Chris Hubbard

Last Tuesday at 6 am, I was putting my laptop into my backpack and getting ready for work when all of a sudden I had extreme pain coming from my back.  I could barely make it to the couch.  Once I was on the couch, it was difficult to roll over.  It felt like my hips were pinned down.

After a while, I called my dad to ask for prayer.  He reminded my that the previous week he had had some bad back pain and gone to a friend of the family, Ryan Van Matre, who was now a Chiropractor with offices in Delphi (our hometown) and Carmel.  I had recently re-connected with his older brother Graeme Van Matre who is also a Chiropractor in Westfield and was a classmate of mine in high school.

I decided to give him a call to see what he could do.  I called pretty early just expecting to get his voicemail to find out his hours, but he answered and got me an appointment for that morning.  I was in so much pain, that I had to have Michelle go to CVS and get me crutches.  I still wonder how I managed to get to out to the van due to the pain.

I arrived at his office and hobbled inside and he lead me back to his room.  He explained to me about the Active Release Technique that he uses and started working on me (well, more like working me over).  It wasn’t pleasant at first, but afterwards I was able to walk out without needing the crutches!

I have been back four times and I am getting to the point were I actually forget that I had back pain.  He has given me exercises to do and I got a GymnastikBall to use at work.  Each day is getting better.  The worse is when I use a chair for extended periods of time (especially the chair at home). but even that is getting better.

I really appreciate how much you have helped me this past week.  Thanks Doc Graeme!

I have been listening to Grace to You Radio for a while via their Daily Radio Podcast.  I really like the way he lays out the scriptures and preaches for change.

One thing that has always bugged me a little bit is that the radio broadcast, due to time constraints, doesn’t play a whole series.  If you want to listen to the who series, then you have to either buy the CDs or MP3 downloads.  I understand that they are trying to cover the costs of making them available and to spreading their ministry.  It just seemed to me that the broadcast was just a teaser to get you to buy the audio and seemed too much like a sales job at the end of the message. 

I have often wanted to write to them to encourage them to make it available for free and allow God to provide what they need.  Well, I heard last night (well, whichever sermon I was listening to which is about a week old), that they have decided to offer them for free. 

If you listen and are encouraged in your faith by these message, I would encourage you to start supporting their ministry.  This has been the step to encourage me to become a regular supporter.

I was listening to a John MacArthur sermon today on “The Shepherd’s Responsibility” and a quote from Amy Carmichael that was striking to me.

God, harden me against myself, the coward with pathetic voice who craves for ease and rest and joy.  Myself, arch traitor to myself, my hollowest friend, my deadliest foe, my clog whatever road I go.

From time to time, I complain to myself and sometimes to others about my lack of progress in the faith.  Why is it that I still struggle with some sins and don’t gain victory over them?  Yes, it the Spirit that works within us, but we have our part and it takes effort to be effective.  If only I took the same approach to spiritual matters that I do my with my passion for software and technology?

When we moved back to Indiana, we moved to Brownsburg which is on the west side of Indianapolis.  We started going to Norm’s Main Street Hair Co since it was just down the street from us at the time.  We have been going to the same barber, Pam, ever since.  That has been 12 years.

Now that we live in Carmel, we still travel once a month (about 30 minutes one-way) for family haircut night.  We were there on Thursday and Pam told us that we had to stop by one of the local gas stations.  There was a serious price war going on and the price had dropped 30 cents that day.  We were at half a tank so we stopped on the way out of town.  It was $1.82 in Brownsburg and $2.19 in Indianapolis.  The last time it was regularly $1.80 was in 2004.  I still remember when I was in college (early 90′s) that it was right around $1.  Is this going on anywhere else or is this just a local phenomenon?

Recently, my wife’s computer started locking up when she would remote desktop to it from her laptop (both have Windows XP SP3 installed).  Last night I started diagnosing the problem. 

My first suspect was the video drivers.  Reinstalling the latest ATI Catalyst drivers didn’t help and uninstalling them left the system with only one monitor (it is a dual head setup).

Next I logged her out and logged in holding down the shift key which will keep startup items from running.  I also disabled anti virus software (Spyware Doctor with Antivirus).  In this configuration, I had a stable system that could remote desktop again!

I enabled anti virus software again and I had the locking up problem again.  It was time to look at the event log (which I should have done earlier) to see if there were any issues reported.  In the event log, there were 4 instances of the same error for 4 different services: sdCoreService, ShellHWDetection, PlugPlay, HidServ.

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    Service Control Manager
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    7011
Date:        10/25/2008
Time:        10:49:17 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    MICHELLEPC
Description:
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the sdCoreService service.

There are also some warnings about a printer being purged, pending deletion, and deleted.  The default settings for Remote Desktop is to connect the client’s printers with the RDP server so that you can print from the server to the local printer.  This is a feature that I never use since all the machines at home have the printers locally configured.

I tried disabling "Intelliguard" in Spyware Doctor and I was back to it working again.  I had upgraded the version of Spyware Doctor with Anti Virus a little bit ago so that is probably was introduced the problem.  However, I didn’t really want to go down the path of trying to report the problem and having to work with a support organization (no matter how good they were) to resolve this issue. 

Instead, the warnings about printer drivers and PlugPlay service error lead me to try to disable sharing the printers when connecting with remote desktop (with Intelliguard enabled) and that worked as well!  So there seems to be some incompatibility with sdCoreService and PlugPlay when connecting with remote desktop.  I will pass this blog post on to PCTools and see if they can find out anything.  At least I can work around the incompatibility!