Jasper Jones

I just love Alex’s mom - she is such a warm and caring person. Just being around her makes you feel taken care of and secure. His dad is a great guy, too. Very reserved but confident and obviously very intelligent. They’ve been over at the dorm most of the day, just hanging out with Alex. They went out and rented a couple of good movies and picked up some lunch while I’ve been in class. His mom wants to get a few things from WalMart to fix up the room and make it a little more cozy.

His dad has decided that Alex needs a laptop computer since he won’t be able to sit at the rickety little student desk that has our desktop pc and printer on it. I was telling his dad that they can save some serious bucks if they order it online from the Office Deals.info website. That’s what we’ve been using for all our school supplies.

All you have to do is got to their homepage and click on the store name or the brand of what you’re looking for and you’ll get a list of discount offers, coupons and bargain prices. The discount promotions for computer supplies are all for brand names and store chains that everyone knows and likes, like Best Buy, Circuit City and Office Max. I think we’ve saved at least 20% on everything that we;ve bought online and most of the places give us free shipping, too.

Another important computer related item is the Free Antivirus Software you can get from Cyberdefender.

This company is right up there in the big leagues of antivirus protection but they let you download it for free. This company has taken computer security to the next level, with real time security updates and there’s no conflict with other previously installed antivirus or security programs. If you are online a lot and get involved with a lot of high risk surfing, you should probably have more than one antivirus program anyway - just to be safe.

If you need extra features, the same company has more products available for purchase. It is worth checking out - because safe surfing is a must these days. This is true for large companies, small businesses and home computer users.

Hackers have gotten much smarter and more devious in how they design and spread the new viruses. I think most people are already aware that they shouldn’t open attachments to emails that they weren’t expecting or don’t know the sender. But now you can have a problem with just clicking on the wrong web page or link. Its scarey to think that you could lose everything on your computer to a virus, so everyone should take steps to protect themselves.

Every once in a while I check the WordPress sites. I use WordPress for my blog and haven’t seen anything better than that in all this time. They come out with updates once in a while and they are always worth spending the few minutes to do the upgrade and get the new features.

They also changed the way they handle the free themes that change the look of your blog. It used to be that people could upload anything that they designed and if you liked the looks of it you could download it for free. But there were a lot of problems with the free themes. Some of them contained malicious code that allowed hackers to back door your server. Others had a lot of links that you had to leave in but did you harm with the Google page rank bots. Others failed to load or were missing critical functions.

So WordPress revamped the whole thing and deleted all the themes. Now they have a review process and they are slowly uploading the new approved themes that are proven compatible with the latest version of WordPress. This is a great advancement and I can’t tell you how much we appreciate all the work done by the volunteers.

Read about Fibromyalgia last night when we got slow at the hospital. It’s a disease that leaves its victims exhausted all the time, and they suffer from a lot of aches and pains.

There is a new web site for people dealing with Fibromyalgia called FibroCenter.com I’m pretty sure it is sponsored or underwritten by the Pfizer company.

The site has useful facts and practical tips for managing this disease. They also have an action plan you can download. Their support group lets you read other peoples stories about how they cope and you can participate in that by writing your own story to share with others.

I’m still learning about how the pharmaceutical companies participate in the non profits and support groups for different diseases and conditions. I’m not sure it is always a good thing, but as long as they have a disclosure on their sites and their advertising or marketing efforts, I guess it is good to have some help - from whatever the source.

This morning I went to print out the homework for my English class and as soon as I hit the print button a little gray dialogue box popped up and says “You are almost out of ink.” Well, that’s just great. We’ve only been using this printer for maybe 6 weeks and not really doing much printing and I’m already getting a message that we are almost out.

Well, at least we got a warning. It used to be that you just ran out and wouldn’t even know it until you picked up the stack of papers in your report and thumbed through them when you noticed that the printed pages started fading and then disappeared, so all you had was half a pile of blank sheets of paper. Don’t try turning those in for a grade, folks.

With our college student budget, Alex and I are going to have to save money on things like new printer cartridges. We can’t just run down to the drug store and buy brand name ink cartridges and pay top dollar for the privilege of a brand name on the box. What we do is buy compatible cartridges and save about 30% off the cost of a new brand name cartridge.

The best way I’ve found to save money buying compatible inkjet printer suppliesis get online and use the web site called inkjetdeals.info to find a place that sells compatibles for your printer model, like our Epson.

There are brick and mortar stores that carry the different brands and there are online stores, too. If you have time to order your cartridge online and wait just a couple days for it to come in the mail, that’s usually the best way to go for the maximum savings.

But if you are totally out and desperately need to buy an inkjet cartridge to use immediately, sometimes this site has coupons and discount codes you can use at local stores, like BestBuy.

At work last night one of the med techs was telling me that she’s taking classes to become a massage therapist. It started out with a little teasing because my shoulders and neck were really sore from the softball game Wednesday night. She wanted to give me a neck massage but was afraid that if she did that while at work that someone would cause trouble for us. Touching another employee is not a good thing as far as management goes - they don’t want to have a sexual harrassment lawsuit or anything. So I didn’t get the neck massage, but I wanted one!

When she finishes the massage classes she will probably move out of the area and get a job at a resort or large spa. There’s not much of that in Chattanooga.

The closest big city for us is Atlanta. It’s about a two hour drive south of here. I don’t know if there is a lot of demand for massage in Atlanta. We were talking about that possibility and did a search for Atlanta Massage and were surprised to find so many listings. We found these using a special search directory called Clicksmart. This directory lists professional in categories like:

Contractors
Florists
Home & Office Services
Massage Therapists
Mortgage Brokers
Real Estate Agents
Weddings and Events

While working the admission desk last night at the hospital it got pretty quiet and boring around midnight. We only had a handful of people in the waiting room that needed attention, so I sat at the desk with a college textbook and got caught up on some reading for my Psych class.

For a while I got the chance to chat with an elderly gentleman, who was glad to have someone to talk to outside of the nursing home where he’s been living. He was an interesting guy, served in WWII and came back home to be a farmer. He owned a lot of land and about 10 years ago he sold it off for a huge amount of money and all of a sudden all the little old ladies around here found him to be very attractive.

He confided that he’s had a more active social life in his 80′2 than he had in his 50’s. He even pulled out a Viagra pill from his pocket to prove his story! Now, I wasn’t real happy talking to this guy about sex in your 80’s, but I was stuck at the desk and had to be polite. He was eager to tell me that he buys his Viagra online because it is cheaper than at the local pharmacy and the place where he gets it will mail it to him so he doesn’t have to worry about driving or finding a ride to the pharmacy.

My jump drive totally freaked me out today. I had all my documents and data from home transferred to my jump drive before I left home and I planned to copy those files to my computer here at school. So on the desk was what I thought was my jump drive and when I plugged it into my computer, none of my files were there. Instead, there were a bunch of items on there with a file extension of DMG. I was so freaked out! I though someone had corrupted all my files from home!

So I woke up Alex and asked him what was up with my jump drive? Like, did he take it and do anything to it like erase my files? Did he see anyone else messing with my jump drive while I was at work last night? I was so freaked.

Of course, Alex didn’t do anything to my jump drive. turns out the file extensions for DMG are for Apple computer image files. If I had thought about it for a minute I would have realized that I had picked up Alex’s jump drive and not mine. But I didn’t even realize that Alex used a jump drive that looked exactly like mine!

So I ended up learning about file extensions and even though the Mac runs a lot of the same programs as my PC, the file extensions for image files are different. In fact, the new Macs use different extension files than the old Macs, and sometimes you have to fix your old files to be read on the new Macs. There’s even a site online that does that for you automatically. They have a whole library of file extensions and ways to fix files. So I looked at the page for File Extension DMG and found all the information I would need to fix the extensions from old Macs. that’s good to know and when I showed it to Alex he bookmarked that site so he can find it again later.

My mom is a big fan of shopping on “Black Friday.” Although she kicks off her Christmas shopping as early as October, the big month for her to shop around and find the bargains is usually November, and the day after Thanksgiving is the mother of all shopping bargain days.

A lot of stores have special prices on high dollar items to get your Christmas shopping money as early in the day as possible on Black Friday. For example, my mom got word that Best Buy was opening their doors at 4:00 am on Black Friday last year, so she was up and out of the house by 3:15 am for a full day of bargain hunting. At Best Buy she scored big on a digital video camera under $100 and a portable DVD player for under $50. All the big stores will have special deals this year - and if you know about them ahead of time you can plan your whole day around which stores you want to get to early and which can wait until later in the day.

Some of the same stores are now bleeding over into the next week with special deals on “Cyber Monday.” These are deals you can only get online, and the best part of that is there’s no crowds, no parking issues, and they can ship everything to either your house for the gift giving in person or they can ship it to the person’s home or business address for the relatives and friends out of town or who won’t be able to be with you on Christmas for the gift exchange. I’m a big fan of cyber monday and will probably take advantage of the online deals this year and have everything shipped to my parents house so it will all be there when I get home on the Christmas break.

Sorry I don’t have much sympathy for Comcast when they are whining about some of their internet subscribers using large amounts of bandwidth. This company is huge and is already making an obscene profit, and they have created a huge dependency on their services for millions of users all across the country. And they are charging a pretty penny for this service already.

Today I read in the newspaper that Comcast has announced they are going to limit usage to 250 gigabytes of traffic per month. Now, that sounds like a lot of traffic but I honestly have absolutely no idea how much “traffic” I use and it really torks me to think that I have to start watching and budgeting my internet usage. I want an “all you can eat” type of service and I really don’t see why it’s a problem for Comcast.

None of the other internet service providers are whining about this. And it concerns me that if Comcast puts this policy into effect that the other providers will follow along. It seems like a ploy to charge some people or companies more money and I don’t like it. It’s technology moving backwards and corporate greed.

With the advances in technology you would think that services would be getting cheaper and that the whole country could eventually have free access to the internet. Maybe the government should take over the internet service providers and change things from corporate profitablility to a free public service. I think everyone should have the right to get online just like TV and radio is free and our public libraries are free, and not everyone can afford the $50 - $100 per month being charged by the private companies. What is the breaking point for being able to afford having internet access at home? Why should we have to pay anything? Take the profit motive out of the picture and make it a public utility or public service just like the schools and libraries are free to all citizens.