Lutz FL

That was a hectic ride!

The first few days here were spent just setting up the basics -- ordering dog food and meds, grocery-shopping, laundry, church, servicing the van, etc. We occupied much time with phone calls: Lew phoning his sister and brother in Texas, Bobbi phoning Paul, Rob -- and especially her new friend Mary Margaret Gerlach -- all in Columbus. And we spent much time giving prayerful thanks that we have not seen a snowflake!

On the 11th (Tuesday) Lew drove the Bobbi and Scott's family up to St. Leo's Abbey. Bobbi had gone because she wanted to go through their bookshop, but we ended up going through the abbey church, taking photos with Su's camera. Bobbi started to attend morning mass daily.

The 12th (Friday) was one of those "eureka" experiences. Lew had noticed that despite the (supposedly) huge capacity that one receives on Google Sites, the webpages he had transferred there when Yahoo shut down the old Geocities site, the pages that occupied 1.5 mb on Geocities, were now occupying 38 mb on Google! Being unable to imagine why, Lew pushed the button on his browser and started looking at the source code for one of his pages. Lo and behold, initially his code was nowhere to be found. Instead, the page seemed to consist of an immense morass of obscure and recursive code -- and finally he found that buried here and there within the morass were a few lines of his original code! The remainder consisted of totally irrelevant (to Lew) hooks and esoteric HTML 4 and 5 tags that could benefit only Google. Indeed, it appeared that each page coded the entire background and template for each of the pages that needed only a few simple lines of HTML 2 code to display Lew's entire data.

Immediately, Lew was reminded of a short sequence of pages in early January from the comic strip Pearls. In that sequence, mentally challenged Larry the croc comes up with the discovery that the Zebra has a new friend who knows everything, and tells him -- "Da Google". At the same time Lew recalled the news stories about the new Google "service" Gmail -- "Buzz". "Buzz" had attracted much negative reaction because Google started it up automatically on all Gmail accounts, without telling anyone and especially without asking anyone's permission. Essentially, each time a subscriber sent an email (or did anything with the related services), "Buzz" broadcast it to everyone in the subscriber's "contacts" file. In the face of the uniformly negative publicity, Google backtracked almost immediately, but the damage to it's credibility was permanent: no computer literate person would trust Google ever again.

Because Lew did use several of those services (carefully) it was obvious that he needed to review everything that Google had on him. Fortunately, Lew always had been dubious of Google's intentions, so it turned out there was little that he had to remove. Mostly it was a case of going to the dashboard and deleting a few random items that snuck (sic!) past his prior precautions. But of course, that assumes Google has been honest about putting all it's information about a subscriber on the dashboard....

(On the 22nd, newspapers around the country carried a column about how law enforcement officers are using our cell phones as personal tracking devices, all without the knowledge or permission of their owners or the courts. Needless to say, it also is doubtful that this has escaped "Da Google" with its 20 PB of storage.)

Almost the entire next week was given over to med-surg care for Lew's computer -- including impressive transplants. For several months it's power jack had had an intermittent contact, and slowly it had gotten worse. So finally in the project to clean up his presence on the internet, he phoned Dell service (he has carried a contract with them since the unit was purchased). The oriental gentleman on the other end of the phone told him that the jack was irretrievably fastened to the mother board, so he would have to send him a replacement of the whole board!

As the reader might remember, Sunday (14th) was Valentine's day. Scott put on a renewal of wedding vows at his church, but Bobbi and Lew stayed out of it -- Bobbi because she had gone to the early service, and Lew, who habitually gets up around 9 had just made it to the later service.

The next day Su had a new drier delivered and installed. This thoroughly disrupted the day. Not that any of us really were involved in the installation, it simply was disruptive of whatever one might be doing. And after the installation, of course the ladies had to test it.

Tuesday (the 16th) Lew picked up a large bag of Smokey's hypo-allergenic dog food (kangaroo meat!) and fiddled some more with the dying computer. The next morning the technician phoned and told he would be out to change out the mother board that afternoon, between 2 and 6. Of course, he arrived at 7. He was most charming, made the change, and departed. Lew sat down to check the computer out, and discovered that the console was freezing up erratically each time the computer was booted. So at 10 pm, Lew was back on the phone to another oriental service tech. The tech dismissively informed Lew that he must have picked up a virus, but Lew pointed out that that was impossible, since Lew had not connected to the internet since the motherboard had been replaced a few minutes earlier. After arguing back and forth for about 2 hours, the technician agreed to replace not only the mother board, but the HD and the memory chips as well.

The tech had told Lew not to expect the new parts until the next week -- but the next morning Lew got an early call from the local tech promising to bring the parts out and install them that afternoon. Clearly, someone had intervened (probably the oriental man's supervisor) and deciding Dell could not afford bad customer relations, had ordered the parts shipped overnight. The local tech again promised to show up between 2 and 6, and again showed up in fact at 7. He ran the computer through a number of diagnostics that demonstrated that the HD was going, so he replaced the HD and the memory chips -- keeping the replacement mother board in hopes that this would do it. But when Lew tested it again, the console again froze up every time the computer was booted.

The next morning another phone call to the local tech, and another promise to come back that afternoon. This time he made it at 6, changed out the mother board, and this time tested the whole unit out. This time it checked out OK, and has not frozen since. While working on the unit the tech very kindly told Lew that the HD (which Lew had kept because of HIPAA) was not completely dead, could be mounted in a USB enclosure and the old files taken off of it. Although Lew had backed up the HD only 5 days before the computer quit, he decided to try this -- and was very grateful that he did, because the old HD worked just perfectly. In essence, Lew now had a completely new computer -- the mother board, memory, HD and battery were new this week, while the keyboard and the power supply had been replaced only a few months before. On top of that, he now had an external HD, a spare battery, and a spare power supply. The value of all these parts totaled substantially more than the service contract cost. Lew remains very impressed with Dell and its reliability.

Not to be outdone, on Saturday (the 20th) Bobbi finally purchased a digital camera. Completely overwhelmed by the object and its accompanying manual, she spent the afternoon being overwhelmed by the task of configuring the new purchase. The next day she got Su to help her cope, and was very pleased with the results. She now has several new photos posted, though I'm not exactly sure where.

Yesterday and today (that is, the 22nd and the 23rd) the normal pace returned -- Bobbi went to early morning mass before Lew awoke, then both checked their email and the news. Yesterday afternoon Lew worked on the taxes, and this afternoon on this blog.

And that is where we are at. Stay tuned.