Category: Life News

Laura’s New Toy

Yesterday, Laura’s new computer arrived. She now has the fastest computer in the house. It’s quite nice. Now, I have to spend a little time to get the thing up and running properly and set up just like she likes it.

This new system will run the latest versions of her favorite video/photo editing software without even breaking a sweat. For you nerds: she’s got an HP m7790e with an AMD Athlon X2 5600+ 2.8GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, a 250GB HDD and lots of bells and whistles. So far all is good except for two things: 1) they didn’t provide any “backup” media – no install disks and such; 2) they installed 32-bit Vista on the 64-bit computer. Weird. I guess we’ll live with it for now. Better program compatibility.

Back to work setting it up… 🙂

Much To My Chagrin

It  seems I have NOT found the problem with my server. After migrating the data [all 400GB of it] to non-RAID drives and removing the RAID card, the server still crashed. I’m now down to two remaining pieces: the video card [not likely, but I still have to try] and the motherboard. The drives, case, & power supply are still there, but are not likely causes of the problem. I’ve even replaced the motherboard once already for this same problem. So, I’m trying the next item: the video card [it’s also much cheaper]. After the crash last night, I’m begining to wonder if the PCI-E databus is bad on the motherboard. So, I’ve found a way to crash it: simply defrag the drives. That kills it.

Anyway, I’m testing the video card today and if it crashes while defragging, I will know that the card isn’t the problem just like the RAID card really isn’t the problem. I was hoping, but… well, at least if it’s the video card, that’s much cheaper…

Data Migration

I have moved all of my critical data off of the RAID array now, well, all data in fact. It’s empty and I’ve deleted the entire array. Now, what I need to do is go in and pull the card out. Then, I’ll leave it up and running for a while and determine if it reboots itself. I’m sure it will stay up for a while. In the mean time, though, I’m “low” on space. I only have 40GB or so left on the main data drive. I guess I could use one of the array drives… and grow the array after the fact. I don’t think I have any other drives that would be big enough. Well, we shall see how things turn out.

You Know It’s Going To Be A Bad Week When…

You somehow accidentally flip a switch on your motorcycle battery charger that keeps it from being able to charge. The switch changes from 6V to 12V and was supposed to be on 12V, which I know in the past it was. However, sometime recently, it got switched over to 6V. This means it was unable to charge, and therefore unable to start this morning.

This must have happened when Laura and I cleaned the garage. And clean it is, I must say! Laura has been on a cleaning frenzy this last week, so the whole house looks spotless.

Luckilly, I was able to roll-start it and get to work. I hope I can get home.

I Hope It’s Worth It…

I’m at work today. Yes, that’s right – on a Saturday. We have some big project with impossible timelines [aren’t they all, though?] and we have a deadline for implementation by Monday. So, at work I sit. I’m not even the one doing the real work – I’m just here for support… I guess that means that I get to blog and edit my pictures while the “real” work is done by the developer…

And, of course, then there’s all the snow and ice we had to drive through to get here this morning… 😐

All Work And No Play

Makes Jeff a very tired boy.

These last couple of days, I’ve been early to work, late to home and doing home chores/work when I get there. I haven’t gotten to sleep earlier than 1AM or so, but have beeen up before 6AM – 4:40AM on Monday for my first workout of the week [quite an achievement, I feel].

There have been things going on at work – both customer related and internal – that have both increased my level of stress and involvement and my level of hope. I can’t really talk about it here yet, but I feel that big changes are afoot. I’ll let you know what I can when I can.

RAID No Good?

I have been waiting for some time now for the manufacturer of my RAID card to reply to my request for help. I got an initial response, to which I replied, but have gotten nothing since. I’m begining to think that I may have to just buy a different vendor’s card. I’m thinking of the Promise SuperTrak EX8350. I know Mike likes his and it has certified drivers for Windows, unlike my current card.

So: my dilema is how long I should wait until I give up on tech support while my server continues to crash. At least the server crashes won’t affect the web sites anymore.

Winter Is Back

I spoke too soon. It looks like Winter is back for a bit. 19 degrees when I went out to run today. I cut the run short, but I did run a good 20 minutes… until my hands and eyes froze. It looks like it will even snow tomorrow. I guess this horrible, gusty wind that we’ve been having is blowing us some frigid Canadian air.

Ah, well, out I now go to brave the elements in our nation’s capitol.