Jasper Jones

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.