Mutual Respect: The Lost Skill of Being Punctual

When did punctuality become a rarity rather than the norm?   I've long grown accustomed to it, but I can't remember the last seminar, speech, or talk that started on time, whether it's late by five minutes, fifteen, or longer.

Being punctual is more than just a matter of courtesy, it's a matter of mutual respect:   the audience's respect for the speaker's time and, vice versa, the speaker's respect for the audience's time.

The most common rationalization I've observed is the 'wait a few more minutes for those who are running late to trickle in'.  Why is *their* time more important than the speaker's or than everyone's already in the audience?  Needless to say I'm not talking about specific individuals or VIPs whose absence necessitates waiting, whether by virtue of their position or connection to the occasion.

There are numerous and legitimate reasons to be late.  I've been late, but not once did I expect the speaker or everyone else to wait for me before starting and I suspect most people feel the same.  So why do it?

Purolator

A few weeks ago I received shipment notification and Purolator tracking number for an item I'd ordered online.  After 3-4 business days there was still no status information on the shipment.  The only information available using Purolator's online tracking tool was "there was a problem with your request, please phone...."

When I phoned Purolator I didn't learn very much more.  All they could tell me was that the item had not yet reached the border (it was shipping from the U.S. to Canada).   Purolator told me to wait a few more days.  Okay, fine.  It was only standard shipping, and I hadn't been expecting to receive a tracking number to begin with.   But here's the rub.  When I returned home the very same day I'd phoned Purolator, lo and behold, my shipment had arrived.

On a whim, a week after having received the shipment, I decided to check the tracking number with Purolator's online tracking tool, and the information still hadn't changed, "there was a problem with your request, please phone...."

Providing tracking numbers that can be checked by customers online is a great convenience.  There's no point to it, however, if the online tracking information is never updated.

BCCode 116: Nvidia GeForce 7650GS video card

This is an update from my previous post, where I mentioned some problems I've been having with my desktop.  To briefly recap, I'd been getting video crashes with the error message "Nvidia kernel 266.58 stopped responding and has recovered," or words to that effect. Reinstalling the latest driver didn't turn out to be a permanent fix.

In fact, in the past 3-4 days it became progressively worse, where instead of a straight-forward crash I'd get incorrectly displayed displays (odd colours, horizontal lines, etc.), then crashes and then blue screens of death (BSOD).  The upside, however, was that I finally managed to catch the phrase "BCCODE 116" somewhere among all the funky graphics, crashes and BSODs.  I couldn't research this at home, of course, since my desktop was fairly unusable at this point.

Anywhoo, BCCode 116 turns out to occur when the video card malfunctions for whatever reason, one potential reason being the video card processor running at too high temperatures.  I found a free utility that reported current temperatures of hardware components, and lo and behold, at "idle" my GPU went from 78 to 95 degrees Celsius in a matter of minutes.  The temperature reached 102 degrees Celsius before I shut down my computer.  According to what I read, at idle it should be in the range of 50-70 degrees Celsius.

The cause of this elevated temperature?  The video card fan was no longer working, which I confirmed visually.  Cleaning up the dust (how does that much dust get in there, anyway?!) didn't help.  The video card is a Nvidia GeForce 7560 GS that came with my desktop.  It must be four, maybe five (or more?) years old, now.

I removed the video card, plugged my monitor via the basic D-SUB port, uninstalled the Nvidia driver, and now I can use my computer comfortably once again.  The only question I have now is whether I should buy a new video card.  I probably will, since I can already tell that videos run a little slower than they had previously -- not by much, almost negligible, but nevertheless noticeable.

Nvidia Kernel 266.58

For a good long while I'd been having video problems with my PC desktop. The monitor would freeze, go black for a second, and pop back up with the error message, "Nvidia kernel 266.58 stopped responding and has recovered," or words to that effect.

There never seemed to be a specific reason for it -- I'd just be surfing the internet, reading the news, and I'd get the identical crash and error message several times in a 30 minute span, regardless of website, not watching videos or playing games. It even happened when I was simply working in Excel or Word.

When it first happened I tried "rolling back" to the previous driver version via Device Manager, but it didn't help. At the time I gave up and decided to live with it... until a couple days ago.

Here's how I fixed this issue, on a Windows 7 32-bit desktop with a Nvidia 7650GS graphics card:

1. Downloaded latest driver for my graphics card (which still happened to be 266.58) from the Nvidia website.
2. Used "add/remove programs" in the Control Panel to uninstall Nvidia driver.  Do not use the "roll back" feature in device manager.
3. Restart computer.
4. Used ccleaner (free software) to clean up the registry (this step might have been superfluous but I did it, anyway).
5. Installed newly downloaded Nvidia driver from (1).
6. Restarted computer.

To date (knock on wood) following the above steps has completely stopped my monitor from crashing.

UPDATE:  Ugh.  Looks like the above "fix" wasn't successful.  The same error message started reappearing a week or so ago.  It does seem to occur less frequently than before, but perhaps it's only a matter of time.

UPDATE 2:  I think I've finally found the root cause of my video troubles.  More information in this post.

Darth Vader Meets Volkswagen

This has to be one of the funniest commercials I've ever seen.

Snowy Days in The Land of Tim Hortons

The Land of Tim Hortons had 15 cm  of snow a couple days ago, and overnight there was another 5 cm and it's still snowing as I type.  I had mixed feelings about heading out this morning, but most of all I was looking forward to it because it had been a while since I'd driven my R32 in significant snow conditions.

Random observations and/or rants after returning from my snowy foray:

• The same truck made me cringe twice, today, and I'm not talking about a pick-up truck.  It was more similar to a mid-sized fire truck size, and wider, to boot.  The first cringe occurred when he changed lanes to my direct right -- the sudden impact of his snow splatter hitting the R's side was very irritating.  The second cringe happened when he immediately turned on his left turn signal, indicating he wanted to make the same left turn I did.  The fact that he wanted to turn per se wasn't what made me cringe, it was the fact that the truck left it so late that he didn't leave me any safe options to get out of his way. Oh yeah, and the itty bitty  fact that I was in a dinky little hatchback facing up against a monster metal box on wheels was quite cringe-inducing, too.  Anywhoo, to cut this short, I made a safe, legal left turn, and the truck made an illegal one.  All's well that ends well.  I guess.
• Thumbs down to the pedestrian who tried to cross a major intersection against the lights with approaching traffic.  A bad proposition at any time, but a snowy, slushy road isn't the best time to be in a hurry.  You might slip.  Which that pedestrian did.
• The same Impreza fish-tailed twice making two different left turns.  The first left turn was from a parking lot.  Traffic was extremely light, so I don't know why he/she didn't wait for a larger gap so that he had time to take it slower, and safer.  The second left turn and fish-tail was at a traffic light.  This time there was no approaching traffic at all so I really don't know why the Impreza didn't take it more slowly, especially as this happened only a minute after the first.  Perhaps a really short term memory.  I hope the Impreza wasn't misled by how relatively quickly I made the turn -- I was trying to stay sufficiently ahead of (i.e. away from) him.  Anywhoo, I made doubly sure to stay well away from this particular Impreza.
• I liked how on the highway slower traffic kept left, and drivers generally were traveling at slower speeds than normal.  Still, I'm not sure how helpful this would have been given how closely most drivers were still following one another.  If you need to stop suddenly the best brakes and winter tires in the world won't help much if you lose traction on the snow.

MS Word 2007

I've discovered something fairly annoying with Microsoft Word 2007.  In the past I'd used an earlier Word version to create and update webpages on my website.  Well, this was the first time since upgrading to Word 2007 that I tried to update a webpage and it was a disaster. 

I deleted one bullet point, added another.  Uploaded files, and... eh?!  Entire blocks of text were shifted from the middle of the page to the very top.  Eh!?


I repaired one hyperlink to a subheading on the same webpage, and... entirely new hyperlinks were created in entire subsections on the webpage.  Eh?!  Instead of a single word being hyperlinked the entire sentence/paragraph magically became a massive hyperlink.  Other hyperlinks were changed to link to something I didn't link them to.  Eh!?

The most puzzling thing is all this unwanted and magical editing that was occurring wasn't visible in Microsoft Word, just in my browser.  Opening the page's htm file in Word was fine.  Text okay, hyperlinks okay in Word.  But once I uploaded the updated files and opened the page in a browser the page had turned into the frustrating monstrosity I described above.

So... if anyone is wondering about the recent paucity of updates to my R32 Gallery site it's because I currently lack the time and patience to figure out what the heck is happening, why it is happening, and how to fix it.