Quote of the Month:

"This is something that will take weeks rather than months."
- Dick Cheney after the Iraq war began.

- October 31, 2006 -

Freezing hard drives is so much fun! Today at work a computer died which held data Jesse really wanted to keep... and I heard that if you freeze a defective drive sometimes it will make it work for just a bit so you can get your files off before it warms up and dies once again.... The drive was a noisy little bugger before when we tried to hook it up to another computer.... and after we froze it the frequency at which it vibrated was much higher so it was like a tiny little tornado siren, and we both died laughing. It didn't work though, but the characteristics of what was wrong with it didn't really match with a good freezing candidate. It was fun to try though!

Today I took Tachyon II in to work to be my Linux system... Tachyon III seems to have some problems with some of the USB ports... but it's quirks aren't too great. I ponder I should rename the old Tachyon... I just haven't decided on a good elementary particle yet. I pondered Electron and Positron for it and my XP system, since they will be Windows and Linux, and Electrons and Positrons are opposing particles.

- October 28, 2006 -

I'm mostly moved in now... Still need to copy some more stuff over, and I accidentally formatted a drive that had some files on it, but they weren't anything too important- I also learned that I can't have EIDE drives plugged in, along with a SATA, and then plug in a new EIDE drive.... the result is "invalid system disk." Took me forever to figure out why after I added a drive the system wouldn't boot, even after I disconnected it. But I did find that if I unplugged the SATA drive all was ok- and then it can be plugged in again later when the system knows what EIDE's it should have.

- October 27, 2006 -

Tonight I blog from the new computer... well, I'm really just typing this into a text file so I can hopefully I can add it to my blog later when I get the rest of my software installed. Right now I have Windows with all my system drivers installed, and just a couple programs... but most importantly I pulled the old system out from the stack and put the new one in- I feel committed now to getting the new one perfectly happy for daily use so the old one can be retired.

- October 26, 2006 -

Wow, so busy... I've been rather delinquent in my blogging.

President Bush signed a bill to build a wall on part of the US/Mexico border... I find the solution a bit troublesome though. First, it's going to be a good wall that's difficult to get over, and it's going to be placed in highly trafficked areas... both are good, but if you place it in just the areas that are frequently crossed, those areas will just shift to where there isn't a wall, so we'll end up spending billions and nothing actually changed. The other thing I found interesting was the new Mexican President elects' thoughts on the wall... He compared it to the Berlin Wall and called it a grave error; This from the leader of a country with the strictest laws against immigration and a very secured southern border so they can keep out all the poorer people from Latin America.

Rumsfeld got upset today in a press conference. Many Republicans are now pushing for some type of time table for pulling troops out of Iraq. He accused reporters of having a pessimistic tone in their questions... Reporters asked if he could blame them for being pessimistic about Iraqi troops not taking over so Americans could come home.... Rumsfeld raised his voice and shook his papers a bit and said that was completely and totally false and that they were standing up... and then another reporter asked if the people of Baghdad were safer today than they were six months ago.... and Rumsfeld turned and just walked out.

- October 19, 2006 -

A difficult day it was, but it ended well. The last half the day I spent talking to Rudolph, the HP support guy about one of the printers that had gone crazy. During lunch and after work I started in on my file cabinet of antiquated technology... I'm putting magnetic tape on old technology and putting them all over my file cabinet- it was so plain and it's the first thing you see when you enter my cubical- it also matches the clip Bob gave me very well; I still need to make good signs for the clip too.

- October 18, 2006 -

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll came out today: 37% of Americans plan to vote Republican in the upcoming election, and 52% plan to vote for Democrats. That is the widest margin for the Democrats since they began the conducting poll.

- October 16, 2006 -

Gah! Two hours after I spiffed the HP all up with the new hard drive and power supply it died! Junky defective power supplies! It was late, so I just went to bed, but after work today I came home and put the old power supply in and then fired off an e-mail to the Ultra people for my return authorization.

My new cell phone is kinda nifty, but I fear the last owner must have been a little like Teresa- poor Cory didn't seem to notify anyone that he was going to lose his number, and now all his friends call me.

- October 15, 2006 - (Part II)

Wow, I'm chatty today. I ordered the other motherboard today as I said before, but then I also noticed Chroniton, my HP media center/server was out of space on a couple of its drives... the I eyed the new SATA drive I wasn't using... so I pondered: "Hey, I'll toss that in and then have loads of new space... I know I just put the side back on it yesterday, but I pondered it was time to take it back off! (This is why I normally just leave the sides off). There wasn't an extra power plug for the new drive though, so I took the power supply out and put the in that I mistakenly ordered... yup yup, it was perfect for the HP, and now it has power to spare.... and it also has 684.36 Gigs of storage now.

- October 15, 2006 -

Welp, my new computer's problems went from bad to worse. I did some meandering on the Intel site to research heat problems, and it said that if the board read hot, but you suspected that it perhaps wasn't you could update the BIOS and they supplied me an updated version for my motherboard, so I downloaded it, put in on the new system, and told the file to update away, so then it restarted.... and BSODed (Blue Screen of Death) on me. BAH! BIOS are saved on a chip on the motherboard unlike other software instructions that are saved on the hard drive... so once it's screwed up, you must replace the BIOS chip to get it to work again, so now I'm at a bit of a quandary.. buy the replacement chip and be back to where I started, or just get a new motherboard and start over. I've come to dislike the motherboard I picked out in the first place, so I went with option #2.... we'll see where that gets me. OK... I'm over budget now, but I'm ready to move on. OOOw, the new MB supports eight drives... so nifty!

There seem to be a lot of Nancy Boyda signs planted everywhere these days, and this time around she seems to be narrowly leading in the polls against Jim Ryan. Ryan said he will not debate the issues with Boyda again, but if you'd like to hear what she has to say you can schedule her to come to your house to talk.

The Governor seems to be doing very well in her re-election too, rated as one of the five best Governors by Time Magazine, she has reached out to Republicans and has a very well blanced cabinet including former Governor Mike Hayden. The Republican challengers for both Sebelius and Boyda have launched negative ads against them, photoshopping their images in grayscale to make them seem more gloomy and they make them sound like they hold weekly bakesales to support terroism and illegal immigration but I buy into none of that.

It was all over the morning political news shows that Bush and Rove are suddenly very positive about how the elections will go for Republicans.... FOX News was very inquisitive in repeating the phrase: "I wonder what they know that we do not??" I just pondered; "Um, aren't they the same ones that have a super-positive view of Iraq each month? ....I'm not thinking they really know anything more than the rest of us." In related news of Iraq, the top general of the British army stated early this weekend that Iraq was falling apart, and the presence of troops in the region was only making things worse. Iraq has become a wasteland during the war... it was estimated that 2.5% of the population of Baghdad has now been killed since the onset of the war, and millions have fled the country to escape the fighting.

Recently North Korea tested an atomic bomb, though there is a bit of disagreement on how successful it was. The UN voted to impose limited sanctions... I'm not exactly sure where it will go from here, or what we should do- what I did find of interest was how other countries are viewing the events... In South Korea people are placing equal blame on the US as they do on the North. Many feel that the Iraq war, and the North being labeled as part of the "Axis of Evil" has forced Kim down the path of nuclear armament. ....They also feel he's a crazy madman too.

I got Brent's computer all fixed up last night. Internet Explorer had a trojan downloader virus and it had happily downloaded two trojan viruses for his system which I was able to clean.

- October 14, 2006 -

I started to work on Brent's computer today... when a system gets a virus I like to take the drive out and scan it in my USB kit from another computer so none of the system files on the infected drive are running. I hooked the drive up to the laptop and then I realized I had four systems, none with a side panel on- perhaps it's time to try to put everyone back together again once and for all.

- October 13, 2006 -

It was a good day at work, I got the Mac I fought with all day yesterday to format and accept OS X.4. It starts up superfast now so that made for a happy mac user.

- October 12, 2006 -

I came home from work and found that my new heat sink had arrived... I also went to see if there was anything inside the mailbox as well, as it was somewhat open, and as I reached it a bird flew right into me.

- October 8, 2006 -

I set up my new cell phone today, my number is 221-6828, a Topeka number this time. Tracfone is kinda whack with how they set up roaming areas... I could either pick Topeka, Lawrence and Wichita as my home area, or I could pick the rest of the state. Odd that before I could call Hays from Holton and it was local, but to call to Topeka is double minutes... Since I always use it in Topeka though, it is better this way.

I ordered a new CPU fan for the computer I built, but still don't really use cause it runs at the highest temp it will allow without shutting down. I'm not certain why the one that came with it did not function well, I tried everything but alas.... The new one is a nifty gold plated monster with the new heat pipe'n construction.

- October 7, 2006 -

Saturday and today marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war on terror with the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Another milestone was passed last month with the number of US war dead surpassing the number of those killed on 9/11.

For some reason I started doing origami recently, I guess because I have a cubical to decorate now, but it's been a year or so since I've made anything.

- October 6, 2006 -

Friday, at work I continued to move old technology, and I started to format computers so they can go to surplus... actually I was just using fdisk to clear off the old partitions and then I moved the systems to the hall, but then Jesse told me I had to use the format command too, so I moved them back to the lab for formatting. I hate to make mistakes of the sort, but it was good exercise I guess.

- October 5, 2006 -

Today at work I moved some old monitors out to the hall so they can go off to surplus- quite a number of monitors too. It was good exercise, an added benefit to the job. There were some nifty finds like the 9" green screen monitor from ancient times... and some nifty ram chips of nearly a dozen different types that were very well kept to preserve all the original shine... they were just like 1 to 8mb chips, very small.... I think they'll make excellent file cabinet magnets (once magnets are applied that is). I made a nifty magnet tonight out of an old floppy drive circuit board I had at home. It has a lot of nifty copper wiring on it as you can see from the scan I took. Ah, I got my new scanner today... the replacement for the one that TigerDirect sent that was DOA with all the glass smashed out... this new one was not packaged any differently, just in the box it would be on the shelf in, which is not sturdy enough for shipping... but this time it seems to have made the journey in better shape. I installed it, though it insisted on loading way more software on my computer than what I feel it needed to, but... it seems to work nice.

Goodyear went on strike today so Dad is going to be out of work for a few days or months depending on how well people can negotiate I guess. The last time they went on strike was just after Carrie was born and it went on for quite a while.

- October 4, 2006 -

It was a good day today- I went out to lunch with Teresa and Lin, and then after work Bob, Teresa and I went to see Superman at the dollar theater. It was a good movie, but I would rate the X-Men, and Spiderman movies higher.

- October 3, 2006 -

Tonight I went to my first house concert at Matt & Judy's with a group of people from work to watch the April Verch Band. It is part of the Folk on Mass. series, and I've actually never really listened to folk music really, but I thought the band tonight was awesome. It was mostly fiddle/violin which April played, and she also sang and used tap dance as added percussion- It was a very high energy and interesting performance.