Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

My delightfully hack-o-rific boyfriend has done something fairly remarkable in the past week. (Cut to his hack if you don’t feel like being bored by the back story!) It all began when I purchased a Dell Mini 9 laptop/netbook. I have a rule: when I get paid for photography, I get to buy a new lens, or something that helps me to make more money, but it can be fun, too. Well, I got another photography job, and I was thinking about lenses I could buy, but the truth is that I’m pretty happy with the lenses I have right now. There aren’t many limitations I’m finding I have, and honestly, the more lenses one owns, the more stress there is about deciding which lens to have when I walk out the door. When it all comes down to it, I have the 50mm, f/1.8 planted on the front of my camera 90% of the time. That way, I can just throw the sucker in my purse, and I’m a happy camper.

Anyway, I started thinking about what fun gadgety thing I could get that would help me be more productive as a psychologist, and quickly came up with the idea of getting a little netbook, one that could bring around with me that was NOT a place where I could edit pictures. Basically, a machine for report writing, checking email, and that’s about it. After a little research, and after learning that Dell Mini 9’s were about to go on sale at Best Buy, my choice was clear.

Well, I got this little sucker, and it’s EXCELLENT! It fits right into my regular purse. I have it running Windows XP with only a few little programs installed:

• MS Word and MS Excel
• Chrome, Firefox Portable, and Safari 4 Beta (I’m at a crossroads browser-wise these days)
• CCleaner (my very favorite security program)
• Foxit PDF Reader
• Lightscreen Portable
• WinDirStat Portable (for making sure I’m wasting NO space on my tiny 8GB hard drive)
• Pidgin Portable for IMing (hey, I’m not a saint!)
• CoolPlayer+ Portable (for listening to tunes)
• Picasa (for viewing, and now when I’m out, if I just HAVE to post a picture, I can)

Portable Apps

There’s a really nice SD card slot, which is great for sucking in pictures, and I found a $30 16GB Kingston card which I keep crammed in there most of the time. A few of the portables are there, plus I will eventually add a little more music and such.

I signed up for a Dropbox account, which is REALLY nice. I just drop stuff into “My Dropbox” and it automatically syncs with the server, so sharing files I’m working on between computers is a no brainer. I’m a happy camper, and I think it’s one of the best $300 I’ve ever spent.

So back to the delightfully hack-o-rific boyfriend… Multiple people saw that I’d gotten this thing and started sending me links to this Hackintosh article. Jake is a tech guy. This article had him drooling. He started getting MUCH more interested in my little Dell Mini 9 very quickly. He was so excited about it that by around Wednesday, I had offered to give him my Mini for the day on Saturday so he could try some hacking. And by around Thursday, he’d ordered his own netbook. It’s a Lenovo S10 – similar to mine, but with a different kind of hard drive with 160GB. His plan was to get a netbook as his primary laptop. Right now, he’s using his IBM-issued ThinkPad. With his own laptop, he could leave his work machine at work all the time.

On Saturday, Jake set up the Mac OSX on an extrernal hard drive and was running it on my Mini. Very neat. On Monday, he was out driving around in the snow to try and get his paws on his new netbook. Sadly, it was already out on the truck. But yesterday evening, he got that sucker, and he’s been a bit distracted ever since.

Check out his handiwork. You’ll be impressed:
Mac OSX on Lenovo S10 and Dell Mini 9

Now stop right there. Please do not tell me to get an iPhone. I’ve actually looked into it, and I can’t afford that right now. So just move along if you’re here to tell me all about how the iPhone is better. I have some real tech problems that are kinda driving me crazy that I’d like to fix. So please, if you have some answers, share them.

Problem #1: My office is in a dead zone. My BB gets service most anywhere, EXCEPT for my office. And whenever I go into my office, I can’t even make phone calls. And when I leave my office, my BB can’t find service again, like EVER. That is, unless I do a full restart, taking out the battery in the back and everything. Ugh. What a pain.

Problem #2: I lost a little spring in the back. It’s annoying. I don’t think it can be replaced since this is a disposable culture. I’m sorry, but I don’t have hundreds of dollars to replace the whole BB when it’s just a spring that’s gone.

Problem #3: In order to use Opera Mini (the best BB browser), I need to have the firewall turned off, or I’m faced with a nag every single time. That was no problem until I installed the YouMail app (which I love). Only problem is that for that app, I have to have the firewall turned ON or I get TWO nags every time I open up the program. What?!!

Problem #4: For some reason, every picture I’ve attempted to mail in the last week has failed. I wasn’t warned or anything. Just didn’t work. Why? I don’t get it. I find this really annoying. I haven’t changed any passwords or anything.

Problem #5: GooSync isn’t working consistently. Every now again (not every time), when I add an event to my BB calendar, it doesn’t sync up with my Google calendar. This is why, last week, when I was STARVING and really ready to go home, a patient showed up for a 2 hour appointment. I looked at Google calendar: Nothing. Looked at my Blackberry. There it was. Not acceptable! And I can’t figure out why that event is any different from any other events.

Problem #6: Some programs drain the battery. I know what some of these are: Google Maps (with GPS turned on) and the Chronograph (stopwatch) are the worst offenders. I’d like to have something similar to Windows Task Manager that would tell me what didn’t get turned off correctly so I can work out what is draining the battery. I don’t mind things running in the background, but if they are battery drainers, I sure wish they would exit out whenever I moved to another program.

OK, all done. Any advice you have is most appreciated. I do love copy-paste. I do love the full QWERTY keyboard. And there are many other things I do like, but these annoyances are becoming “LOUD” (if you know what I mean). They are starting to mess with my bliss, and that ain’t OK.

Oh, we had so much fun! And we all spent in the $35-$55 range. I’m SOOOO going back, even though I can think of basically nothing that I need!

Charlotte IKEA Adventure from abbyladybug on Vimeo.

Just fer kicks. Once a day, I get a little popup reminding me to take a picture. I just use the webcam. It’s easy. It’s silly. Why not?

(Wonder if there’s a way to slow down the speed of that thing. It’s a little frenetic!)

I have ADD. I take medication for it that helps me immensely. In North Carolina, prescriptions for Class 4 drugs (like stimulant medication for ADD) can not be mailed. Also, only one month can be prescribed at a time. What does this mean? It’s a perfect storm ADD nightmare. Once a month, I have to remember that I’m running out of meds, then I have to call my doctor’s office and have them write a script for me. This usually involves waiting until the doctor has a break. I ask them to call me when the prescription is ready. They usually forget. I have to remember to call back and find out what’s going on. Once it’s ready, I have to find time to drive to my doctor’s office to pick it up. Then, I have to take it to the drug store to get it filled. Generally, there’s some problem. It seems like it’s different every time – the meds are out at that location, I don’t have time to get the prescription filled during the same trip as the doc, there are a million other people waiting, the insurance company hasn’t approved it, whatever… Always something. I have to deal with this every month.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that getting my prescriptions filled is about the most stressful task of daily life I have to deal with. I feel like there must be another way. After a particularly stressful trip to the drug store tonight, I felt damned determined to find a way to deal with this that isn’t so stressful. A workaround. Something. Anyone got any ideas?