Monday, November 16, 2015

Mr Murphy

As you might remember, my laptop didn't boot up when I arrived here in Arizona from Kansas..  I thought it was the hard drive, and would need the key code to reinstall windows 10..  So I set it aside as a project to be completed back in Kansas over Christmas vacation..

That left me with only the Microsoft Surface tablet...   Heck its a laptop almost....  Well not really..  That's were Mr Murphy came in..

I had gone riding with the Goldwing Club down South of Tucson and didn't get back until almost dark..  And when I came into the house, I found the Guitar amplifier howling loudly in a feedback loop..  And the clocks all blinking...

Obviously we had a power outage..  Biscuit was in the back bedroom under the bed, and its no telling how long she had to endure the noise of the guitar system..  When the power came back on the amp rebooted itself and went into a really loud crunchy mode as setting 00..  It then heard itself thru the pickups on the guitar and began the feedback howl..  Poor Biscuit...

The power bounce also knocked off the cable modem and router that is connected to the Cox feed here at the house...  I couldn't get connected with the Surface tablet...  And the magic jack phone didn't work either...

One by one, I rebooted stuff but couldn't get the tablet to log on..  After about an hour of messing with it, I decided that the wifi adapter in the surface had a scrambled driver program.



That is kind of an achilles heal.  Tablets have no hard drive or provision to load programs other than one USB port and the wifi connection to the internet.  So how do you fix the connection to the internet without the connection to the internet?

By now it was 8:30 so I made a really quick trip to Best Buy to purchase a USB wifi adapter.  I'd only need it for a few minutes to download another copy of the driver programs, but the adapter I had in Kansas City was a long ways away.

Arriving home, I cut open the package only to be confronted by an installation DISK.....!    Laptops and tablets don't come with DVD drives any more...

I was completely disconnected from the internet.......... fish out of water...  I was gasping for bits and bytes....  Well, I still had my phone... But I was going to need that Dell Laptop working...  I went to bed wondering if I was going to have to go purchase another laptop....

The next day, I began by researching the symptoms of the Dell...  Using the phone as my only connection to the net...  I couldn't bring up the rom bios in the Dell no matter what I tried...  Usually the bios will help you analyse the bad hard drive...  But the computer was beeping... But it was beeping 4 beeps and then a pause...  So I researched four beeps and found out that meant it didn't have any memory strips..

Disassembling the memory door and removing and cleaning the contacts and reseating the memory, I held my breath....  And it booted!!!! I was back on line!

Windows 10 though immediately  went into its update mode as it had been away from papa for weeks...  It took several hours to get it back functional...

I had to go buy thumb drives to copy the install disk onto the tablet's micro SD card, as it only had one USB port and it had to have the removable wifi adapter in order to install.  For a minute I thought I was going to need a USB hub too..

With the light on, on the netgear adapter, I connected to the internet and went into the windows settings control panel and updated the drivers for the onboard adapter.  It only took about 10 seconds........

I went from no working  computers, to both of them working, just like that..  Well the Dell is still working on another update........  lol  Seems to be the Microsoft way of things..

Please don't tell me to get an Apple product though, as I just can't get over them keeping their money in Ireland to avoid paying their taxes is the USA..  They only have $130 billion stored off shore......  While you and I pay our taxes...

Retired Rod


Saturday, November 7, 2015

Bike Night

Bike night is held every first Friday of the month in downtown Mesa, Az.  They block off the streets on Main for two blocks, allowing only motorcycles in a Sturgis like tour of Main Street.  Vendors are set up hawking many wares..

Live music is set up in the streets for roped in Beer Gardens.  You tube is short.... LOL




Well OK for the local guys...

Probably 5,000 bikes.  All of them moving or parked along the street..  Even more were in the lots behind the buildings, where I parked as well.  I did drive up and down the street for a couple of passes, but didn't find anyone from the Goldwing club.


My shaky arms can't hold anything still, so long exposure times ruin any pictures I try to take.


They installed light rail thru the center of Mesa that comes from Phoenix thru Tempe..  They try to rope off the crowd with all the cones along the road..  Crossing guards are at all the cross walks and in the center of every block.  The electric trains make very little noise..  Only a couple of blocks farther is the end of the track.



There were so many cool bikes on display, but for my friend and riding partner Al, I took a picture of a scooter like his that was parked along the parade route...

Retired Rod

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Up a Mountain and Broken Laptop

I haven't completely disappeared..  but my laptop went South on me....  Its a Dell and a fairly nice one but....  It didn't survive the trip to Arizona..  It won't boot up..  Looks like a hard drive crash...  And my software product code is somewhere back in Kansas...

I could go purchase a new hard drive but then I would have to buy another copy of windows 10...  That seems like money that doesn't need to be spent...   So I have been living with just this tablet computer...  It has nothing on it that didn't come with it..  Its a microsoft surface with 128 Gig.  Nice enough, but not as a production computer with out another backup machine..

I did get picasa downloaded and edited the header picture, but it is one I downloaded from the group photographer that went with us on our first ride up Mt Lemmon North of Tucson..  That went up to 9,000 feet and it was really cold up there...  I wasn't dressed for that and about froze..




That turned out to be a 325 mile day and I got home after dark...  Biscuit was really mad at me but didn't mess in the house...  It took her about a day to quit scolding me....

The following week we rode to Gila Bend on I 8 most of the way to Yuma...  The photographer wasn't along, so I have no photographic evidence..  Somehow my helmet wifi seems to run my phone down when its connected up...  I never have solved this problem..   Its been that way for a long time..

So that kills the phone for taking pictures, or using the maps feature to find my way home..  But after all these year coming to Arizona, I don't often get lost...  Well, except when we were in the North end of Tucson...


About half way down Mt Lemmon, there is a rest stop where the viewing point is built out over the mountain valley.  It makes kind of a dramatic picture...

I'll bet its kind of cold up there today, as it is only 63 degrees here in Mesa and the sun keeps going under the dramatic looking cloud cover..  It more than likely snowed up on the mountain..  The man in the Mt Lemmon restaurant was planning on closing for the season when we were there and that was almost three weeks ago..

I will have to determine if I can hook a wire from my camera to this tablet and download photos, as it will be Christmas before I can go find my product code  to try and fix the laptop...

Retired Rod