If you haven’t switched, there’s no better excuse. Think of it this way, all IE users out there, with this many people choosing to switch, don’t you think that you should see what all of the fuss is about?
Security aside, Firefox is the most customisable browser I have ever used. I cannot go back.
When moving a mile down the road, is it really worth the time to pack all of your stuff up in boxes?
I can understand when moving across the country, which I have done before. But I have also seem many people move in one day without a single thing packed in the morning. We are better off than that, but I just do not see the point.
When we moved to central Ohio from Northern Virginia, our life was bound to change. I did not think that the physical feature of out domicile would have such an impact on our day-to-day lives. In Virginia, we lived in a modest (costs two and a half times of our future mortgage payment) apartment, that was all one floor. We had two TV’s, one in our bedroom and one in the living room. We had two computers, a desktop for our daily doings, and a ridiculously old laptop, to keep me from getting bored when I traveled. Everything was very centralized, and we could see everything in the apartment, no matter where in the apartment we were located. Life was good.
When we moved to Ohio, we needed a bigger place. Tony had spent the first couple of months of his life sleeping in our room, and that needed to change; this was both for out sanity, and his sleeping habits. Our first place, and soon to be second place, in Ohio has three floors, with the bedrooms on the top floor, the living room and kitchen on the ground floor, and a finished basement that corrals most of the boys’ toys. For RJ and Tony, and their short attention spans, this means that they will be on any one floor of the house for usually less that an hour before they decide they need to move somewhere else.
This was the deciding factor in our decision to purchase a new laptop. The old laptop, which was in decent shape for its age, was no comparison to the desktop that has been constantly upgraded every couple of months. For out sanity, we needed something that could keep up with our needs, and they boys pace.
This is the first laptop that I have owned that I depend on regularly. The old dinosaur of a laptop was broken many, many, many, many times, both intentionally and unintentionally. On our desktop, this was easy. I scheduled of the regular maintenance tasks, from defrag to Spybot SD to disk cleanup. (Norton comes this way, so no need to tinker with that.) It all happened in the middle of the night, and the computer restarted itself when it completed, and we were never the wiser. Conversely, what was I to do on a computer that was not always on? Crap. I would have to do it manually.
Saturday has become the ritual computer-cleaning day. (We still do not have a day for this for the apartment. Does this make us lazy or just geeks?) I begin the day by checking my email and reading my feeds. By the time I am close to being done with this, the boys are completely awake, and I must begin their day. This is when I begin my cleaning ritual.
I begin this ritual by updating and running Norton, Ad-Aware, Spybot SD and MS Anti-Spyware, in that order. This usually only takes a couple of hours, and is done by noon. After I make sure that there are no stow away programs on board, I go about cleaning the hard drive by using disk cleanup and CCleaner. I use Eraser for my day-to-day deleting. Now it is time to clean the registry, to make sure those stow away programs that get on board did not leave anything behind. There was a great article on Information Week about different registry cleaning software. I use EasyCleaner, RegScrub XP and RegClean.
Once all of this is completed, I defrag and reboot. This seems to do the trick for me, and I can really notice the difference if I do not get around to it one week.
We are moving next weekend. Again.
This is a really good thing, though, since we will finally own a place of our own. This is also much more well planned than our last move, and that took us half way across the country. This time we are only moving a couple of miles down the road.
I do not know why, but we are actually packing some of our stuff up for this short jaunt down the road. I have helped many people move (that is a weekly occurrence in base housing) when I was on Active Duty. a majority of them did not even have their stuff packed when moving day arrived, and we still managed to move a three bedroom apartment in a little more than half a day. Since we only have a two bedroom apartment, and most of our belonging are still in boxes from out last move, I am hoping to be done with this around 6 PM. It is a lofty goal, I know, but if I do not push myself this move could easily last all weekend.
The plan is for the men to do all of the moving, while all the women folk stay at the new place to put things away and arrange furniture. Does that sound a little sexist to you? Well, it is. Why do women discriminate against men and their interior decorating sense?
We have almost everything arranged, save transferring the electric, but that should only take one phone call. The cable guy is supposed to be there around 8 AM on moving day, so I expect him to be there around noon or so. At least he will be there on the same day. I am thoroughly dependant on the internet for most of my household needs (i.e. paying bills, shopping, coupons, phone books and most of my daily communication.)
Our current cable/internet/phone provider does not provide service to our new home. This just works out well, since I hate answering all of their questions about why you are not keeping their service when you move. I have absolutely no problem telling their customer service is the worst I have ever seen. I mean it is really bad. Even though they are almost half of the price out the provider that we are switching to, I would still pay twice as much because their customer service is that bad? FU WOW!
OK, now that I am done with that little rant, it is time for some breakfast and packing.
It was another of those kind of days. The say started with the cable being turned off, and subsequently there was no phone or internet either. This would normally just annoy me, but I had bills to pay, and I always wait until the last minute since I pay them on-line. (Note: If their web payment is down on the day that your payment is due you can usually get them to waive the fee and pay the bill over the phone.)
They day at work began pretty much the same way.
We finally set a closing date for out new place, but not without a lot of hassle. Our Realtor was kind enough to offer to pay to fix the one item that we had requested be fixed, but was completely ignored. It was by no means the fault of the seller, since their Realtor did not let them know any of this until well after the time for such requests had passed. This whole ordeal is almost over. If we did not love this place so much, we would never have put up with all of this.