Last night, like many others I watched as thousands of people in New York protested. The live stream provided by TheOther99 was absolutly instense and the commentator Tim was amazing. He does a wonderful job at bringing the facts to the table without opinion.

No matter which side of the table you stand on with the politcal issues just seeing these protests is an amazing thing, because you are witnessing history in the making. Thirty years from now people will be watching the footage of these events with the same awe and wonder in which I have watched old newscasts of the vietnam protests in the sixties. I’m still not sure what change is going to come from all these events, but I am positive that change is coming. Event’s like these don’t happen without it.

Having dialoge with other people seems to be the main thing going on right now, and there are oh so many ways to do that in this day an age. We have email, twitter, facebook, chatrooms, text messages, video streams and then go old fashioned face to face conversations. I’m glad to see it happening, and am very glad to be a witness to it all….

I’ve starting working towards getting my G.E.D. thanks to the wonderful people over at free-ed.net. The website offers a host of free online courses, so I enrolled myself in the G.E.D.-College prep course they offer. I’m hoping to have my GED by next spring. At some point though I will be enrolling in Excel High School in order to get my high school equivalency certificate. I hear having both will make it much easier for me to get into College, which I would like to do as some point in the future.

I’m enjoying feeling productive that’s for sure, though my hand is taking quite a beating as I’m not used to all the writing any more…lol. I’m currently keeping a learning journal with hand written notes. They advise us to do so, and hand writing notes do help me with remembering what I’m learning. If anyone is intersted in persuing their G.E.D. I highly recommend signing up for free-ed’s course. It’s been very helpful to me so far.

Angel

A Day we spent at Coney Island August 4, 2011

This is just some random video shot at Moms house July 23, 2011

We just Moved from Washington state to Ohio we drove the whole way. All 3 of us packed up tight in a 1998 Ford Escort for 3 days…lol…this is footage from the drive.

Well, The hubby filed for unemployment, I applied for a bit of medical assistance from the state, for me and the kids. He put in a few applications but nothing yet, this job market really sucks. We hear there is program where you can get a grant for school while on unemployment, the hubby may look into that. By trade he is a CNC Machinist but he would like to get into electrical engineering maybe. I wish I could get a job myself and help out, I hate feeling so, well helpless. I started working when I was 16 years old and worked very hard up until I became sick. I’m a high school drop out so I always worked in the food industry, Waitressing, or some such, but still it’s money in your pocket, and not being able to do it and help us out really sucks. The hubby keeps telling me that things we’ll be ok, and to be fair things do seem to work out for us, but it doesn’t make it any less scary or frustrating. It’s very stressful when you have children, to be in a situation like this.

Anyway Enough of that, I have decided that I like KDE but on ubuntu I only like it installed as a second option with gnome. Kubuntu seems to me to only be half done, and it seems more time has been spent on making it look nice, than making it usable. I installed Kubuntu and was very disappointed to find there isn’t even a gui method comparable to Gnome’s system->preferences-startup applications. One thing I really missed in Dolphin was scripts, I have grown very addicted to nautilus scripts, they are quite handy. But the KDE menu is quite nice imho.

Well my hubby finally fell victim to our bad economy and got laid off last Friday along with a bunch of others. It was damn sneaky of his work to nobody saw it coming. They were all getting overtime and everything. Seems they just wanted to get caught up so they could get rid of people. At this point we have unemployment, but I don’t know what were going to do. It’s been a hard weekend trying to cope with the news. Him being a CNC Machinist you would figure it wouldn’t be too hard to find work, but who knows with the way things are right now. I’ve been going back forth sometimes crying sometimes not. I guess I’ll apply for some assistance and see if I can at least get medical help. So that my health doesn’t suffer as well.

My Mother in law was visiting from out of town last week, so I haven’t really been online much but now the visit is over and things are back to normal around here…

So it’s 7:00 A.M and I’m sitting going over my news feeds and such. You know I really like this time of morning during the week. My Kids are still sleeping the hubby is off at work, and the quite is very nice. It’s nice to get an hour or so alone to myself. So here’s some of my random thoughts…

Google…
I personally am kinda of excited at the news of a Google Distro, I mean it can only mean good things for Linux with a powerhouse such as them behind Linux. It will be interesting to see what Kind of effect they have on the OS market that’s for sure.

Websites…
Well after much time and thought I have decided that the only website (this doesn’t include the UN) I will continue to run is My Personal blog. Most of them have been offline for a while now, and with my personal life growing so busy I really don’t have much time to continue to throw at such a hobby. Also this will help $$$ wise as I will no longer need to pay for such a big hosting plan.

Kubutnu…
Really isn’t that bad once you figure out how to customize it. Though I still prefer Evolution over Kmail. Evolution seems to have a cleaner interface to me. I have always used a few of the KDE apps anyway evenwhen using gnome such as Kmymoney and a few of the Kgames. The font’s in Kubuntu leave something to be desired in my humble opinion I had to fiddle with them to get them in what I consider a decent looking state.

Woman On Linux…
I’m so tired of seeing threads pop up on the Ubuntu Forums about whether woman exist in Ubuntu/Linux. Of course we exist but why advertise it I mean it’s bad enough we have to fend off “Pick Up Artists” in real life do we really want to have to do the same thing online? Besides the last time I checked the Ubuntu Forums were support forums and since when is gender relative to using a computer???

Windows…
Well when they announced the new pricing schemes for windows I wasn’t surpised. Even after trying windows 7 I see nothing to make me want to run out and spend $300 on an OS when I can get a perfectly good one for free.

Kids..
I guess kids go through phases as right now my teen has been driving us crazy with his procrastination and lack of wanting to do anything around the house. We had to ground him for coming home 3 hours late which is sooo unlike him, normally he’s pretty good about being home on time But I guess that’s why they call them Kids….lol.

Well these are my ramblings..

First the bank is retarded….

On the 21’st I logged on to my bank account only to discover that we mis-calculated about an automatic payment, and were overdrawn. So My husband, went down to the bank and deposited $100.00, he verified with the teller that this amount covered both the charge and the overdraft fee. The teller told him it did and in fact the deposit put the account $44.00 To the positive.

Well the next day I log on the account only be horrified to find that we had two more Overdraft charges. So My Husband (whose very very good at not taking crap from people) gets on the phone to the branch and tries to figure out what happened. The lady he’s speaking with tells him that there we’re two charges which went through One for Xbox Live $7.99 (the overdraft fee was $32.00) and another from Taco Bell For $6.93 (The Fee was $37.00), He said yes but how did I get charged overdraft fee’s for these items when I had money in the account to cover it? This girl didn’t know so she asked him to hold while she got the manager. A Few minutes later she comes back on and takes our number and says the manager is in a meeting she’ll call you back. So he gives her the phone number and we wait 45 minutes still no phone call, so My husband calls back. Finally he gets the Manager on the phone.

The Manager Says the charges where on the account the day he made the deposit, and teller could see this and would have told him this, and then she

informs him there are two more charges coming through that we’ll be charged fees for as well. He said Well the teller never informed me of that I have her name right here and she only told me that I the $100.00 I deposited covered the charges, and that I was $44.00 to the positive. She said “So we should pay for your mistake?” He said “Your Damn Right, when your teller is telling me one thing but the truth is something else”. She said “Sir there is no need to cuss if you continue to talk to me like this Then this conversation is over”. He said “I didn’t cuss at you besides Lady you have heard cussing yet”. She said well I can reverse one of the charges but not both. This went on a few more minutes with her using every excuse in the book and trying to blame him for their mistake. Then she said “We give courtesy calls to let you know your account is going over” he said “really because We never got one, the only reason we found out was because my wife logged on to the website”. Well then she basically called him a liar. This was the last straw, he hung up on her.

I got a 1-800 Number from the website and we proceeded to call them. My husband explained the situation to the lady on the other end who in turn put her supervisor on the phone because she didn’t have the authority to make reversals. The supervisor, refunded both overdraft fees and informed my husband that after doing so it only put our account at $10.00. So he said “So If I go put $90.00 in the account right now that will cover the pending charges as well and we’ll be good no more fees?” twice he asked her this and twice she said yes. So my husband went and made the deposit and that covered us finally our account was in good standing again.

The bank we use is Key Bank, and that was the worst customer service I had ever had. I mean it’s not like we were disputing the original charge we new we screwed up and we’re trying to fix it but that manager made us feel like we we’re criminals. This was our first overdraft charge since opening that account, we had been in good standing since the beginning prior to this incident, wouldn’t you want to keep a customer like that? Apparently this lady didn’t care.

Well that was just the beginning of my bad day….

Guild Wars which Mark & I play all the time, is celebrating it’s 4 year anniversary, as part of the celebration, they are giving a free storage pane to all players. Well the way you have to get the storage is to log on to the NCsoft website and enter a coupon code for it. Well I can’t remember my password but the website is soo overloaded with traffic I can’t use the forgot password feature because it keeps telling me the security image has expired by the time the page loads. So I’ve written them asking for help getting my account info hopefully I’ll here back before the promotion ends on the 31st.

Next up Being dissed on your own website…

A Website I run has been experiencing some issues and needs severely upgraded. From the old version of joomla to the new version. The problem is I can’t upgrade it without risking some form of data loss. To that end I have been completely honest with the websites members, actually I’ve always been honest with them. Well because of these issues I opened a ning community for them to use while I figure things out. It was supposed to be a gradual transition, from one website to the other. While I worked up an alternative to our website in the background. Today I discovered that some of the members had decided to start up and new forum, than began copying and pasting threads from one place to the other leaving links in my websites forum to the new forum.

I don’t mind them wanting to create their own forums It doesn’t bother me in the least what bothers me is that the way it was went about left me feeling like it was sort of an “Screw You and Your Stuff Move” If they didn’t like the alternative ning setup they could have let me know I would have worked with them on making things better. I’m not a communist dictator at my websites I like a community effort. But this all had the feeling of well being completely shirked. I don’t know maybe I’m being whiny, but I guess I just thought I had a better relationship with these people then I do.

In the end it left me feeling glad to to have The UN I love the feeling this community has going for it. It feels more like a community than any other project I’ve worked on. So thanks guys for helping make The UN feel so great.

So it’s been a while since I wrote anything, mostly because I’ve just not been feeling to hot. I’ve been going to the Chiropractor for my back and also been seeing a regular doctor trying to figure out what’s going on with me. Come to find out the thyroid medicine I’ve been on has been working to much it now has my thyroid too low. So she told me to stop taking it until I get in to see the endocrinologist and we can figure out something better to do about my thyroid. I also discovered that I have gall stones but that’s neither here nor there as they aren’t giving me any symptoms so we don’t have to worry about them right now. However I’m hoping it was the thyroid medicine which was causing me to feel this muscle weakness all over my body, and maybe now that will change. It’s made it difficult to say the least to perform even regular tasks like typing. Even now my arm’s feel exhausted from typing this little bit.

Kenzie is doing well as a matter of fact he’s lost even more weight and is now down to 182 we’re very proud of him. Wrestling season is now over and the poor guy never got to wrestle once at a meet this year either there wasn’t anybody in his weight class or he was sick. We’re now going to look into getting him into some kind of Martial arts class. He’ll be doing football next year, as well as wrestling.

I spent most of the last few days reformatting my new system and getting rid of the extra crap they always feel the need to install on new computers. This one came with a bunch of free trial stuff like gateway games, Norton anti-virus, Microsoft office student, and a bunch of other crap I didn’t need, like Google desktop and such. So I reformatted it wiped it down to bare bones, ran all my windows updates all the way through Service pack one, and now I finally have it set up the way I want it. I have noticed a difference in boot time now with service pack on it and file copying and such seems much faster. So Microsoft did indeed fix some of the speed issues with the service pack. I did order another gig of ram from crucial.com that I’m waiting for in the mail, that will give me a total of 3 gigs. I figure for $20.00 bucks why shouldn’t I get another gig. Well I’m off….