Day 2: Still tired from the move

Well California prices were more than Pete could bear, so Sara said “Pete, move away from there!” She said “Carolina is the place you oughta be” so they loaded up the truck and they moved to N.C. .....
(Holly Springs, that is. Yards larger than a postage stamp. Actual seasons.)

Current location: Pete and Sara (and Rigby) residence, Holly Springs, North Carolina
Weather: Mostly cloudy, 37 degrees
Wind: Calm
Forecast calls for clouds and sunshine, a bit warmer

Yesterday was a big day for us. In the space of a few hours, we:

• Got cable service (TV and Internet) hooked up by Time Warner. Scott the cable guy (I came THIS close to calling him “Larry” more than once) was quite efficient, especially considering the irrigation folks had apparently severed the outside cable lines when they installed the sprinklers in December. Through no fault of his, I'm still having trouble getting everything hooked up to every computer, which I'll explain below.

• Got a refrigerator, washer and dryer installed by Sears. Vince had to take both the door from the garage to the house and the front door off the hinges to get the equipment in, and still had to unscrew the refrigerator door handles in order to push it into place. His talent was evident in that he did so with nary a scratch to the fridge nor to the rest of the kitchen.

• Got phone service hooked up by BellSouth AT&T. Larry (his name actually was Larry) didn't even have to come into the house, just needed to run another line (apparently our sprinkler guys were busy.) These two lines, running across our yard, will eventually need to be buried, thus resulting in more dug-up grass. We may have to re-sod the whole thing.

• Got all of our stuff off the moving truck and into the house by Bekins. Scott (the driver) and Steve, George and Carl got our stuff in place in record time. The move was accomplished with only two major casualties; unfortunately, those two casualties comprised two of the biggest-ticket items we own:

  • My 32” Sony KV32V15 Trinitron TV somehow had its casing... well... shattered. It's something of a miracle that the picture tube survived, but now I'm afraid to turn it on lest I start an electrical fire.
    
    

  • Our Select Comfort Sleep Number bed was handled rather poorly. It wound up with multiple grime marks on it, a big (and still wet) water stain on the duvet cover, and a tear in the bottom of the mattress cover. Yikes! We can't even sleep on the thing right now. It appears that it wasn't even wrapped for transport, which is particularly odd since they wrapped the couch and chair (ya know, the ones we couldn't give away to charity since they were too old and worn) in plastic.
    
    
    Both items are being submitted with Bekins for an insurance claim. More as it progresses...

On happier notes, Rigs is increasingly enjoying the increased space, both indoors and out. Here's a video of him running around the bedroom the first night. (Note: Semi-big file, avoid if you're on dial-up.)

More pictures as I get the computers working better. Why aren't they working well, you ask? Welp...

WARNING: The following paragraphs contain totally geeky talk. If you're not a technology-savvy person, just consider this post closed and we'll catch up later.

Okay, so Scott The Cable Guy (git-r-done) comes over and shows me the punchdown block in our utility closet on the first floor. Note that the preinstall of house wiring was done by a subcontractor for the builder, and multiple attempts to contact them or the builder and get more info on the wiring rough-ins have met with limited success. Anyway, all the ports in the house say Cat5e so I figure I have Ethernet throughout. When I finally get the pre-wiring company on the line, the rep says they installed all of the ports for phone and only TWO rooms for Ethernet. Never mind all the ports are RJ45 and as before say Cat5e. So STCG shows me the PDB and says yeah, here you have two dedicated Ethernet lines, and the rest are for phones, but since they ARE Cat5e you can run Ethernet over them as long as you don't mind losing the phone service for that room. So my office, for example, will have networking but no phone, which is fine since I'll use cordless anyway. BUT, since the PDB is not labeled, nor are any of the Cat5e wires, I now have to do a guesswork experiment to see which cord goes to which room. Phooey.

And then the other reason I have trouble with the computers is that this particular laptop was originally used for one of my computer security classes, so I installed VMWare on it. All well and good, but apparently when you install VMWare it does something with the virtual networking that interferes with the real networking on the host machine. I tried just uninstalling it, but that apparently was the worst thing I could do, and I've been fighting with issues on both Ethernet and WiFi (like it taking away all of the network property settings and giving me a “file not found” error if I try to reinstall one) since late December. I'll just pull all the data off this laptop and reinstall from CDs, but in the meantime it's a major pain in the neck.