her in, and the second one said about $300.

I told Jan that at those prices i just might do it myself. Of course i spent two summers in high school working for a vet. So I’ve assisted on hundreds of these operations, and could probably still do one. I mean a steak knife makes a good scalpel, right?

Anyway, at lunch, our son Chris told us about the Animal Alliance down in La Marque, TX, that will do it for $55. So Miss Karma has an appointment for May 26th, about two weeks away.

It can’t come soon enough.

Thought for the Day:

Life always offers you a second chance. It’s called tomorrow.

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The power went off all on its own.

First up this morning, right after coffee and cereal, I got back on getting Win7 installed on our granddaughter’s HP laptop after I replaced her dead hard drive.

Once I got the HD replaced, it only took about 15 minutes to have Win7 installed and running, using this Win7 USB Installer.

I bought it on Amazon last December for just this kind of situation. It covers all the many different versions of Win7, including 32 bit and 64 bit. Note that it is not a FREE copy of Win7, since you must have a Product Key to make it work. So it’s perfect for this when you’re just replacing the OS.

Unfortunately it’s not available on Amazon right now since the seller is moving his business from FL to CA, so if you want one, keep checking back.

But as smooth as the OS installation went, it quickly ground to a halt after that.

In the past with other manufacturers, I can go online to their website, enter the product number, or the serial number, and it will tell me exactly what drivers I need to download and install. Or they may offer an option to scan your computer and tell you what you need.

But apparently HP doesn’t do it this way. When I followed their instructions and entered the Product Number, I got a list of 48 possible drivers, without a clue as to which ones I actualy needed.

But the first thing I wanted to do was to get the laptop online, so after futzing through three different drivers, I finally found the one that got me there.

But about this time it all came to a halt. A little after 3:30 the park shore power went off. So was this deja vu all over again after last week’s power problems at Colorado River?

Well, no. The power was off all over the park. But it did come back on in about 10 minutes, so no real problem . . .then.

Back on the driver hunt, I found that, unlike other manufacturers, HP doesn’t seem to have any way to discern the correct drivers for a particular HP computer. This was reinforced the fact that that there are a couple of utilities that you can download and they’ll tell you what drivers you need and then download and install them for you. But . . .

after they scan your computer and tell you they have identified the specific drivers you need, they then want anywhere from $30 to $40 to actually download and install them.

So cheap as I am, I started slogging thru the list, trying each one until after about 2 hours I had them all done,with no errors showing in Device Manager.

But I wasn’t done yet. Now I had to get Win10 installed. And surprisingly it went very smoothly. I used a bootable USB stick that I had created from a download from the Microsoft website, and had no problems

Just as I started this, the park power went off . . . again. And this time it was off for over an hour. But since the laptop had a full charge, i just let it keep going.

And about 45 minutes later, Win10 was up and running. So after installing AVG Free virus protection, and LibreOffice, I was done.

Tomorrow Jan and I will head for the Clear Lake area, to return the laptop to Miss Piper. But along the way we’ve got scheduled two clients, lunch with our son Chris, haircuts for both Jan and I, a car wash, and a stop at the dry cleaners.

And probably a couple of other things I’ve forgotten.

Thought for the Day:

“Gun control by definition affects only honest people. When a politician tells you he wants to forbid you from owning a firearm or force you to get a license, he is telling you he doesn’t trust you. That’s an insult. … Gun control is not about guns or crime. It is about an elite that fears and despises the common people.” – Syndicated columnist Charley Reese (1937-2013)

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