kevin_standlee | Clearing the Decks

This afternoon and evening, Lisa has had me dealing with a lot of miscellaneous computer-based chores while she has me here. There's been more drive cloning, for instance. (She prefers that I do them because all of her computers have USB 1.x ports, so even if she has the drive-cloning software and external drive connectors, it could take days to clone a 320 GB drive.) Also, I'm scanning for her a bunch of the photos from the 2005 trip. She took these on disposable cameras and we had them developed at a shop near the Russell Square tube station. As I recall, it wasn't until well after the trip that I realized that we'd been going and coming through the area where one of the 11/7 bombings had happened only a few weeks earlier.

She also has been doing some shopping for used computers and parts. It's a pity we didn't have a chance to do some of this a couple of weeks ago, because so many places will only ship by UPS/FedEx, and Lisa hates shipping things to her father's house when I'm not around. The packages tend to get lost, and once she found neighborhood kids about to make off with a package that had been left on the doorstep. Stuff shipped to the PO Box doesn't have this problem, but it's very difficult to format an address in a way that UPS will deliver it to the post office. (It's apparently possible to do so, but many times the presence of a box number in the address will cause the shipper to balk even before shipping the package.) When Mehama's post office was inside the local hardware store it was much easier because we could give the address of the store and both shippers and shipping companies could understand it. Now that the local contract office has closed and the boxes for Mehama have been subsumed into a section of the neighboring Lyons office (it's less than 1 km away), shipping has gotten more difficult.