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.
Category Archives: Rants
Dearth of Newsletters
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 a lot of time away from it.
3 Drives Enter, One Drive Leaves
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 years old. But is sucks that I just spent the better part of a week making it work the way I wanted (it was my new PC’s boot drive).
So while I didn’t lose any data I did just lose a ton of setup time. Time to order up some new drives, it appears.
Shocking Discoveries
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 sit down and take stock of what was going on. It seems that in my desire to hurry up the re-install of each of the light sockets, I left on an adjoining breaker that shares the wall box with one of the switches. As I was putting the new switch into place I got a significant jolt, saw a spark, then heard the breaker snap off.
When I regained my composure I discovered my newly “fused” wiring on the side of the old light switch. It took me some time to figure out that I had the ground hit the side of the other switch’s neutral wire, giving me the jolt and blowing the breaker. Needless to say, after that incident, almost all the breakers on the first floor went off so I wouldn’t do that again. The install is all done for the switches so I think I’ll take a break from AC wiring for a while.
Another Ski Trip in the Can
I just got back from a ski trip to Heavenly and although its good to hit the snow this trip was a bit of a let down for a couple of reasons.
- Not enough snow
- Temperature was too high (48 F)
- Rocks on the trails
- Too many folks in lift lines
Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful to be up in Tahoe hitting the snow. But I just wish it were good, functional snow. 4 hours each way for crappy snow just isn’t much fun when you think about the time spent. Maybe next time will be better.
The Pit and Despair
I have just completed the first phase of the X-10 light switch install. After two days I’ve swapped out 8 switches and now have all the stairway lights properly wired. It was pretty touch and go there for a while: when things don’t work and patience wears out you can do some pretty dumb things, a bad idea when playing with 110 volts.
In any case, even though it isn’t pretty, things are working. Now the huge task of mess cleanup comes next. I have boxes, wire cuttings, wall remains, and a whole lot of dust and muck to clean up after. I can’t ask myself if its worth it because I know it will be… it’s just the pile of crud that awaits removal that makes me think otherwise.
Roku Update
After about 12 hours of grinding away, my server finally finished its scan of all my music and made itself ready for streaming. For about 5 hours yesterday I had everything working great, searching and streaming songs, playlists, and the like. Great, this is just what I was looking for.
Then I noticed that my laptop couldn’t go to any web sites. And my router appeared to be dead. Hmm, that’s not right.
I discovered that at least twice an hour, for some reason, my router, a Linksys, goes all wonky and stops responding to anyone but the server and Roku client. No one can be pinged, tracerouted, or communicated to. Cycling power on the router brings it back to life, or I can sit around for 5 minutes or so until it clears itself.
It is truly baffling why this happens, but the music still runs. I suppose more diagnosis is in order, but I find that UPnP is neither truly universal nor plug-and-play. Figures.
Holiday Online Ordering
I spent a good part of today doing some online shopping for Christmas gifts. Much to my surprise, after doing research this past week, capturing prices and URLs, I go back and find that most of the prices change quite dramatically. A combination of local taxes (thanks California!) shipping costs that aren’t known, and just plain bait-and-switch tactics by the web sites have conspired to raise just about every price.
So when you do your shopping and you see a price that is just too good to be true, be sure you verify it by going down the purchase path until the tax, shipping, and availability questions get answered. And watch out for those restocking fees… they’ve gone up to nearly 20% on some items this year.
Why Pizza Hut Sucks
I tried for a third time in as many months to find a Pizza Hut, any location, at any amount of purchase price, to deliver a pizza to my door. They simply won’t do it. The closest one is just 3 miles away, I could probably see it if I stood on the roof of the house. No, they would rather refer me to two other locations that are even further away. And of course, neither of them will drive here, either.
So I’m left with some local shops that do an OK job for pizza and charge through the nose, or I have to get up, get out, and get the pie myself. Figuring in the fuel cost these days for the truck, its a wash if I drive to the location and back for the pizza. Guess if I want better service I have to get a better, more fuel sipping form of transportation? In any case, Pizza Hut earns the big thumbs down from me, again.
Post Spam Sucks
Just after I posted that last story I went to look at comments. I found that I have been spammed about 200 times since I last checked, basically once for every time the blog gets updated. This really bites, so I’ve turned off unmoderated comments again until I can find a better way to do things.
That is just poor behavior and I find it difficult to believe it does anything more than upset people. I certainly won’t be going to any casino mortgage gaming web site for my favorite interest rates again.
EDIT: I have found an excellent site that has many possible solutions for spam comments. If you run WP like I do you’ll want to visit the WP Spam Comments site and get some help. Highly recommended.