Year: 2009

assisted living in NJ

If you’re considering assisted living for someone in NJ, please read this. I haven’t been blogging much since my Dad passed away, largely because I’m trying to spend as much time as possible with my Mom, while also settling Dad’s estate, and trying to figure out what I need to do for Mom in the long term. I’m thinking that my Mom is ready for assisted living, but the costs involved are pretty scary. She does have long-term care insurance, but there’s a max payout on that, so it’ll run out if Mom lives long enough. And Dad had a fair amount of savings, but, again, assisted living costs could drain those savings. I’m hoping that, if that happens, I’ll be able to transition Mom over to Medicaid, and just pay for her room & board myself. I hope I can manage to choose a facility that will do right by us, and not try and kick Mom out if she has to go on Medicaid. It’s a lot of responsibility, and a lot to work out.

my father

I haven’t been posting anything lately, because my father, Chester Huey, has been in the hospital for the past few weeks. Early yesterday morning, he passed away. I usually don’t post a lot of personal stuff on this blog, but just in case anyone’s reading this, and they knew my father, but haven’t heard yet, I thought I’d post some information here. We will have viewing hours for him at Manchester Memorial Funeral Home in Whiting NJ on Wednesday 9/30, probably from 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm. He will be interred at the Brigadier General William C. Doyle Memorial Cemetery in Wrightstown NJ, probably on Monday 10/5. We’re still finalizing things.

I’ve been working on an obituary of sorts that I may eventually post here. I owe my Dad a lot — for everything from buying us a TRS-80 and giving me my first exposure to computers, to introducing me to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (“Four legs good, two legs bad”).

Windows 2008 – File Server Migration

At work, I’ve been gradually setting up a new machine to act as our main file server, print server, and domain controller. The old server is running Windows Server 2003; the new one will be running Windows Server 2008. I haven’t really done much Windows sysadmin work lately other than the usual day-to-day stuff, so I’m a bit rusty on AD forests, FSMOs, and stuff like that. I have a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to write up and post, but I haven’t had much time for that. I thought I’d mention one thing that I discovered today, though: the Microsoft File Server Migration Toolkit. I just stumbled across this at random, but it seems to be exactly the tool I need to get my shares moved over from the old server to the new one!

Snow Leopard

I have a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to write up and post, but I just haven’t had a chance to do it. For now, just a couple of observations on Snow Leopard, since I upgraded my MacBook on Friday. The upgrade was smooth. I’ve got two semi-important programs that don’t work anymore though: Windows Live Sync and SonicWall NetExtender. I’m hopeful that both will be updated, but I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, on the list of stuff that *does* work, there are a few oddball programs I use that are working fine: KeePassX, Lotus Notes 8.5, and Missing Sync all work. I *think* Fusion and TechTool Pro work, but I haven’t really tried anything crazy in either of those yet.

annoying detours

Just found out that my usual route to work will be blocked off for “a few months.” I knew they were doing this, but I was hoping it would just be for a week or two. Joy.

Talmadge Avenue Bridge Reconstruction over the Middle Brook, Township of Bridgewater/Borough of Bound Brook. Beginning Friday, August 14th a detour will go into effect for this bridge as work continues. Eastbound traffic will continue to use the temporary bridge but must turn left onto Tea Street. Talmadge Ave. will be closed at this bridge. The posted detour will direct traffic to Union Ave. (Route 28), to Mountain Ave. back to Main Street. The posted detour will direct westbound traffic onto Mountain Avenue to Union Avenue to Tea Street back to East Main Street. This detour will remain in effect for a few months.

comic-con

Since I didn’t get to Comic-Con this year, I bought an events guide and souvenir book from someone on eBay. The package showed up today, and I just finished going through the events guide. Reading through it was strangely relaxing. Not quite as good as actually *going to* the con, but, with a little imagination, it felt a little like I was in my hotel room on Wednesday night, after getting back from Preview Night, planning out the rest of the weekend.

Notes 8.5 FP 1 and a weird shortcut key

Notes 8.5 fix pack 1 is out. I’ve downloaded it and applied it to a few machines. It does seem to fix a few random problems with the initial 8.5 release.

I haven’t applied Domino FP1 to our server yet though. I need to wait for the weekend to do that. I haven’t had a lot of problems with 8.5, overall. I’ve had a few issues with SMSDOM crashing occasionally. I’m on the most recent version; I upgraded SMSDOM right before I upgraded Domino itself. I’m not sure if I should blame this problem on IBM or Symantec. I also upgraded Backup Exec on the Domino server recently. That seems to be working OK, though the Backup Exec Domino agent isn’t yet certified to work on 8.5. The Backup Exec upgrade was a pretty big jump, since we’d been running version 10. There isn’t a way to directly upgrade from 10 to 12.5, so I just uninstalled 10 and did a fresh install of 12.5, then re-created my daily backup job.

As I side note, I discovered a weird shortcut today. Hold down Ctrl+Alt while you’re going into your inbox, and you’ll load the “non-java” version, basically the same thing you get if you run Notes in basic mode. I picked this up from a forum post written by Mary Beth Raven. I’m not sure how useful this is to anybody, but for some reason, I think it’s kind of cool.

revised AutoHotKey script

A couple of weeks back, I posted a semi-useful AutoHotKey script, just a little script to paste text from the clipboard, but stripped of formatting. Well, I did some searching, and of course, I’m not the only person to have come up with this basic script. This guy posted a similar script, a couple of years ago. The one thing I learned from his script, which I somehow didn’t think of myself, is that, rather than sending the clipboard contents using “SendInput”, it’s better to put the text back on the clipboard, then send ctrl-V. The reason this works better is that, in most applications, a paste is an atomic operation that’s easily undoable, whereas using SendInput appears to the application as though you just manually typed out the contents of the clipboard.
I also decided to disable the macro in Excel, since I have an existing macro in Excel that’s mapped to ctrl-shift-V, and I don’t want to override that. So, bottom line, the macro now looks like this:

#IfWinNotActive Microsoft Excel 
^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "s+$","")
clipboard := %myStr%
Send ^V

Still nothing terribly amazing, but very useful, and something I was living without for longer that I should have.

NYAF

I bought my 3-day pass for New York Anime Festival today. I went last year, and enjoyed it, though I didn’t really buy much or spend that much time at the con. I think I just went in for a couple of hours on Saturday. This year, I bought a three-day pass, and I plan on taking Friday off from work, so I should be able to spend more time at the con. I’m still so far behind in watching my accumulation of anime DVDs, and reading my accumulation of manga paperbacks, that I probably won’t buy much again this year. But, I’m hoping to just hang out, relax, and avoid thinking about work for the weekend. How’s that for a plan?