I town in New Hampshire has a problem with parking meter Robinhoods.  It seems that these citizens have taken it upon them selves to put money any expired parking meters.  This, of course, upsets the city because they rely on parking tickets for their revenue stream.

I guess if the city needs that money so bad, they should raise the parking rates.

The sign in the restaurant stated that “we do not seat incomplete parties.”  So, I was surprise when I got seated even though I told them that I was waiting for someone.  It took almost an hour for the other person to arrive.  But, at least I waited in comfort.  Oh well.

As a florist, my mother used to make bridal bouquets.  And, with every bouquet was a sprig of ivy.  She would then tell the bride to plant the ivy as a reminder of the wedding.  Unfortunately, most of the brides managed to kill the ivy after a few months.  And that, of course, cast a bad omen on the marriage.

As a part of the setup with Windows 8.1, I was forced to enter a screen password for my machine.  Since there is just me using the laptop, I find the screen password to be very annoying.  Fortunately, I managed to limit the password to reboots only.  When I get time, I will try to remove it completely.

While rebuilding my laptops, I needed to go out to various websites.  And to avoid dealing with third party vendors, I made sure that the websites were the official websites.  So, I was surprised and annoyed that the official websites had as many popups at they did.  And while I understand why they do it, I still don’t appreciate it.

I saw a pizza ad that proclaimed that there pizza is made with real tomatoes.  So, are there artificial tomatoes?

Never having replaced a hard drive on a laptop, I wasn’t sure just what to expect.  So, when I plugged it into the side of the case, I was pleased that the machine recognized it and accepted it.

It then asked for the operating system disk so I put it into the CD drive and everything took off.  An hour or so later, the laptop was ready to accept new programs.  Plug and play!!  I love it!!

Since my laptop died and I was fairly sure it was the harddrive, I decided to take the laptop apart and see if I could fix it.  And to my surprise, I found that it plugs into the side of the case and can be unplugged by removing two screw.  So, I removed it.

A quick scan of Best Buy yield a replacement drive to $60.  Not only was it an in-store item, it had more storage than the defective drive.  So, I decided to take a chance are try replacing it.

Whenever you install a new program on your PC, you need to check for the latest update to the program.  And, when you purchase a new PC as I recently did, there are a lot of updates which need to take place.  So, I was not surprised when my PC told me that it needed to update the wireless card.  And, I was not surprised when my wireless quit working there after.

Every time that I would try to connect, it would reject my password.  Then I tried just pushing the sync button on my router but that too failed.  Then, the PC told me to wait while it did some checking.  And, as if by magic, it started working.

Whatever.

One thing that I have noticed about Windows 8 is that it will open screens and not give you an easy way to exit them.  There doesn’t seem to be any back arrows and, short of doing a ctrl-alt-del, no apparent way out.  And while I realize that I am new to the software, some screens are not intuitive.