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It is two o’clock in the afternoon & the Wyoming sky overhead is angry. Its been thunder & lightning for over half an hour alternating with rain & hail. Nothing like a wild Wyoming spring thunderstorm to scare us all to death. The thunder sounds like its right in our back yard, the result of being only a few blocks from a large butte bristling with antennas.

The computers are all off: power flickering too much to risk working even with a UPS. I am writing this on my Treo; thumbing along in the dark. The drops and hail are bombarding the concrete outside my window, pinging off the various things strewn in the yard. Hope there is no vehicle damage.

Then suddenly the din lowers and then eerily stops. The silence is broken by a huge thunderclap that rolls and rolls for almost 15 seconds. Good news is that it is coming from east of the highway, not as close this time. The storm has said hello & goodbye in about 30 violent minutes; however, it will be a while before the power stabilizes.

Maybe I can catch a nap now…or not. The highway is now buzzing with post-storm traffic. Where are my earplugs? And the Bengay for my cramped-up thumbs.

It is now five o’clock, I just got all my computers online when I hear a low runble to the west.  It is time for round two. Power down again.

I just found out that Liz was offered a scholarship by the UWYO engineering department. She wants to learn computer programming & the school is offering to help pay for that. Way cool.

Liz has always been very smart, even if she did not want people to know that. She prefers to ‘fly under the radar.’ Well this scholarship makes that a bit more difficult. You go girl! Your parents are way proud.

This post typed entirely on my Palm Treo.

UPDATE: Liz now informs us that she has qualified for some Pell grants, which help even more. Our tax dollars at work.

So what have I been up to lately?  Implementing a new shopping cart system for the online business latter-dayvillage.com.  My partner Debra and I want to expand the product lines we carry, mainly through drop-ship arrangements.  Our old cart system was just simply not going to carry us forward into the future.  I chose Zen Cart, an open source solution, after several months of looking at cart systems out there.  With a few add ons and modifications, it appears it will fill the bill.

Let me comment on Open Source software. It is true that open source is free; however, the tradeoff is usually a lack of support or a consistent features road map so you can see where the product is going.  In regards to that, I read a blog entry where one person ’struggled’ with Zen Cart, trying to get it to look the way they wanted. After two days of trying, they gave up and moved to our old cart system from ecommerce templates. Basically a simple cart system designed around nice looking templates.

Well my methodology was much different.  I was much more interested in cart functionality then look and feel. After integrating different components (forums, photo gallery, support system, membership management, knowledgbase; I was fairly confident I could get the look and feel done.  (That proved easier than I thought. I converted our site’s headers and footers into .php files and included them in Zen Cart’s header and footer. Some CSS tweaking was required, but that was pretty much it.

Zen Cart’s breaks the ‘no help and no documentation’ stigma attached with open source software.  It’s documentation is sparse, but there is a very good how-to manual available, extensive FAQ and help forums are provided by the code sponsors, and the user community is active and helpful. More so than many paid systems I have worked with past and present.  It pays to do your homework before launching into an open source implementation, but that time can pay real dividends, as I experience almost daily.  NOTE: I logged a serious bug (1.3.8 Downloads problem with GZIP compression turned on) in the Zen Cart bug forum. Not a show-stopper as their is a work around, but something that should be fixed.  No responses yet, but at least it is there.  Several issues that I ran into were solved through searching the extensive forums; better with Google than with the forum search engine.

Now on  to tweaking and  optimizing.

Permit me a moment of pride as I tell you about Lyal’s latest project.  Last year he purchased a used 1997 Dodge Ram pickup, part of which was a graduation present from his mother.  I previously wrote about his engine failure and the deer I hit towing his truck home. So for the last four months he has been driving my Suburban to work and around, trying to save up enough money to purchase a used engine.  He finally did so at an auto recycler in Rapid City, picking up a Dodge 5.9 V-8 that was in a wrecked Durango.

He finally started the replacement job a couple of weeks ago, using a friend’s garage (thanks Mark, and thanks to your parents too!) and some donated labor. The full time missionaries helped him (I guess that would qualify as community service, he helps them quite often) for part of one day, then his brother Jon helped another day. Finally on the fourth day of working on it, he completed the swap.  The smile on his face as he came home after the engine started was priceless.  I helped him drive it home (I followed as he babied it around the construction here in Gillette) and he was still beaming several days later.  His friend’s mother commented that she was sure he was not going to be able to do it, but was amazed when he finally did!

A couple of weeks have gone by and his truck is running just great. Good for him and good for my poor 200K miles Suburban.  It needs a rest.

We could not be prouder. Well maybe when he leaves for his LDS mission, but this will do for now.

My HP Color Laserjet 2600n has been giving me fits. Colors on printouts started fading and I could not find a fix for it. The toolbox’s print quality test showed that the Magenta color was the problem; it faded on the edges, causing oranges, reds, purples, to go light towards the edge of the paper and normal in the middle. HP’s standard answer is “replace the cartridge.” That is expensive! HP makes it real printer profit on consumables, so of course that is their answer.

After trying my THIRD new cartrige, I went back to the HP support forums, and found this little GEM - HP Business support forums - Problem with magenta, 2605dn & 2600n - ARGGHH - are you kidding me, dust on some internal mirrors caused by an open air lasert unit design?  Surely HP could have found a way to seal that up and prevent a dusty mirror / lens from causing color fade!

Guess not, then they would sell fewer printers.  Now do not get me wrong, I have owned and used several HP lasers of the years and have had reasonably good service.  Some were used and still gave me many, many reams of good printouts, starting my first 2P, a 4P, then a used IIISi (now that was a duplexing workhorse that finally gave out after 120K pages printed, a used Color Laserjet 4550 and finally this 2600n.  So I am an HP man. But this is ridiculous.

Thank heavens I am reasonable handy with technical tools and can follow directions.  Two hours after I decided to dive in and give the outlined procedure a go, my printouts are back to normal.

Thanks  Don S. Thompson and Andrew Reeves-Hall.  You guys are some of the reason the Internet rocks. And if someone finds your solution(s) because this post made a search engine, all the better.

Obsolete Skills: Skills/Skills - while researching how to fix a color fade problem on my HP Color Laserjet 2600n, I happened on a link to this extraordinary site. It lists all of the skills that used to be required to get along in the world, but have been made obsolete by technology advancements. Why is it that so much of what I know about and can do (and have done many in the past) are on the list? Age. It happens. I am a late boomer in my mid-fifties so many of the skills on the list are very familiar. A few of my favorites:

• Cleaning head of a VCR
• Drive a manual transmission - who drives one of these any more?
• Editing AUTOEXEC-BAT and CONFIG-SYS to get as close as possible to 640K of free memory - anyone besides me remember using DESQview and QEMM on their DOS computer?
• Word Perfect 5.x - NOTE: I wrote an article many years ago for WordPerfect the Magazine on making WordPerfect 5.x run more efficiently on a DOS-based computer. This and the previous item are certainly in my wheelhouse and evoke fond memories…

Now if I can just remember how to configure that ZenCart shopping cart system I worked up a couple of months ago and get the new scanner/plotter my business partner and I bought.

It is truly amazing how much I have learned and forgotten over the years.

I have previously chronicled my struggles with allergies and their side effects in this blog. For many years now I have had chronic bronchitis caused by post nasal drip.  My nose and sinuses are in an almost constant state of agitation; Kleenex is my most-purchase commodity.

Years ago I took prescription Allegra D.  It did a fair job of controlling the nasal flow, but almost daily I would still have bouts of nasal clearing and coughing. It was (and still is) rough in me when I got to bed and when I get up. The shift of phlegm in my check kicks off a coughing spell at both of those times, usually accompanied with an emptying of my sinuses into many, many Kleenexes.  Sinus nasal washes help when it really gets bad, like when a cold happens at the same time, but the problem never goes away.

When Claritin became available over the counter (OTC), I switched to it.  It does about the same job as Allegra, but is much cheaper as I buy the generic Wal-Mart brand. When Zyrtec recently went OTC, I decided to try it. The first could of days my sinuses and nose felt like the Sahara. Ah, some relief at last. But sadly, the daily nasal fits returned and now I am just about where I was with Claritin, with two notable exceptions.

Zyrtec makes me sleepy 24/7. I can nod off at the keyboard, watching TV, doing almost any activity.  It definitely makes me more drowsy than Claritin; a worse side effect.

My coughing spells morning and night are down.  Previously, I could trigger a coughing attack with any type of heavy breathing.  Just two deep breaths and I could generate phlegm coming out of my lungs.  Now, on Zyertec, I cannot do that.  It takes some really heavy breathing to get me to cough.  That does not mean that I don’t cough up a lung periodically. That still happens, but my lungs appear clearer as I cannot trigger a cough so easily.  (Pausing to blow my nose)

So I will stick with Zyrtec for now.  Perhaps switching back and forth between Claritin and Zyrtec might help me reduce any tolerance to either.  Time will tell.