Ericales's blog

Ouch

We got pepper sprayed in class on Saturday. I still can't think of anything that has hurt more. I recovered fairly quickly but, damn. That stuff is effective.

What is it?

While trying to rip a DVD last night I totally hosed my main machine. Again. I have to assume it's one of the pieces of freeware that I'm using. I don't think it's malicious, but it's frickin' annoying. Files and folders are being corrupted left and right. The machine is still running and Firefox will start, so I can at least interact with it. Oh, but chkdsk won't run. Which is the recommended solution that comes with every corruption error. Damn. At least I've got a good backup. Except I spent a bunch of time reorganizing files on the desktop. Not the backup. So everything is still there, just messy. Ubuntu is calling.

A fairly productive day

I had a pretty good day yesterday. I made some flour tortillas from scratch, started some bread dough, and made split pea soup, also from scratch. The boys weren't too horrible while I was up and I even got most of the dishes washed. All this before my day off too. Not bad at all.

Come Monday

I bought a gun on Monday. Actually, I spent damn near a thousand dollars. The gun is a Glock 22 that was just under $500 by itself. I don't get to take possession of it until next week though. I also had to take a safety test first. Then I got myself set up with a duty belt, a holster, magazine pouch, a third magazine, red dummy gun, handcuffs and a case for them, and a few other assorted accessories. But I've got (will have technically) my gun now. So I'm pretty much set for the next unit at the academy.

Fixin' things or at least getting them to work

I had a bit of an extended computer emergency last week. I've had an 80 GB hard drive for some time. Late last year it stopped working for a day or two. It eventually came back up but it motivated me to purchase a second drive. I had been planning to do so for some time, but that experience hastened my action. I had a the same problem early last week. Not too big a deal though. The only stuff I would conceivably be out of would be the things left on the desktop. Most everything else was copied to the second drive. Then I tried to take that second drive (a 160 GB) and put it in another machine or read by a new install on the same machine. No good. Regardless of what I hooked it up to nothing would read it. I could see it, but Windows just wanted to format the drive. This got me to worrying. I gave the old 80 another try and it started coming back up. It would eventually quit after a while but it was enough to get the machine up and reading the 160. Turns out I had the 160 formatted as a dynamic disk. I have no idea why I did that. Not even sure what the benefit is. But it does prevent it from being read by most anything else. My goal was to use partition magic or something on the 160 and scoot everything on it over a little bit then install a new copy of windows. But given all the other problems I was having that didn't seem like a good idea. So I ran out to Wal-Mart and bought an external 160 GB drive and copied everything over to it. I had to restart the process several times when the 80 GB disk with the operating system would die. But I eventually got everything done, got the machine back up and running, and have two copies of everything I'm concerned with saving.

Then our dryer quit working on Saturday. With most of my pants in it. I wore jeans to church on Sunday, which felt a little weird but wasn't too big a deal. The dryer kept tripping the breaker every time it started. On Monday I tried taking it apart to see if there was some lint or something caught inside choking things up. That never actually worked. I got everything put back together and hooked back up. There were a few items left inside it so I took those out and tried to run it. It worked. So I don't think I actually fixed it so much as I got it to work again. I think there's a kink in the power cord somewhere. When I was pushing it back into the corner it again briefly quit working. Pulling it back out a little kept it working. Anyhow, now we can do laundry, and that's very important.

Break a leg, or arm

I was meaning to post about this a while back. But two weeks ago I was instructed on how to break someone's arm in about 4 or 5 different ways. I'm attending a police academy and we've been doing defensive tactics training. The arm breaking comes as a result of handgun retention techniques. As one of our instructors put it, if someone grabs a cops gun, they should never use that arm normally again. Dehabilitating the arm is the fancy and polite way of putting it. Overall the academy is quite enjoyable. It certainly breaks up the monotony of work. And as I'm doing the extended academy it isn't overly stressful. Normally only three days a week. Now I just need to get my income tax return filed so I can get the money and go by my handgun.

That makes a lot more sense

I just got logged back in here after trying for a few days. It seems I didn't notice that the login isn't asking for a username, it wants my email address. Duh. Although it didn't help that gmail didn't display the password recovery emails I had sent. Which is weird as I finally found them when I searched, they just didn't show up in the inbox. Oh well. I will have interesting things to post later. Like the different ways they taught us how to break someone's arm on Saturday. That should provide some entertainment for you Tess.