Category: Uncategorized

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Quicken 2007 For Mac To Be Discontinued, Replaced By Quicken 2017

Quicken 2007ScreenSnapz001As a long time user of Quicken for Mac I have been stuck using Quicken 2007. Intuit came out with several version of Quicken after 2007 but they all lacked the most important features that I used Quicken for.

Intuit was apparently aware at their own incompetency at producing a quality Mac quicken app becaue they continued to make Quicken 2007 compatable with the latest OS.

Quicken was sold in 2015 which is resulting in a updated version of Quicken.

The Quicken team is committed to delivering a great Mac product to our customers.  We are in the midst of doubling the size of our Mac engineering team, and our engineers are hard at work on improving Quicken for Mac 2016 (including the recent release of 12 month budgets) and building a robust Quicken for Mac 2017 that will launch later this year.

In order to focus our Mac engineering efforts on products that are built to run on Apple’s latest computers and operating systems, we will be ending support of Quicken for Mac 2007 with the release of Quicken for Mac 2017, later this year.

One way or another Quicken Mac users will be forced to upgrade whether the 2017 version is feature complete with 2007 or not.

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Goodbye And Fuck You 2015

While a change in the calendar year has no real meaning to the universe, it’s not hard to track one’s life milestones by the change in the year.

2014 was bad after being laid off from Intel. 2015 continued being shitty with poor job prospects and the death of my sister among many of my problems.

I have become a cliche at the age of 40 with major life changing events and being in the situation where I don’t know what to do with myself. I hope next year brings some improvements but honestly I am not very hopeful.

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1980’s Robots

I have some 1980’s Robots for sale. They include:

6 x HealthKit ET-18 Hero -1 (apparently belonged to NASA at some time)
2 x Maxx Steele By Ideal
2 x HeathKit Hero Jr
1 x Omnibot 2000
1 x Androbot Inc Topo

contact admin at greginthedesert.net for more information.

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R.I.P Kristina Joy Smith

Kristina Joy Smith
Kristina Joy Smith

My sister Kristina Joy Smith died in Miami, Florida on Jan 6th 2015. She was 37 years old.

She was living in Marathon, Florida (located in the Florida Keys) where her boyfriend took her to the Fisherman’s hospital when she was complaining of leg pain. They airlifted her to Kendal Regional hospital on Dec 12th 2014 where it was determined she had Septic Shock.

My mom and I had made two trips to Miami during this time. It was pretty clear when we saw her that she was not going to survive. They had her on medications for the infection and her blood pressure, but she was not responding well to either one. Her hands and feet started to turn black due to the lack of circulation and her organs were failing.

It’s obviously been a difficult time for us and we are asking for help covering expenses. If your interested you can visit a donation page “Help pay for Kristina Smith’s funeral expenses“.

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Vice TV Visits An Albuquerque School

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Episode 3 of Vice on HBO visits an Albuquerque school. The website has a short trailer and a subscription to HBO will be required to watch the whole episode.

With an average of 83 people dying in gun-related violence every day in the U.S., the debate over firearms continues to heat up. VICE visits the New Life Baptist Church & Academy in Albuquerque, NM, where Pastor Larry Allen preaches guns and teaches guns. His school is fully armed with an ex-police security team, and his young students are taught gun drills and tactics to disarm attackers.

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I Lost My ID At The Airport And Went Through Security

I am setting at PDX (Portland International Airport) near my gate for a flight that leaves later today. I arrived this morning for quick work related business. Somewhere at the security checkpoint at Phoenix International Airport and boarding the plane to PDX I lost my ID.

I didn’t find this out until I was in my Rental car getting everything ready to drive off. It turned out to be a very stressful day. Obviously rental car companies will not allow you to drive off without a drivers license. I have to thank my good friend Mustafa for coming down to the airport to get me and take me to where I needed to do my official business.

He brought me back and I approached the TSA officer and told them I lost my ID at Phoenix. They took me aside, teased that the rubber hoses were over there, and asked to look at what I did have.

I pulled out everything in my wallet with my name on it, he looked it over and then I found my Costco card that had a picture on it. A crappy picture but it was something. That was it. No further pat down, not special baggage checks. I supposed bad guys don’t walk around with worn out credit cards, Costco cards, voter and library cards. He also quizzed me on some items in my checkbook.Despite the bad reputation TSA gets, I have never had a bad experience with any of the officers.

If they didn’t find my drivers license in PHX, I have a real pain to go through to get a replacement. That’s a story for another blog post.

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Resolving The 6X Red Blinking Light Of Death On My Sony TV (with pictures)

Find Sony TV Parts

The following is meant for informational purposes only and not meant to be an instructional guide. This information is meant to give a basic concepts on how the thermal fuse is replaced, It doesn’t cover everything thing and can vary on other TVs. If you decide to replace your own thermal fuse based on this information you do so at your OWN RISK.

For information on the Sony Wega flat CRTs with a similar problem (in this case a model KV34HS420), visit Lee Devlin website and view his posting titled “Fixing a Sony Wega with a 6 or 7 blink code“.

A few weeks ago I was watching my Sony 60 inch rear projection TV (model KDF-E60A20) when the screen turned blank and the normally green power-on indicator started blinking red. I thought, this has to be a bad thing. My first assumption was the bulb died.

The bulb did not die, there is a whole other indicator light for a dead bulb. What was actually happening is the power-on indicator light was blinking 6 times. Some googling on this subject indicated that the thermal fuse had blown and it needed to be replaced.

Sony apparently has a service bulletin (E29102171) that covers the replacement. In order to access this information you have to be some sort of authorized service personnel. I did find a website where you could obtain the service bulletin but they wanted $12 to join the site first. Let me go on for a moment and say why I think this is a total scam. It seems the damaged thermal fuse situation is a design flaw and Sony’s replacement part is totally different from the original. This website is profiting off the situation by providing information was created by Sony. I won’t link to the site here, but if you search google for this issue you will surely find the site in question.

This is something that Sony should be fixing for free. I’m reading people are paying around $400 to get this issue repaired. I repaired mine for $17.91. The part itself was only $4.80. I ordered part 191002393 from Sony’s service site (It’s available from Amazon.com for $5.95). Here’s how I replaced mine.

First, the thermal fuse is simply a small electronics part on the end of two wires that connects to the harness in the TV. The wire comes wrapped up in a small package about the size of two dimes. Shipping costs $11.95 to ship it in a giant box full of bubble wrap. Thanks Sony for wasting resources getting this to me.

Replacing the thermal fuse on a sony TV1

The thermal fuse is located under the lamp housing in my TV (and can be seen using the procedures for replacing the lamp in the manual). It’s a dime sized device mounted to the bottom of the TV with two wires coming out of it. It took me a while to figure out that this monstrosity is the thermal fuse considering how tiny the replacement is.

Replacing the thermal fuse on a sony TV2

Unfortunately In order to get to the wiring harness I had to remove the rear panel of the TV. There’s about 10 screws that hold that on. Then I removed the fan housing to gain access to the original thermal fuse. I followed the wires back up to where they connected to the wiring harness. I unplugged the original fuse and plugged in the new one and ran the wires to where the original fuse is.

Replacing the thermal fuse on a sony TV3

I did not remove the original fuse. It’s somewhat difficult to get to and doesn’t hurt to keep it on. I wrapped the new fuse wiring around the old one. There may be a actual place to mount the new fuse but i didn not see the service bulliten so I cannot say for sure. It’s important to point out here that the purpose of a thermal fuse is to shut off power in case of an over heat situation. If for some reason the lamp overheats you don’t want it to catch the TV on fire. Having the thermal fuse in close proximity to the lamp seem logical. If you happen to know exactly where the fuse should go, please leave a comment.

The preceding is meant for informational purposes only and not meant to be an instructional guide. This information is meant to give a basic concepts on how the thermal fuse is replaced, It doesn’t cover everything thing and can vary on other TVs. If you decide to replace your own thermal fuse based on this information you do so at your OWN RISK.

Find Sony TV Parts

If you found this usefull, you can support this site by purchasing something from Amazon. How about a new Sony LCD Lamp?

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Free Zooomer Accounts

Zooomer is a photo sharing site built off the same APIs as Flickr, but is being much more aggressive at adding features. They are now giving away free pro accounts to bloggers, all one has to do is post a picture from Zooomer (as I have below).

IMG_7230IMG_7230Hosted on Zooomr

I already paid for a 2 years of pro accounts on Flickr, should I switch?

[Update] Doesn’t look like I will be switching, Zooomer only allows bloggers that own their own domain to sign up for a free account, when I put my blog in I get the message, “Uh-Oh! The blog url that you gave us belongs to another member on Zooomr!”

[Update] OK so I over reacted. I needed to post a pic from my account, not just any old pic. My bad, sorry Zooomer. SO Here’s a picture I uploaded.

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Summer 2005 Classes Are Done

This last quarter’s classes turned out to be more difficult than expected. I signed up for a MS Access class and a Business Stats class. I won’t say much more about the Access class. I already had experience with it so it was a easy A.

I was looking forward to the stats class, since I use it all the time in my work. Unfortunately we were plagued by a new teacher and a new book. The first two chapters of homework were taking students 8 hours (!) to complete, this after being in class for 4 hours. That’s just too much for people who also have real jobs. She cut it down quite a bit after that, but just illustrates how out of sync the teacher was with our needs.

I managed a B in the class, but not without a lot of help from my classmates. If I hadn’t been able to complete the homework I wouldn’t have ever passed. Yet, I still didn’t come out of the class with a good understanding of the subjects.