The Daily Diversion Archive For December, 2002

Tuesday December 4, 2002

What's cool?

Thin and light laptops, getting something right after many tries and snow.

What sucks?

When your wife's laptop breaks right after you get a new one, snow and not updating your blog as often as you'd like.

I must say that I've not been in a writing mood of late. I've been in a get stuff done mood for most of this fall. Now that winter's finally here complete with bone-chilling cold and snow, perhaps now I can finally concentrate on writing a little more. I have a ton of stuff I'd love to do to the website to make it more interesting, but there's that time thing. I shouldn't complain about not having enough time to do the things I like to do, but I wonder where folks that blog good stuff daily ever come up with the time to do it. I suspect that many bloggers are single, young and unemployed. Either that or there are more hours in their day than there is in mine.

I finally got a particular configuration problem fixed at home. FINALLY. I'd been wrestling with it for many moons now and it's nice to finally be able to scratch that one off my list. I had been struggling with it for so long and I was able to solve it so simply that I was high after I did it. This kind of experience certainly speaks to the presence of background problem solving processes going on inside one's head. I hadn't thought too much about it for a while until last night. The first thing I tried once I reset the settings worked. It's a funny ol' world, innit?

Speaking of funny, or not funny as this particular case is, my wife's laptop came up dead. Punch the power button and you get nothing. That's a drag because there I sat in our living room with my new (to me) laptop. It made me feel like a schmuck. We're dealing, but since my wife's laptop IS her office, it's making life rather difficult for her. Here's hoping Apple gets it back to her ASAP.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. I thought of a bunch of things I'm thankful for, and I may even share the list. But not today.

I went to a Vikings game. It was the Vikes vs. the Falcons. The guys in stripey shirts won. It's funny how that works.

Tailgating was as fun as I remember it to be. A person who's never done it might think it very similar to ice-fishing. Although that's a fair comparison, it still was a lot of fun.

Saturday Decmember 7, 2002

Happy Birthday, Dad.

He would have been 60 today.

I'm sad.

In other news, my lovely wife, without whom I'm seriously handicapped, is back in our nation's capital for the next couple of days. This means I'm a "bachelor" for a the duration. I don't find this a cause for celebration, mostly because I'm STILL totally in love with my wife.

Today I dropped her off at the airport and then came home. My buddy Illya came by and we picked up some stuff he had waiting at a local furniture warehouse. We then took the truck to pick up some wood at my uncle and aunt's place. It was a quick trip and it was very fruitful. I ended up with a half-cord of wood for pretty much the cost of gas to go get it. Thanks to Judy and John for their generosity.

When we returned to the house, we stacked wood, ate dinner and my buddy left. I went out and got some beer for tomorrow's football game--Illya's coming back over--and then went and picked up come used CDs at Cheapo. I then came home and got drunk.

It's become something of a tradition when Sarah goes out of town. I'll either go over to the Big 10 in Stadium Village and have hot wings and beer, or I'll re-live my "road days" with Northrup King and have a bottle of wine solo. It gets me out of any bad mood I might be having because of her being out of town, and it keeps the "wolves" at bay.

Tonight I'm particularly comfortable because I'm sitting here in the living room with my feet up on the coffee table, the fire crackling off to my left and my nice, new laptop providing me entertainment in my lap. Oh, and the wine.

Today was also odd for another reason. We went shopping for Sarah's Christmas present. I'm typing on mine. I decided it was high time that I got a laptop that did everything I wanted it to do and quickly. Sarah had the good grace to agree that I needed such a thing and so I got one. Her gift, nameless to protect the receiver, is pretty expensive. On a good day it's about twice what my laptop cost, but she's worth it, so what the hell. I thought about some other stuff, but I tried out a "proof of concept" gift on her earlier in the year and to my surprise, she's been wearing them ever since.

Anyway, the "proof of concept" needs to be realized, and that's going to cost money. We were all set to get these things today, but upon finding out what they will cost, she balked. It turns out, she wants to take what she thought they would have cost, bank it, add to it, and get it for a birthday present. I'm all for it, but I was all for us just flat-out getting them, so I'm happy she's going to be happy with the method of their acquisition.

Another odd thing happened today. I was over at a local furniture warehouse with my buddy Illya picking up some furniture he bought earlier in the week. I always go in to this place whenever I'm nearby, because we've bought both our bed and our kick-ass couch there. I'm just looking for matching pieces, or something that we could use at home. Well, it turns out that since I'm there without my wife and with my best buddy a piece turns up that's the exact match to our couch. It's a bit haggard looking, and the price is a bit high, but it's the companion chair to our lovely black leather couch. If it had been $150 cheaper, I'd have bought it on the spot. Because it was a bit high priced for the shape it was in and because we have enough of these types of chairs, I deferred to my wife to make the decision. Figures that she had just gotten on a plane to D.C. Modern life can be difficult sometimes.

I decided to wait until she got home to go have a look at it with her and to make a final decision then. Calling her tonight proved to me that that was the correct thing to do. If, if, if. If the time was right--meaning that we just weren't about to drop a ton of cash on Christmas presents--it would have been an easy decision. If she had been there, it would have been an easy decision. If we didn't have satisfactory furniture already (our living room chairs rock) it would have been an easy decision. That settles it. I'm never going into that building again without my wife. It's as simple as that.

If I hadn't mentioned it before, Happy Birthday to my cohort and partner-in-crime Nick Ryberg. He's been a great help in keeping this site running and he's been a great friend since I met him back in high school. Cheers, dude.

Well, the wine buzz is overtaking me and my fingertips are going numb. The CD needs to be changed and it's getting late.

Monday December 9, 2002

Geek Alert: If you don't like to read about PC hardware stuff, then come back in a while.

The laptop is finished. The 256Mb RAM stick is in and the 40Gb HDD is installed. Ghost did its thing and I'm sitting right where I was--only with 32 more Gigabytes or storage. Life is good.

It's nice to see that even compact laptops are getting much easier to work on. My first two laptops were pretty well-defended. My oldest Toshiba laptop had its HDD buried under the keyboard and under a controller board. It was major surgery just to get to it. To replace it was fun because these older laptops had different screw patterns on the holes that mounted the HDD. They were far closer to the middle than they are today. This meant that there was always going to be some surgery and engineering to get a newer HDD to fit. With the old Toshiba, I ended up using foam blocks to hold the drive in place.

With the Compaq I had, the screw holes were still in the same place, the drive was just as hard to get to and to make a tough job even tougher, the whole thing was held together by torx headed screws. Nice. I hope both Compaq and HP ditch their love affair with torx headed screws. It's a major pain in the ass to have to have these tools on hand. Anyway, the old Compaq was no easier to work on, and seemed more fragile, t'boot.

My Tecra was far easier to work on. There wasn't even a screw holding the HDD bay door on. Just a spring-loaded latch secured the cover. Unfortunately, the Tecra had a fairly unique drive carrier. Sure, it was modular, but you had to buy one if you wanted to put a different HDD in. Again, the narrow spaced screw holes meant that heavy modification drilling had to be done to make a newer HDD fit in the bracket.

Today's laptops either have modular bays for their HDDs or they have one or two screws holding a cover on. My particular Portege has one screw holding the HDD cover on. The screw also does double duty as the anchoring mechanism for the HDD itself. Taking the old one out and putting the new one in was a 2-minute job. The only tough part was breaking the bond of the thread locking goo they put in there to keep the HDD from losing mounting screws. I think that's overkill, but they probably save a few service calls over every ten thousand laptops so I can see why they do it.

Ghost worked very well getting the image over on the new drive and expanding the partition to use all the usable space on the HDD. A few words on the new drive: It's a 40Gb IBM Travelstar with the "pixie dust" technology. It has an 8Mb cache which is broken down into two different sorts. I don't remember exactly what the breakdown is, but it's nice to have that much cache. It also has a faster 5400rpm rotational speed. Since I'm pretty sure my HDD controller in the laptop is only ATA/33, the ATA/100 speed of the drive doesn't do much for me. The benefits I see are the obvious benefit of 38.6Gb (formatted) of space, faster seek times due to the faster rotational speed of the platters and the benefit of the drive cache being large enough to absorb write requests and to store bigger pipeline seeks.

Did it speed up my laptop? Yep. It's pretty transparent until you get busy with doing something that takes a lot of I/O--like starting up. It might have knocked a handful of seconds off my boot time. I've found that that process can be really sped up if you have all your unused ethernet devices disabled/unplugged/ejected before startup. That way those interfaces don't sit around waiting to be serviced by a DHCP server that they can't talk to.

The final benefit is that it's about half as loud as the physically identical 6Gb drive I replaced.

Monday December 16, 2002

I rebooted this server for the first time in a half-year today. I tried to restart Apache and I kept getting an error. Worse, it was an error occurring in a module I knew absolutely nothing about. Not good. Time to reboot. It worked.

I probably could have figured it out, but I have less than any free time and I just needed it fixed. Pronto.

The reason for the reboot is that I adjusted the configuration file for Apache to get logging back on track. If you've seen the stats page of late, you'll notice that logging stopped on October 10. Suspiciously, this is the same day we upgraded to Apache 2. A configuration error, nothing more. However, that meant that /var kept filling up and I also found that the stats we captured for that time were in a different format. What this means is that I'm going to have to figure out some way to split out the stats I want into the old format. Or I can just bag it and get a sandwich.

<Homer Simpson sound>Saaaandwich--guuuguugugugg <⁄Homer Simpson sound>

This weekend was busy. Sarah did a ton of baking and I did a ton of stuff down in the computer room. I'm trying to get the total number of machines down a bit and I think I have that problem sussed. I may end up just tossing this current web server on the shelf as a spare and using my old server machine as the web server box. I just want less devices down in the office. That's all.

Friday December 20, 2002

The Norwalk Virus has struck the land of Coin-o. My wife got it on Wednesday afternoon and spent the rest of that day reviewing what she'd eaten for the past couple of days. It wasn't fun for her and it really wasn't fun for me, either. It's not that taking care of my wife is a drag, because it's not. What was the real bummer was feeling like a condemned criminal. "Yer gonna get it, bub." I found myself sizing up everything I ate for how I thought it might look/feel/taste coming back up. I wouldn't recommend the experience.

Now that I know a little more about the Norwalk Virus, I'm starting to think I have a fair shot at avoiding it. Sarah's been pretty careful to not do anything that would cause me to come into contact with any shedded virus. Essentially this means she's not cooking and she is cleaning up after herself where she did her, um, emergency evacuations. For this and all the other things she does for me, I say the mightiest THANK YOU.

Of course, now that I've said something about it, I'm gonna get it.

Her folks are in town for a week. We're gonna do some fun stuff. We have a trip to our favorite restaurant planned as well as a fancy high tea at a nice place just outside the Cities. Couple this with all the relatives popping in and our trips to their houses and we have a busy week ahead of us.

I'm also taking a couple of days off so that I can visit, recharge and rest.

This serves you all with notice that I may not be posting until after Christmas. I probably will, but I don't want you to get your hopes up.

Thursday December 26, 2002

Christmas has come and gone and I must say that even though there were some challenges, it could have been far worse. Sarah's better, her parents didn't catch her flu and all the parties and such went off without a hitch. It's all good, really.

Sarah's folks are on their way back home and we'll have the house to ourselves again. They're nice people, but it really is nice to not have to consider the needs of guests when making the usual decisions such as what's for dinner and what do I want to drink.

I'm going glasses shopping tonight. We have a medical expense reimbursement account that needs draining before the first of the year so we're both getting new gogs. I sorta have mine already picked out, and I might just order some replacement parts up front as opposed to waiting until the frames break to buy them. Yes, it seems a bit silly, but having no glasses for a week while waiting for a new piece to be shipped is no fun. Perhaps it will be different this time around being that I'm going to go with Ti frames. We'll see, I guess.

We also have a fridge full of treats and sweets as well. We must have the remnants of at least 3 pies in there as well as ham and other good stuff from the various feasts we attended. It's gonna be good eatin' around the house for a while yet.

Monday December 30, 2002

What's cool?

CounterStrike, New Year's Eve plans and bonuses.

What sucks?

L33t D00ds on CounterStrike, headaches and AppleTalk

I've recently started playing Counter Strike. It's a first-person shooter type game that can be played on-line. It's totally fun, it's fairly realistic and it kills tons of time. There are some problems with it, however.

The kiddies who play it all seem to think that since they're relatively anonymous and good at the game that they can just go off and pull out all the nasty, cruddy, disgusting language they know. Woe be you if you're anything they're not. This includes being white, black or Asian, American, Swedish or Chinese, and bad at the game, have a strategy they don't like or just happen to have your player killed by them in any given round.

I guess I should explain a little: Counter Strike is a multi-player game. There are two teams: Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. All players have the ability to send text messages to other players and any player who wants to, can have the ability to talk to other players using a microphone. Here is where you get all the crap. I agree that this is an important part of the game, but as with anything really cool, these functions get abused. Some servers are moderated and these little morons get kicked off immediately, but when it gets late, the morons seem to take over.

A small reminder to the l33t d00d$ that play the game: I'm three times as old as you are and make 3 times as much money as your family does. You may be top dog on that particular server, but you still get your ass beat by the bullies in Jr. High. Life is all about perspective. It might do you some good to consider some other ones.

Now that Dad's done with his lecture, there's a small point that makes the game a bit sucky at times. It's called the AWP. It's essentially a high-powered sniper rifle with a scope that kills just about anything with one shot. Yes, I understand that it is the weapon of choice for people who are good at the game, but for one weapon to be that dominant kinda sucks. A lot of servers out there don't even allow it. I find that play on these servers is far more fun.

Enough of this stuff.

I've got some good plans for New Year's Eve. We're going to The Modern for dinner with about a dozen of our friends, then Sarah and I are heading over to my buddy Pat's place for a bit of celebrating. We've bought a couple of good bottles of bubbly and it will be a fun evening.

It's been an odd year. Not only did I get laid off back in January, but I got a bonus just this last week. What a difference 12 months make.

AppleTalk and TCP/IP on Mac computers has been giving me fits this weekend. It's ironic that I was struggling with it at home, and then some friends called me for some IT help on exactly the same issue.

The problem I'm having is getting my wife's laptop to print on our Windows 2000 server controlled printer downstairs. The laptop should be able to connect to the print server box itself since it supports AppleTalk. However, that's not to be and I can't figure out a way to get her machine to connect to my server's print queue. I spent a good two hours on it not counting the time it took to set the server up in the first place. Sheesh. I'll get it, it's just a matter of time.

To all of you out there: Happy New Year!