Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
Rants
If I have a problem with something, here it will be.
Another Case of "The Magic Smoke" Escaping
Feb 2nd
I put together my third PC, the “alternate” that I wanted to use as my server in the basement, but that I had left by the wayside for a while. In my quest to “get it done” I hurriedly slapped everything together and screwed everything back into the case. It looked good at the time, anyway.
Upon applying power I was met with the distinctive smell of cooking silicon, and a small waft of “magic smoke” slipped up past my side. Now the motherboard doesn’t even power on and I likely cooked the CPU and the motherboard. I got in a More >
Bad Luck Travel
Jan 23rd
The adage “if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all” really fits me this week. After spending most of the week (Tuesday through Friday) down in LA for my new job I managed to really rack up the bad luck points. Here are the highlights:
- The rental car company gave me the wrong directions to my hotel, leading me on a 1 1/2 hour tour of some of the scariest areas of LA
- Once I got to the hotel, I found they allow pets in some of the rooms. While pets should not have been in my room, More >
One more ski trip in the books
Jan 16th
I have just returned from another Heavenly ski trip. Now that I’ve been up there more than 6 times the season pass has paid for itself. That is good news. The bad news is that the runs were jam packed with people over the 3 day weekend (since some companies observe MLK day in the US) and many of them were inconsiderate weasels.
In the course of two days I was fully run over by a snowboarder who just said “sorry dude” after tackling me to the ground in a semi yard sale bending my right thumb all out of sorts. Later More >
TiVo's Death Nell Near?
Jan 7th
I’m glad I didn’t make it to CES 2005 this year, otherwise I would have to hear this directly: DirecTV is building their own DVR and intends to dump TiVo. Now this isn’t completely new news, but when put together with other comments they made this week (MPEG4 broadcasts for local HD, home media centers) DirecTV seems determined to separate themselves completely from TiVo, and leave us current Direc-TiVo owners high and dry.
TiVo isn’t sitting still, they announced that they are building a new class of stand alone HD TiVo just for cable and that they are partnering with Microsoft to offer More >
The Tao of Spare Change
Jan 6th
After procrastinating far too long, I took in a bundle of change to the local Safeway and used one of those change counting machines to convert it back into useful currency. On the way in to the store I probably lost $2 or so, plus another $1+ from the house to the car. Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity (in reality only a few minutes) of noisy shaking and clanking, the machine spit out a receipt that read like this:
Change counted: $242.58. Counting fee: 8.27% Redeemable Value: $222.39
Now I’ll admit that it isn’t fun to take change and make More >
New Look for a New Year
Jan 5th
I didn’t know if it was going to happen there for a bit, but I’ve managed to pull together a cleaner, faster loading look for the site without too many personal headaches. You should find everything running quite a bit faster now as I eliminated a large chunk of the graphic files that had to be loaded each time the pages were built.
The downside of all of this is that the new layout is even less IE friendly than the one before it. IE just seems to suck at dealing with standards, and this site is using more and more More >
Home, Rainy Home
Dec 27th
I’ve just gotten home from the joy that is holiday air travel. As is typical for me, it was freezing cold weather for most of the OK stay, and upon returning to “always sunny” San Jose it is raining. On the upside, that should mean some awesome new snow up in Tahoe, so I’m hoping for some really good powder to ski on soon.
Dearth of Newsletters
Dec 19th
I am having a hard time writing a newsletter to send out. What I have discovered is that after 3 years of using LCD monitors at work and on laptops I simply cannot stand to stare at a blurry screen for more than an hour or two.
This means that I either must crank the resolution way, way down or hijack someone else’s laptop to get a newsletter written. I could also get a new job, as that, presumably, would also have access to LCD displays again.
In the mean time I’ll spend a little time in front of the CRT and More >
3 Drives Enter, One Drive Leaves
Dec 16th
It was too good to be true. I had two drives that appeared to die so I pulled them out of where they were and added them to a new system. Everything seemed great, and they worked for 3 or 4 days. Yay for me.
The problem is that this morning I woke up, came down to work on the PC and found a “click of death” sound coming from my PC. It could only be one thing: a dead IBM hard drive, the Deskstar (affectionately know as the Death Star). Now I shouldn’t complain too much, as this drive is 4 More >
Shocking Discoveries
Dec 13th
In an incredible turn of events, two relatively new hard disks have died on the same day — today. What is more incredible is that both were in different machines, on different interfaces, from different manufacturers. Both were protected via my APC UPS, so power was not to blame. Worse, one is a RAID backup drive for my documents, so I have to replace it soon. It just makes no sense that this would happen all at once.
On to the saga that is replacing light switches: I managed to give myself enough of a shock today that I had to More >