At the Oakland airport on the way to Burbank. There are a ton of people walking around in USC gear because it's homecoming for USC, and people are flying down south for it. Someone just spilled their large cup of coffee in the walkway. And something I haven't seen in ages, policepeople walking around with a drug-sniffing, bomb-sniffing dog.
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Wow, that was wild. All of a sudden my laptop speakers stopped working. I could hear sounds when I plugged in headphones, but not the external speakers. I thought for sure I had blown my speakers and needed to buy a new sound card.

But, former not by choice help desk person that I was for six months, I decided to peruse the Dell Support forums. Not surprisingly, I found several posts on the same problem. I read a bunch of answers to this question, and decided to try a solution that kept popping up -- uninstall the sound driver and reinstall it. The answers to this common problem was that the main reason speakers stop working is because the sound drive has become corrupted.

The first time time I did it, it didn't work and I was so bummed. But then I thought maybe I didn't really uninstall the driver because I didn't get a message about my laptop finding a new device. So I tried uninstalling the driver again, and this time I got a message saying that asked did I really want to install the driver. I hit okay, rebooted, and sure enough I get the message the says my laptop has found a new device. I reinstall the sound driver, run the new update, and YEAH!!!! My external speakers started working again.

I love those computer support forums, because they really are a help sometimes. I was really freaking out, but thinking, okay, I've blown my laptop speakers, no biggie because I can still get sound out of the headphones. But that would have been such a drag!

I used to do that all the time when I did my help desk stint - when something was not working and I couldn't figure it out, I would reinstall the software because most of the time it solved the problem. My coworker told me that it didn't matter if we couldn't figure why the computer wasn't working, just get it working again and do it fast. 10 years later, the reinstall the software solution still works.

At the foodcourt at Westfield Centre, where Bloomingdale's is. I had pasta pomodoro at Pastamoto and it was ghastly. I will not be eating there again soon. I am so not in the mood to write tonight, but I forced to write two pages front and back.

There is such a strange energy in the air these days, that maybe I am being affected.
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At the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival sitting by the Rooster Stage waiting for Boz Scaggs to come on. But I'm only staying for awhile and then I'm going to see Ricky Skaggs
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