Trina's page of Blogginess

This just in: (and much sooner than I anticipated!)

Hi Trina, thanks for writing MINI.

Congratulations on your upcoming MINI, how exciting for you!

I checked our records and found that your MINI began production on December 8th. It is estimated to have completed production on or by Friday, December 19th. We can view your order up to the point that it reaches the port of exit in England. Feel free to e-mail or call us for the latest update we have for you!

Hang in there, the wait will be well worth it in the end! Happy holidays!

LET'S MOTOR.
Jen Schuelke
MINI Division
Customer Relations
866-ASK-MINI

It seems as if my MINI is being built (right now!) and a month earlier than I was told. How's that for a nice surprise?

It'll still take 4-8 weeks after production to be transported all the way over here from Oxford, but I'm thrilled!

Just so you know that I do more than just sit around, thinking about my new car.........

had a really nice experience yesterday:

I volunteered for an event hosted by The Always Dream Foundation and The Family Giving Tree for underprivileged kids. There were 60 kids in total, representing 4 different groups from around the Bay Area.

It was a very, very cool experience. The kids were able to ice-skate for an hour with Kristi. They were treated to a pizza lunch, then came the special treat: a visit from Santa. Each of the kids had a chance to sit on Santa's lap, take a picture with Santa and Kristi, and took home a couple of gifts.

The event lasted about 3 hours, and was just a great thing to be a part of.

I was so impressed with the staff of volunteers who work with these kids regularly. What a great group of people. I hope they realize what a great job they're doing.

I checked the MINI Owner's Lounge this morning - just to see. Ever since I got my production number last Friday, I've been checking it obsessively to see if there's any change.

good news: this morning, I went from "On Order" to "Scheduled for Production".

Very Cool.

I also have my VIN now.

In addition, I got a nice letter from my dealership today informing me that was Cooper was in Production, and that I could expect delivery in about 6-8 weeks.

That would make me very, very happy :)

(I'm laughing about this right now, and I'm actually doing this!!!)

I'm in the kitchen, making Jacques Pepin's "Split Pea Soup".

I chopping onions, and garlic, listening to "The Best of Aretha Franklin".

It just occurred to me how funny the visual is.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T !!

Extra credit points to the person/people who can remember why the song "Natural Woman" holds a special place in my heart. :)

My computer seems to be better today.

It's running slower, though. I'm pretty sure that's because it's running on 256MB less RAM than I'm used too. Kind of frustrating. I just want to be certain that it's not running slower because it's still experiencing drive problems.

I was thinking about buying some new RAM - although I'm still not certain that the old RAM was absolutely the problem. We're just assuming it is. Safe assumption, but an assumption, none-the-less.

I thought I'd look into Apple RAM, so if I installed it, it would still be covered under Apple Care. Here's the hitch: the RAM through Apple is twice the price: $200 for 512MB of RAM, vs. the $100 I paid on Amazon.com for Viking RAM. UGH.

I need to save my pennies, so I don't think I can afford to buy it at the moment.... although, it is, of course, a work expense..... But still.....

I just put a new feature on my blog.....

Now you can leave comments! :) (thanks to the friendly folks at Haloscan) I noticed this nice feature on Willo's blog and decided to check out how easy it is to install. (answer= very easy)

Hmmmmm.... this should be interesting. I'm curious to see who will actually leave comments.

Is anyone really reading this, anyway?

Now be nice - no mean comments allowed. ;)

Here we go!

Well, that was a long day!

we *just* got it back up and running.

Really, we've been running some sort of diagnostic program on it for the last 24 hours now.

But, the important thing is: it's working again.

Dick spoke with Pete about it this evening, and he told us that Norton Utilities isn't as good as "Disk Warrior". I'll have to look into that tomorrow.

happy computer :)

My poor little computer is sick.

I noticed it a few days ago - it was "sleeping" and when I moved the mouse, or pressed a key, nothing happened.

Yesterday, it froze on me a few times - something it had never done since I got it in July.

Uh oh. Time to break out Norton Disk Doctor.

Here's where it really became interesting.....

When I launched Norton Disk doctor, it didn't see my hard drive, so I didn't have the option of selecting my hard drive to be examined. Weird!

I also tried to run the first aid disk doctor program that came with my computer. It only allowed me to view the permission settings, but again, wouldn't allow me to select my hard drive for repair. Big uh-oh!

Finally, I broke out the Norton CD and ran it as my start up disk.
This time it did recognize my hard drive, and I was able to examine it!

I've been working on this since last night, and started running it again this morning.

Bad News: all kinds of kooky things are happening - things I've never seen on Norton before. It's finding several "major errors" in the "directories" section, and does allow me to fix them. However, I'm having some real problems. Every few errors, it might freeze, say it needs to be restarted, or simply quit out of the application.

Good News: every time this happens, and I need to restart my computer, or relaunch the application, it gets further along.

this could very well take all day.

I will call Apple Care later on, but I want to run it through Norton first.

Eek. Hope my little computer can pull through.... I need to get some work done.

And yes, like all good techie-geeks, I have backed-up my files ;)

UPDATE

1:40pm: still working on it.

I remembered (about an hour ago) that my Apple Care program came with a CD that would have some sort of other diagnostic program on it. Indeed it does. We put that in, and it crashed when it was reading through the RAM. This was an "a-ha" moment.

My computer came with 512MB RAM, though it was in two separate 256MB slots. I bought an extra half GB RAM when I ordered the computer. We replaced one of the original 256MB RAM slots with the new 512MB RAM.

We just tried taking out the 512MB RAM, and re-running the TechTool Deluxe program. So far, so good.....

Another UPDATE 4:46pm

Still going.....

It may have been RAM problems, but there's also something else going on.....

As we were running the TechTool Deluxe program, we encountered errors with the volume.... It's running the repair now, but it's taking a very long time :(

at this rate, it still has another couple hours to go.

:(