Wayne D's Blog

I know it won't make any difference but I must rant about gas prices.  When I was driving home a week ago Thursday I needed some gas.  Unfortunately the price of gas was about 82 cents a litre and the cars were lined up at every gas station I drove by.  The next morning the price was $1.02. 20 cents a litre in one night, give me a break.

Having written recently about my travails with getting sound working on Linux I thought I should give equal time to a recent Windows XP problem I encountered.  We decided to convert one of out Linux machines to a dual boot system so I went out and bought a Windows XP CD, made the proper incantations and installed it.  The machine was a plain vanilla Dell computer that had worked flawlessly with Linux for over year.  Everything went fine until I tried to get the onboard networking going.  Windows XP didn't have a driver so I dug up a CD of Dell drivers from the proper vintage of machine. No luck, XP couldn't find a driver it liked.  I rebooted in Linux so I could find out what type of card Linux thought it was. Linux thought it was a card that was listed on the Dell CD I had tried.  The most irritating thing throughout the process is that every time XP rejected the drivers I offered it asked me if it should connect to the Internet to find them.  Would it be too much to ask Microsoft to add a snippet of code to the Windows setup that would check to see if the machine had Internet connectivity before offereing to connect to the Internet to find a driver that I needed to connect to the Internet? Talk about rubbing salt into the wound.

I gave up, the next morning I bought a generic $20 network card at the local computer store and booted the PC.  Windows XP found the card, loaded a driver that it had already and happily connected to the network.  Sigh.

The picture at the top of this entry was taken as I was driving up to the cottage last weekend to open it up for the year.  It's a picture of some of the turbines of the Melancthon Grey Wind Project located near Shelburne, Ontario.

It was my first visit to the cottage this year, not counting the time my brother and I went up to clear off the roof after a particularly large snow storm.  Two solid days of work, two leaks found, one repaired.  Want to buy a cottage?  It's for sale, the MLS listing is here .  If you are looking for a nice 4 bedroom cottage in Sauble Beach this is the cottage for you.  It's a 50 yard walk from the front door to the beach access, I'd love to keep it myself but I don't get enough time off to make having a cottage worthwhile.

P.S.  As I was driving to a picnic today I saw a sign on a vacant corner announcing the construction of a new Home Depot.  This location will be about 3 km. from my house.  Double sigh.