Our power went out not once but twice three times tonight. The first time it went out was around 8:40 p.m.. That wasn’t so bad as to the fact that we had sunlight to play in the yard with. But the second time was around 11:05 p.m.. Not much to do but sit in the dark and chat.

Its funny when the electricity goes out. things get so quiet, not much to be heard in the house. no air-conditioning, no television, nothing. Except, for one thing. The hum from my Compaq Presario Laptop.

After getting the iBook I put my laptop to use as an internal server for storage and printing and to also be able to use my mobile phone tools. There are other programs that I use that I don’t have on the mac that I can still utilize. I can even torture myself by using the OS directly on my iBook by using a VNC. I have tried the remote desktop client for the mac. But, like everything else that Microsoft makes (except xbox) it comes up short.

Well after a total of 10 minutes were back on. phew! I didn’t know how long I could last with a EDGE service to the net by my cell phones bluetooth connection. I mean imagine, a 115kbps connection speed! Now thats crusin the web.

Do you think i have a slight problem? My wife thinks so.

If you know me, then you know that I hate, really hate cutting the grass. So as it always happens the grass grows not on my schedule. So yesterday I go out and start to cut my lawn. Now think, I haven’t cut it at all this week because of the heat wave we got earlier and due to the rain that came immediately following. As you probably know. The grass grows really fast after rain and it doesn’t help that my lawn is made mostly of weeds. None that could make me money either.

So, I gear up and put on my blue iPod, dial in some Pete Yorn, and start to cut grass. I start just as anyone would that cares remotely about there lawn. I use the weed eater, or whacker, what ever you want to call it. This is long over due because I’ve been out of sting line. I let my neighbor borrow it and had not gotten it back before I ran out. Luckily he is not like Homer Simpson and he gave it back in a timely manner

I don’t mind weed whacking. its the mowing part that I hate. But this time it really sucked because all the grass and weeds had grown into a small forest along my sidewalks and fence. So that took a lot of pain yes pain, and time to finish.

Now comes the part I hate. The cutting. It’s just a pain in the ass. You mow the lawn and within 3 days you have to do the whole chore again. After cutting the front hill, which is like doing incline bench presses I move on to the back yard.

The back yard is absolutely the worst part of my lawn. It’s big, odd shaped, hilly, and there is no shade at all. So as you can tell, it gets hot, damn hot. Well as I finish the back yard I have to move lawn furniture. so that means turning off the mower, moving the stuff and starting the mower again. Did i mention that I really hate cutting grass? After starting up the mower I didn’t notice that the pull cord didn’t seat back into the little loop that holds it to the handle bar. So the pull cord comes loose and falls to the ground. Unbeknownst to me.

Through sweat burnt eyes I can’t see that it is being ran over by the deck and is pulled up into the blade and cut and ripped from the mower. I didn’t know this was happening, and I hear a noise from the deck. so I turn off the mower and low and behold there is the pull cord. Damn!

So now, with a half cut lawn looking like a redneck kid with a bad hair cut I have to get my mower rebuilt. Only one thing I hate worse than cutting grass, is a half cut lawn. It really sucks.

You gotta love your local cellular phone representative. The Wife and I went to the Cingular store the other day to up our plan and to see about getting warranty replacements for our cell phone batteries. Our batteries from the start has held close to no charge. We both get about a days worth of standby time and if we talk its even less.

So after talking to this very nice and intelligent man. Or so we thought he was intelligent. We brought up our battery issues and another issue with her phone dropping calls no matter where she is. After looking at my phone, This technologically slow person told me that the reason that our phones wouldn’t charge is because they had “dust” on the contacts. The same contacts that are never exposed to the light of day. The ones that press against the battery.

I immediately called bullshit in my head. But, because we had The Little Man with us I decided to not rip the clerks head off and use it as a bowling ball. Instead, I listened to what he had to say, and we left. He said that because there was “dust” on the contacts that the charger wouldn’t work right. And that we need to turn our phone off every night to save the battery and to re-establish our connection with the near by tower the next morning.

Is this guy for real!? Does he honestly expect us to believe that because some “dust” which he wiped off with his greasy, fat, fingers would solve the problem? Well, we gave it a try and guess what!? It still doesn’t charge correctly. And, The Wife’s phone still drops calls like a child with a open container of milk.

So I called Motorola and complained about the battery on my phone. The no doubt foreign lady on the other end quickly took my info and sent me a new battery. Guess what! the battery has been going strong for 2 days now! With dust on the contacts!

Next time i think I’m just going to deal with the manufacture of my equipment. Next, get The Wife’s battery and dropped calls dealt with.

Saw a Meme over at Michelle’s blog who says she saw it here. And thought about giving it a go.

1. Believing:: I hear voices in my head
2. Invasion:: of the family
3. Boys:: the,
4. Island:: of the dead
5. Repeatedly:: Stop!
6. Normal:: Not you
7. Hex:: computers
8. Tuxedo:: I need one
9. Virgin:: rare
10. Cereal:: cheerios and milk

So there ya go. Have fun with this one.

Ever since I got the iBook I have been wanting to use iChat. After upgrading to Tiger I was happy as a clam to find that it supported Jabber. But, just like AIM I have no buddies on the service. I only use it as a status indicator for this site.

Well if you know anything about Jabber, you know it has things called transports. Well these transports will allow you to connect to your other chat accounts while staying on your Jabber server. Kinda like forwarding your calls from your cell phone to your home phone.

This is why I was so jubilant when it came out. I should be able to connect to my MSN transport and use iChat. Like that could be soooo easy. Yeah, but just like everything else in most of my life, it didn’t work. Every time i try to connect to my server I would get “Server not responding”. What is that crap!? Well, after hitting the forums at my provider, I came to find, that they have been having problems with the jabber server. So, after looking for a new transport server for a few minutes, I found one.

So now I am logged on to my Jabber server using MSN as my chat, inside iChat. This makes me somewhat happy.

It’s not like I don’t like the MSN Messenger. Its just ugly. The thing sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn’t flooooow well with the style of the Mac. iChat is so much nicer to look at. It has the brush finish and the chat window itself has a comic style bubbles for what was said. How cool is that!