Follow Directions: Part 2

I know I'm really late with this post, but the time difference between this and the last post is no indication of how long it took me to finish the cabinet. REALLY! In fact, I finished it the day after.

So I woke up the next morning with new-found strength to finish the cabinet. There was nothing I could do about my dowel issues (at that point I had not yet realized the 5/16th problem), but I figured I could just pop out the camlock since I just popped it in to begin with, then hopefully reset it. Obviously it wasn't going to be easy since it was lodged in the tiny hole. My solution? -- use a needle to get in there and pop it out. Needless to say I was left with a broken needle and had to go sulking to work.

I came home with a new idea. I could try separating the 2 pieces by pulling on them while using a screwdriver to try to turn the camlock back to its right position. Miraculously, I was able to do that by myself and it worked! The rest of the assembly went relatively smoothly, but since I STILL didn't realize the 5/16th problem until after I finished and started blogging, I was left with 2 more similar...mishaps. I didn't take pictures of them, but you can look at my first post for a good idea of what it looks like.

So here it is...BEFORE:and AFTER:

It's not perfect, but I think this answers the question on the Wysz's post! HAH!

Follow Directions: Part 1

In my latest attempt to be an independent woman, I decided to check another item off the infamous task list: organize my closet. There's one particular corner that's piled with junk so I went off to find something to put my stuff in. I brought home a box that had the words "Floor Cabinet" and "Assembly Required" on it. I've put together several shelves in my day (I won't comment on their quality) so I figured this couldn't be too different...what's a door and a couple more panels?

I opened the box and took out four pages of confusion aka the instructions. One of the first things I noticed:
...maybe for amateurs.

I proceeded to whip out my tools and began construction. I made my way past the first couple of pages which consisted of checking for the right pieces and attaching all of the appropriate screws and dowels to each piece. The first thing that pissed me off was the glue/dowel application. It said, "Apply some glue and lightly tapping the dowel until 5/16" visible." Never mind the bad grammar...what I read was "Apply some glue and lightly tapping the dowel until 5/16 visible." If you missed the difference, I didn't see that it was suppose to be 5/16th of an inch. Instead, I spent 5 minutes pulling my hair out trying to figure out why someone would use that kind of fraction for this tiny piece of wood -- how am I suppose to know what 5/16th of this thing is?! I started pounding in the dowels, stopping just past halfway, thinking it's not really a big deal if I'm a little off. Well, since I misread it, I was off and it was a big deal. This is what happens when you don't pound the dowels in deep enough and you try to connect it with another piece:

Even after this mishap, I didn't realize I misread the instructions. I thought maybe something freaky happened with this dowel or perhaps I left this particular dowel slightly higher than I should have. I did a quick check on the other dowels -- it looks like 5/16 of it is sticking out to me! I moved on.

Next came the Camlock. I had no idea what that was, and all they provided was a diagram and a couple of arrows as it if meant anything to me. However, I did figure out that I was suppose to stick another screw through it, then turn the Camlock to lock it in place. What I failed to deduce was the fact that the Camlock had to be oriented a certain way to get the other screw through. So, I spent 30 minutes trying to get the screw to go in the hole by pounding my little heart out on the poor piece of wood. Obviously, that didn't work and I was left with something crooked that looked like this:

It was 2 AM. I was tired. So, gave up in despair, quite certain this was $30 and 3 hrs down the drain. End of day 1 and this is what I had:

To be continued...

Corner With Love: A Barbie Show

I actually finished this series awhile ago, but I've just put off writing anything about it because I'm lazy. For those of you monitoring this blog and are not obsessive with Chinese music and movies, I apologize in advance for flooding it with these posts. However, if you know me well enough to follow this blog then you probably already expect this. I'll liken it to Reid's numerous American Idol posts of which I do not understand.

Getting back to the series...It's a romantic comedy called Corner With Love starring Barbie Xu and Show (Alan) Lou. Barbie's character is a spoiled rich girl who's family goes into bankruptcy. Her filthy rich fiance is forced to dump her, her stupid parents flee, and all she has left is a poor boy who makes delicious oyster pancakes. The series is cute, the leads are gorgeous, and that's usually enough fuel to keep me satisfied through the 15+ hours. I also appreciate the lack of a super evil, super cheesy villain, but they weren't really able to fill the hours with much diversity in terms of obstacles. I sorta got tired of watching Show chase Barbie on a bike and juuuust missing her EVERY time after the first 10 attempts. This usually follows an annoying argument where neither of them are able to admit their true feelings even though they've sent each other a million "go" signals. I want to scream at them for being so gutless and dense, but then I get over it soon because they're so pretty.

The best part of the series is the music. Lots of nice songs that are now part of my collection of Chinese music. I didn't give Show's album a chance when Evan suggested him to me, but I'm a fan now so here's a plug.

Artist: Show/Alan Lou
Album: SPEShow

Favorite Song: Love's Corner (Ending theme from the series)

You can watch the series here: http://www.mysoju.com/corner-with-love/
Thank you for your attention.

Vista - The Enemy of My Laptop

My philosophy about my electronics is that it should be used and used to my convenience. I totally see the up side to keeping everything pristine and in proper form, but I can't always live my life that way -- there are going to be bumps. My laptop has been a trooper through all of these bumps: a bump into the wall, a bump into my desk, a bump into the floor after being flung 4 feet from the table....ya know, the usual. Luckily it's an IBM Thinkpad, so it's been a tough cookie, but after the most recent bump, it started to fail me.

Problem 1 + Solution:

• Blue Screen of death (crashes)
  
• Upon immediate startup error message: Media Test Failure - No Operating System Found

After speculation about hard drive corruption, fan failure, etc., the obvious first test would be to reformat. My brother is a Vista fan so he convinced me to go in that direction. Let the horror begin (well, continue)...


Problem 2: "Failed in finding proper screen mode for Gr2D"

After the hours of backing up and installing Vista, my first program installation would obviously be Maplestory. If I can't game, what else is there? I would get that annoying Gr2d message every time I try to start the app. My brother narrowed it down to having the improper driver installed for my video card. Vista automatically installs the generic VGA video driver because it does not support the ATI Radeon Mobile 7500 card on the T42. After several more long hours of trying to work around the problem (including installing the XP driver), I finally found the solution on Google.

Solution 2:

Manually update the driver by going to Device Manager. Navigate to the Display Adapters section and select "Upgrade Driver". Select the option to "Browse my computer for driver software", sift through the huge list of drivers, and select the ATI Mobile Radeon 9000 driver.

Problem 3: "Connection Status Unknown: Server Execution Failed" and Network Folder Frozen

I took my laptop home that night excited after finding the solution to the video card driver. I tried to connect to my parent's network and started installing a couple random things including AIM. However, I noticed that my connection was failing (red x), but then the internet still sorta worked. When I tried to view my network folder, the whole thing would just freeze. I uninstalled everything I just installed, but it was still having the same problem. So for hours the next day, my brother and I tried to figure out the problem. We thought it was a driver issue again but for the network adapter this time. No luck. Finally, again with the magic of Google, I found the problem...

Solution 3:

So the culprit was the newest version AIM. All you AIM haters don't snicker quite yet, the forum posts indicated the same problem for Yahoo Messenger, MSN, etc...sounded like a bunch of chat programs caused this problem. Why in the world a chat program would affect the network connection and freeze a particular folder is beyond me. To fix this problem? Uninstall the chat program and do a system restore. Forums say installing an older version of AIM is fine, but I'm not about to try it just yet.

Problem 4: Installing Adobe CS3

I love Photoshop. It seems that everything I love causes problems to Vista. So I wanted Photoshop, but the version that is compatible with Vista is CS3. CS3 requires at least 1 GB of RAM and my poor IBM T42 does not have enough.

Solution 4:

Purchase more RAM! This solution was straight forward but painful nonetheless. Keep in mind that there are 2 slots for memory with a max of 2GB, but one is pre-populated with 256MB or 512 MB, so there's no point in buying two 1GB chips.

Maybe this will help someone, but my advice? Don't even go there, not on a T42. I'm keeping it because I've put it way too much blood and sweat, but if i knew beforehand...

Conclusion

Me = Enemy of my laptop
Vista = Enemy of my laptop

Therefore: Me <3 Vista (I guess)