Along the Way…

Archive for the ‘Life in Ohio’ Category

Can you remember when Andy Taylor was sheriff? When chewing gum in school would get you demerits?

What happened to America?

If this is what happens when we call 911 for help, what can we expect when our neighbor decides they don’t like us, and call 911 to make a false complaint?

If you’re outraged, do me a quick favor, please… click this link, so the Stark County Sheriff’s Office gets a bunch of referrals from this post. I’m not holding my breath, but maybe they’ll respond! Regardless, they’ll know that people are aware of their crimes.

My wife has had a Kia Sedona since 2003, and it has been very dependable. I have had a Toyota Sequoia since 2006 and it has been expensive to drive and expensive to repair… So, when my Toyota dealer quoted me about $500 to fix my O2 Sensor, I decided it was time to cut my losses.

Tonight I traded her in for a brand new Kia Sorrento with a 10 year bumper-to-bumper warranty!

I went outside, tonight, to take a couple pictures of the unusually blue sky we had as dusk was settling in. While I was in the front yard, I figured I’d shoot a couple frames of the wildflowers growing out of control around our mailbox…

Now, I’m definitely no flower expert, and didn’t have any clue as to the identity of this particular flower:

So, I did what any photo-geek would do, I pulled up Google in my web browser and did an image search for blue flowers! I ended up finding some pictures that looked similar to this one, and it turns out it’s the Wild Iris, also called Blue Flag.

Image via Wikipedia

What I found particularly interesting, apart from the fact that its roots are “extremely poisonous,” is that this flower is the original fleur-de-lis from which we get the cool French symbol with the same name. Apparently, this was the official flower of the court of King Louis VII.

I guess you learn something new every day, huh?

There is a section of Stanford Road which has been closed for years, due to disrepair (and, as the story goes, because it crosses the border of a couple cities, neither city wanted to pay to fix it, so it ended up becoming so dangerous they had to close it). This closed section has been turned into a nature trail, and leads to a beautiful waterfall called Brandywine Falls.

A couple weekends ago, we spent the afternoon hiking around this area, taking photographs. Through the magic of Animoto.com, I have produced a short video for your enjoyment.

Here are a few old pictures I found tonight, that I thought you might enjoy seeing…

This evening we went to see this house again:

The owners are asking $204,900 for it and we really liked it! Feeling they were being reasonable, but that we should make a lower offer on principle, we offered $200,000. We can afford to pay the mortgage, but we don’t have a lot of liquid cash right now, so we also asked for the seller to cover our closing costs…

Well, I just got off the phone with our realtor, who called to say they had countered with $204,000 plus agreed to pay up to $8,000 of our closing costs! Because I’m getting a VA loan, that should be plenty to get us into the house, no problem!

If you’d like to see more pictures, you can check them out here: http://flickr.com/photos/kenlefeb/sets/72157604479075121/

You can also check out the Zillow listing, here: http://www.zillow.com/Gallery.htm?zpid=33522573

Well, as I mentioned a few days ago, I had some hardware issues with my server. When I installed Vista on that machine a couple months ago, I had moved all the user profiles to a secondary hard drive, drive D. The drive cable had jostled loose, somehow, and caused Windows to revert back to drive C for the user profiles.

After fixing the cable, I rebooted the system, expecting to see my old profiles come back as I’ve seen it do in the past. They didn’t. The drive was perfectly usable, but I kept getting an “access denied” error when the operating system tried to access drive D to mount the profiles. As an interactive user, I had no access problems, just the operating system account had problems.

Well, being relatively unmotivated when it comes to fiddling with my system, I decided to reinstall Windows. That’s always a sure-fire cure for whatever’s wrong, right?

Oh, and since I’m going to be reinstalling the operating system anyway, why not switch to Windows Server 2008, not that it’s available on MSDN? I’ve been hearing great things about using it as a development platform, as an alternative to Vista, so it seemed a natural decision.

It’s still installing various roles and features, now, so we’ll see how I like it… so far, the installation went smoothly enough. It still doesn’t recognize my NVidia NForce 8650 out of the box, but once I downloaded the drivers from the NVidia site, I got my nice high resolution, multimonitor configuration back up and running. I’m also installing the User Experience feature, so I can still enjoy all the pretty eye candy of Vista!

I probably won’t get around to reinstalling Visual Studio, Resharper, SQL Server, Visual SVN, etc., until later in the week, so I won’t really get to experience coding on Windows Server 2008 for awhile. But, at least, I’ve got access to my media library again! I was in the middle of watching Highlander, Season 1, when the system went down, so I was anxiously waiting to get back to the show.