Icewind's Ramblings

Why do we press harder on a wireless mouse button when we know the batteries are getting weak? Ice

Last week I booted my computer when I came home from a trip and started to do my normal things like check emails, a visit to Facebook, and to write something for this blog. I had been on maybe five minutes when I received a message from Microsoft that I needed to back up my data as my hard drive was near intimate failure.   I tried to remember the last time I had done a complete backup and figured it was during the last Christmas holidays.   Back then I had backed up on several discs so now I pulled out my trusty thumb drive and started to sort and back up some things. The word items went fast and smoothly but once I started the many photos from work and my travels it bogged down quickly.   Then things would start to freeze up and a reboot was necessary.   Over the next day or two it became apparent that I was spending more time with the freeze ups and reboots than I did actually backing things up. Then it happened . . . The Crash. It would be several days befo...

I’ve spent the last two days in an orientation class for job I recently started.  I was supposed to go to one in mid December but with the holidays it was cancelled until after the first of the year. I was able to start work for several weeks and as Monday approached I was starting to dread having to stop for two days to attend a class.  It had elements about the company and our mission.  There were lectures about the systems and the different divisions within our organization.  There were also several lectures (stories) about cultural differences within our staff and also our clients (patients/shareholders).  They were enlightening at times and showcased what makes this group of people somewhat unique in our fields of expertise. The class was filled with people from the four different divisions, some health care personnel with one doctor and six to eight nurses.  There were admin type people who worked in various clerical or billing type positions....

I’ve had this post in my ready folder for a long time now as I had written this last winter during a break from bidding work and slid off for a quiet weekend. It never made it to a post but since I do not have time to write tonight with all of the activities at the hospital I figured I would pull this out of the folder and post it now. I am hoping to get back on schedule with my writing but real life gives us change ups and curve balls that take away from many things. I keep calling it a cabin, but really it was a cottage above the town of Seward , Alaska partly built over the cliff in the wooded hills that stand over the marina and Resurrection Bay . It’s called “Cabin on the Cliff” and a friend that my company does work for owns it and rents it out. Tourists keep it pretty booked during the summer months but in the past I have booked it to take a much needed break, decompress, and rest up from my busy schedule. Everything in it was modern, even the gaz...

Today has been a mixed bag of things going on here in the northland. Anchorage finally dropped the price of gasoline to below $ 3.50 a gallon today while word on the news is saying the Lower 48 is seeing gas prices about a dollar a gallon less than here and a few areas that the price has dropped lower than $ 2.00. That’s great for those areas and hopefully we will see something around two fifty before long. There was the rumor of traffic here today as the traffic engineers were working on the traffic lights by the Dimond Mall. They turned them off at 9 AM this morning for maintenance and other work and should have them operational around midnight. It did not make for a fun day for anyone who had to drive around the area as there were vehicles backed up in all directions while the flaggers directed traffic in the below freezing temperatures. It was only 9 degrees this morning and rose only to about 25 when I left the office at 6 PM tonight. I could see th...