This past weekend marked the beginning of Elaine’s foray into living by herself in a strange town. On Friday, I took the day off work, and we rented a large cargo van from Discount to move all her stuff to Kamloops. Unfortunately, the one we were given - their only one left - had a non-working left headlight, and a faulty driver-side mirror that wouldn’t turn in the correct position for me to use properly. The entire time, if I needed to check that mirror, I would have to lean way forward where my head is almost to the steering wheel to see what’s beside me. I managed it, but I certainly could have done without that extra challenge. As you can imagine, there is a huge difference between driving a Yaris hatchback and a cargo van.
Yaris hatch: FWD, 150.6" long, 66.7" wide, 60.0" tall.
Cargo van: RWD, 224.1" long, 79.4" wide, 81.6" tall.
I now know why FWD is better than RWD for driving in the snow. I got stuck several times in parking lots and had a hell of a time trying to free myself. Usually, the only way out is to back it up, because trying to drive forward was going nowhere. The slightest snow wedge going forward means you’re stuck spinning your tires. With the cargo van being 1.5x as long as my Yaris, I have to make wider but tighter turns, and several times I caught the curb with my rear right wheel. Also, the extra width took some time getting used to, and a few times, I found myself almost driving on the lane divider. On the other hand, a few times, I did manage to do a small fishtail in the snow, and I can also see why RWD is more fun than FWD. =P
Anyways, we were very fortunate that the weather had improved to the point where all the snow had melted on the main roads. On the highway, there was still snow on the Coquihalla, but there was almost always a set of snow-free tire tracks to drive on, so the trip there only took about 15 minutes over three hours, much shorter than the 4-5 hours we were thinking it might take due to the conditions. There is a lot of snow up in Kamloops, but fortunately the roads are very driveable because of all the sand they put down. We got to her apartment and moved everything in. After unpacking and settling in a little bit, we went out to pick up a few missing items. In Kamloops, there is generally one store for each of the large chains - Costco, Superstore, Wal-Mart, Zellers, FutureShop, etc. They actually do also have one of each of the two major dollar store chains, Dollar Giant and Everything for a Dollar Store. I personally like EFADS more than DG, but we went to both. I’m constantly amazed at what you can find available in these bargain bin shops! Sure, for some things it may be better off buying name brand elsewhere… but there are many things available at dollar shops that work just as well, for maybe 1/10 of the price. We bought a whole ton of stuff for a buck each, like plastic garbage bins, cutlery trays, sink strainers, rotating tap nozzles, self-adhesive hooks, and even a plunger. We spent four bucks for the cheapest mop at Wal-Mart, before discovering the same could be found for a buck at the dollar store. =P
On Saturday, we went furniture shopping. There aren’t any IKEA’s up there, but fortunately we found their Danish competitor, JYSK. We bought a glass dining table with four chairs for $149, and a futon sofa for $199. These prices were by far the cheapest we saw out of the several furniture places we went to. On Sunday, before I had to leave to come back to Vancouver, we went out to Superstore to pick up some groceries and a standing floor lamp for $14.99, and then picked up a few more items at EFADS and Wal-Mart. I started the drive home at 2:30pm, and got back right after 5:30pm.
I tried to have Elaine bring up as little as possible, so we decided to not even bring her computer. Instead, a couple weeks ago, I bought her a laptop. She doesn’t need a powerful unit, just one that she can surf on, play Neopets, do email, write documents, and watch videos with. For the past couple months, I’ve seen threads on RedFlagDeals where people have talked about getting crazy deals on clearance laptops from Staples. The best deal that some people got was $397 for a Sony VAIO FS-640, with 15.4" widescreen display, Pentium M 1.6Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, 80GB hard drive, DVD Writer and wireless. By the time I started looking for clearance laptops, all of the few of these that may have been available in the lower mainland were long gone. Each Staples location has a different variety of stock available, so I started going around to each location to see what they had. I went to the Broadway store and saw on their clearance board that they had an Acer Aspire 3613WLCi listed for $397. The specs aren’t as good as the Sony, but any laptop for $397 is a steal. This particular model also has a 15.4" widescreen, which I wanted instead of a smaller 14.1" widescreen, because Elaine will be watching a lot of videos on it. However, all the other specs were lesser, with a Celeron M 1.5Ghz CPU, 256MB RAM, 60GB hard drive, and a DVD Reader/CD Rewriter. My only concern was that the specs listed on the clearance board didn’t say whether it included built-in wireless or not, and that was something I felt was very important to have. I went home that night and researched that model and found that it definitely should include built-in wireless. The next day, I called up that Staples to have them place the unit on hold for me to pick up later that day. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find it in the back, so they concluded they must have already sold it and forgot to take it off the clearance board. Damn it. So then I called up a bunch of other locations in the lower mainland, and found that the one on Seymour St. downtown had one still available! But… someone had placed a hold on it from quite awhile back. It was bit of a hassle to sort out, but eventually they did end up putting it on hold for me to pick up that night. So Elaine and I went down there and bought the unit. It was open box, and had been used a little bit, with a couple light marks on it, but nothing too significant. We took it home and I went to inspect the unit. Right away after turning it on, WinXP gives me a notification that C drive is running low on disk space. So, of course I went to see what was using up all the space, and it turns out the previous owner had dumped a lot of files on there probably as a backup, and never erased it when he returned it. It had a lot of personal information on there, including resumes, personal conversation logs, pictures, and divorce papers. There were some explicit content on there as well. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention… the former owner was homosexual. Many of the pictures were of him and a lot of other guys half-naked on vacation getaways and stuff. Oh, and there were wedding pictures of him marrying another guy too… and then all the details of them breaking up and divorcing.
Whatever the case… even though there wasn’t much installed on the machine - just a lot of data - I decided I wanted to freshly re-install WinXP anyways. However, the Acer eRecovery program totally didn’t work properly. It gives you two ways of restoring the machine to the factory default state. One way is to make a set of four recovery CD’s, which will put the default factory image back on the hard drive. Okay, so I tried doing that… but when I get to putting the second CD in, it gives an error saying it can’t find some file on Z drive or something. Um, alright. So then I tried the second way, which is restoring the default image which was stored on its own partition on the hard drive… but that didn’t work either. An error came up for this method as well, and it left the machine in a state where it wouldn’t even boot up WinXP anymore. Great.
Fortunately, I learned something new from this. I discovered that you can actually use a WinXP Home CD that comes with a Dell laptop to re-install an Acer, no problem. So that’s what I did, and everything worked fine after that.
Elaine didn’t bring up her TV either, so the only entertainment she has right now is her laptop. I copied over a bunch of TV shows for her to watch, and she brought along a lot of VCD’s and stuff as well. We discovered that there were a lot of different wireless signals around her apartment. Her laptop was able to pick up about a dozen different SSID’s at various times, and usually about four signals were strong enough to be detected most of the time. Unfortunately, the two strongest signals were password protected, but fortunately, there was one signal available that was open access.
You just gotta love the people who don’t know anything about wireless routers, and are happy enough that if they plug it in and see the Internet is working, they don’t bother changing any of the settings at all. The SSID we were able to connect to was named "default", and going by the assigned IP address of 192.168.0.104, it wasn’t hard to know that the router’s IP would be 192.168.0.1 - the standard for most D-Link routers. I tried getting on the router just for fun, and not surprisingly, the password to access it was never changed from the factory default either. I wasn’t going to mess around with it - no sense in biting the hand that feeds. The only problem was, the connection was not very good. At best, we only receive one bar reception, and often there will be problems making the connection. However, usually once a good connection is made, it will remain very usable for long periods of time.
As a backup, Elaine can actually also use her Blackberry as a modem for her laptop, and she has successfully done this, so perhaps she can save the money by not having to pay for cable Internet every month.
It’s been two days apart now, and although we’ve talked on the phone and online, it definitely is different, not being able to spend time with her and having to sleep alone.
Since she’s probably going to be so bored up there, I’m sure she’ll be reading this at some point… so I’ll end off by saying: I miss you!
