Category: General Life

My Dell Color Laser 3100cn, commonly referred to here as “the Tank”, has been having issues printing full page color pictures lately. Today when I had family around and they were waiting for prints of pictures it was decided (by Chris) that it was time to fix it.

The two issues occurring most were a paper jam and then also a “void” in the image at varying spots (resembling UFOs in landscapes). The paper jam started happening shortly after cleaning the head on the printer with those cleaning sheet things (cleaned the rollers too good maybe). The UFOs started happening… well I don’t remember, but they started, and technically aren’t voids, since they are not where toner wasn’t placed, they are where toner has fallen off.

For the paper jam, Chris ran about 200 blank sheets through the printer (getting the fuser hot as well as stirring the dust and exercising the demons). It seems to have done the trick, well, that and adjusting the paper settings for thickness. Apparently “PLAIN 1” is designed for really cheap office paper (20#), not my professional papers (28# to 72#). “PLAIN 2” works for all of my normal papers.

On the void issue, it is just the paper causing it, apparently my “Business Glossy” is a “Coated Paper” and therefore requires a special setting of the laser for temperature at fusing. “COATED 2” was selected for that, a heavy weight, coated paper, so the rollers pick it up properly and the fuser doesn’t try to melt my paper.

It is interesting to watch the printer do its job on the “COATED 2” setting. Whereas I usually feel like the paper is being launched at me and is so hot that it curls (not good for reports), this setting is slower and sends a more crisp image out on the page, as well as brings a flat page out to rest in the tray. I may consider using the COATED setting for academic papers and such, just to keep the bend down and maybe make them more clean looking.

Since I myself had very little to do with getting my 3100CN back to a good functional state, I am hoping that Chris will write his own detailed entry of what was done and his logic/approach to the problem so that perhaps other frustrated 3100CN users can fix this problem on their printers using a method that DOES NOT involve shaving a few millimeters off of the imaging head assembly. Interesting thing to note though, my beta 3100CN did not develop the problem, but the production 3100CN has (although,  seems to be much better after today).

One of my new gadgets this year is an infrared surface-read thermometer. I am presently trying to find a guide book or other resource that indicates the ideal external serving temperature for common foods. I don’t want to know internal temps so much as I want to know surface temps, but I can probably figure out some sort of density formula to convert if I need to. Does anyone have a clue about this topic?

After calming down from the excitement of receiving my adapter step-up ring for my D60 I decided to take a look at the Adorama catalog that came with the package. I ran across something kind of interesting in it (at least interesting to me), gold CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. Apparently they write very slow, but have a scratch-resistant and oxidation-resistant coating to allow the CDs to last 300 years and the DVDs to last 100 years. I am seriously considering obtaining some (in the more modest 10 pack, not the $200 spindle) as a way to back up my academic work as well as other projects I have worked on, including GITI.

I am presently having difficulty sleeping, so I thought I would take a look at GITI and see what has been bothering me about it lately. Not seeing any immediate problem that would nag at me the way I have been feeling recently, I decided to diagram. First, I diagramed what GITI represents under its educational umbrella.

Then I took a look at what it presently does in the interface and how things feel in general.

There seems to be a discrepancy in what GITI is supposed to be vs. what it feels like. I am starting to believe that GITI has grown in reverse. Its educational aspects were designed to handle assignments, more specifically, homework, a simple “to do” type interface that also tracked a few grades. In making revisions to reach the 1.0 milestone GITI it also recieved basic ability to handle other assignment types as well as begin to understand the concept of a course (and not have it hard coded). GITI was written during my junior and senior years in high school, simple 1 school, with about 8 classes to manage per year. That concept was broken with my admission to UNCC. Once that happend, I simply added institutional name as a special field to the records for each class, no big deal I thought. Once progressing to there, I added semesters as well.

Now things have reached current state, there are multiple schools, multiple semesters, muliple users (not all of whom were involved in GITI’s creation and therefore may have difficulty using some of my abstract creations) and multiple problems. With distance education and the invention of flex-classes there is a new dimmension of “stuff” that GITI simply does not get. The biggest problem is that GITI simply is too bulky and confusing with all of its new features. I have simply been adding new things to the old things and there has been no rearranging or reorganization to accomodate new things, and more importantly, old code has not been properly been blow out of the interface yet. GITI is in a crucial time and I must address these problems or have all users (including myself) suffering through the chaos that is left. At present, GITI makes no assumptions, but expects its users to assume what it will do.

In general, things are not as bad as they seem, but there are things that used to be no big deal that are a crucial part of course/assignment management that are no longer efficient or useful in their tasks. Sadly, I have allowed the Education and Classes systems to functional independantly for too long. It is time to bring the two brothers back to the same house and not in the house of the red headed step-brothers (remember SCHEDULE and TODO?). Too many parts of the interface treat them seperately. They are the same module now, and not just by name, but by function. In addition, there are some really horrid things left in GITI that need to be cleaned and updated (Class Edit comes to mind). Some new features will also make GITI feel more like home again (bulk add/edit for assignments).

• School 1
  • Semester 2008FA
    • Course A
    • Course B
      • Assignment 1
      • Assignment 2
        • Document Alpha
        • Document Beta
  • Semester 2009SP
• School 2

One of the gifts I received this year for Christmas is a Nikon D60 with both an 18-55mm and 55-200mm lens kit. So far I love the camera. My only regret at the moment is that my adapter ring has not arrived yet, so I can’t step my 52mm threads on my D60 to the 55mm accessories I have for the S5200. This means my macro kit is presently useless to the D60, but that should change early next week.

The image above is of my new strawberry plants that have been propagated from runners on the main plants that were planted in spring.

Chicken is a very healthy white meat to consume. When prepared properly it can also be very tasty, however, there is a time when there is merely too much chicken.

My father has an obsession for warehouse shopping, and usually it makes sense… for everything except for his canned chicken fetish. At present in the pantry there are about 40 cans of cooked chicken breast, at about 13 ounces each. That’s 32 pounds (14.5 kg) of chicken. It is stacked at just over 6 feet (1.8 meters) in height in the corner of the pantry.

Too much chicken and only a few dishes to use it in. It is great in chicken pot pie, chicken alfredo pizza and chicken/vegetable soup. I think I need to find more ways to use the chicken since he gets three stacks of five cans every time he goes to the warehouse store. I can’t keep up!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/21/AR2008122102516.html

JR Raphael of PC World is not to be trusted. His article about the Internet’s 100 Oldest dot-coms is factually inaccurate.

Error 1: "bought", "sold". In 1985, no one bought or sold domain names. Domain names were requested from the registry. Usually by email or postal request.

Error 2: "looks like it was designed in 1985". HTML and HTTP did not exist in 1985, and were no where close to existing.

Dot-coms were not commodities to be bought and sold, or prizes to hold, or property on which to squat in 1985. There were no web pages, no "net" and certainly no porn. Domain names were merely easy ways to get to information on IP addresses (and because joe@192.168.1.101 is a dorky address).