Just a quick post before I leave for a computer call and then work: AIM has a new buddy info page in beta. After you login to the Screenname Service site, you can view all of the away messages in your buddy list. I saw it this morning as a link underneath someone’s profile.
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
For those of you who don’t know, I work in IT in a high school. Today is another one of those days when I ask myself repeatedly, "Why do you do this for a living?" For the last three days I have been trying to setup the hardware for my new Ghost Console server. It was supposed to be a nice, easy setup: six removable hard drive bays, a floppy drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, two internal hard drives and two RAID controllers. Earlier today I finally got all of the hardware into a Thermaltake Armor case, so I decided I would try to boot it up.
As luck would have it, I didn’t get the POST screen to show. I was able to quickly determine that there was something wrong with the video on port 15 of my Blackbox KVM switch. So, I switch to port 14, and up comes the POST. It disappeared as quickly as it appeared, and I was greeted with a black screen for a few minutes hoping that it hadn’t gone into the BIOS because the RAID controllers were initializing. I gave up on waiting, so I rebooted the computer only to stare at another black screen.
Frustrated, I did an hour or so of basic troubleshooting, connecting and disconnecting parts until I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere. So, I stripped the machine down to the parts that were in the computer when the motherboard and drives were in another case. It was no surprise to me to see that the computer booted into Windows right away. So, I added something, the six-port SuperTrak SX6000 from Promise. I was dismayed to see that the computer did not get past the POST again.
The lazy guy would just give up and say, "We’ve got a bad RAID controller. Let’s send it back for a replacement controller." The lazy guy would have been wiser than me. I spent the rest of the day adding and removing the six-port RAID controller, a four-port FastTrak TX4000 RAID controller, and several hard drives (both in and out of the removable drive carraiges). I even swapped out RAM for the SuperTrak’s cache! I also moved the computer to another physical location where I could be sure to eliminate the KVM switch as being part of the problem. The KVM was innocent.
I gave up on getting the new computer to boot, so I tossed the SuperTrak into another computer that I knew was working fine. When I booted up the computer after installing the controller, I again could not get past the POST. So, roughly five or six hours after initially booting the new computer, I have put the SuperTrak back in its original package and an e-mail will be going out on Monday to get a replacement controller (thanks, Debbie).
Oh, and the only food or drink I’ve had today was a small Oreo Blizzard from Dairy Queen, a large white chocolate mocha from Starbucks and a couple glasses of water. I think I’ll score today as 3 points for life beating me down, 0 points for me striking back.
After about an hour or so of first-hand experience with roses, I realized that I never want to be a florist. What I previously thought were extremely high costs for flowers is completely justified. The effort that must go into making an arrangement asthetically pleasing must be tremendous. I know the efforts I went through tonight, and I can’t say that the arrangement I did was all that great. Maybe I will just have to wait and see how the roses open up.
I recently realized Peapod’s only fatal flaw: you will inevitably need something immediately and can’t wait for Peapod to deliver, so you must go to the grocery store. And that is when the problem arises: you’re at the grocery store, walking around trying to remember the few things that you need and where to find them, and they’re out of stock of at least one of those things. Joy!
So, now I either leave the store without those few items I need, or settle for something similar but not quite right. I made that decision (I settled), and headed for the checkout lanes. Since I went to Dominick’s and not Jewel, there were no self checkout lanes. And then another problem presents itself: the annoying cashier.
The cashier I got was one of the many I always try to avoid, but I had little choice as the express lane closed as I walked up to it and the other lane was going rather slow. Lo and behold, the lane I finally chose ended up going even slower! Between the cashier being very old and her being very talkative, I swear I spent ten minutes for her to ring up and talk to the two people in front of me. The woman directly in front of me had that "I’m just going to smile and hope I don’t snap" look on her face. It was pretty intense. I was so glad to be out of there.
It’s visits to the grocery store that make me appreciate when Chris plans out meals ahead of time so that all of the shopping can be done on Peapod.
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