I'm an uncle!

Welcome to this world, Jakob Tobias Serafin Nipshagen!

Daddy and Amy draw a picture together

Daddy and Amy draw a picture together
Originally uploaded by pne.

Behold my wonderful drawing skills! (Larger image available, or click on the image and then on 'All Sizes' to take your pick of Flickr-provided sizes.)

And also Amy's, as she tried to trace over my lines.

Printer woes

This is annoying: my printer won't print any more. It'll print the header of a web page, then bring up an error message and try to reset itself (I get the "dee-doot ... doo-deet" system sound of a USB device disconnecting and reconnecting)... but it doesn't work because any further print attempts just give the error message.

I tried looking up HP's support pages just now and tried to stop and start the print queue service since it said that sometimes jobs can hang around in the queue even if you try to delete them. The dialog box my application firewall gave me (that 'spoolsv.exe', or some such, had been replaced) makes me wonder whether my current ability to print is courtesy of a recent MS Patch Tuesday, since I'm not sure what else I did recently that could have caused the problem. (I'm not entirely sure when it started misbehaving.)

Also, we can't seem to find the receipt. Which is annoying not only because I can't see whether it's still covered under warranty (since I don't remember when we bought the thing, either), but also because I can't submit a support request since purchase date is a required field. Feh.

At one point, I managed to print by rebooting and then trying to print first thing... but I haven't tried that since then since I don't really fance rebooting every time I want to print something even if that trick did work another time.

Also, since restarting the print queue, things appear to have got worse: as long as the printer is on, it now does the "dee-doot ... doo-deet" thing every so often, and during that time, the keyboard stops working briefly and the light under my mouse goes off, as if the computer is doing a full reset of the USB bus or something.

Having a non-functioning (or malfunctioning) printer is not fun.