August 31, 2004
paranoid?
I installed SP2 for winXP last night.. I think it broke Alt+d in firefox.. I'm gonna try re-installing it. though it did fix the worst things about IE better user controll over activeX scripts and pop-up blocker. I'll be darned if I switch because of it.
August 20, 2004
errosion
I finally got my "new" computer working. I had machines for clients that needed to be fixed over the past week so I diddn't have much time to work on my own. Please join me in welcomeing Chimera to my computer family. She's a 550Mhz PIII with 512MB of ram, 80GB WD hard drive, 8X+/- R/RW/dual layer DVD drive, USB2.0 ... and taht's about it right now.. later I'll put in a zipdrive I've got sitting around.. and a floppy drive I suppose. The only problem I have with her right now is that she's noisy. The fan on the CPU heatsink is a bit loose and it buzzes. I'll have to fix that. It's staying cool so I'm not worried about over heating at this point.
My old friend from high school has a blog now. He has a psydonym and everything. Not sure if I'll have him move to the server I'm using or not, for now he's content with blogspot. From here on out I'll refer to him as the Captian. I had been getting exercise by going along when he walks his dog.. though, the dog wasn't a good fit with the crew so the Captain made him walk the plank. we're still walking regulary... though slowly... it's exercise so it's a start.. we both need to loose weight and we are both very good at being lazy so we seem to use the other to force ourselfs into it.
my mental state has been.... inconsistant. I've felt motsly like Q@#$^ lately. I'm just so sick of living in Beemer. I'm so sick of looking for work. I'm so sick of everything. I need a social life, I need to get out of the house, and I need to make some money. I realized last weekend that my life really isn';t that bad but it's the constant errosion that's killing me. It seems like I'm working with sand. no matter how much harder I try or how much better I am at being responcible and just doing normal stuff I should be doing, it all gets washed away . Back to the shore analogy I guess... what I'd like right now is to have a place to stand where I can go on without worrying about the sea sweeping me away. Like the coast, change is iminent. That I'll just have to accept. Is it too much to ask to be on a place where I can move forward without feeling like I'm struggling or burning my feet on the sand? (eventually I'd like to be up on the boardwalk where I can finally relax and just check out all the hot girls on the beach ;) )
My old friend from high school has a blog now. He has a psydonym and everything. Not sure if I'll have him move to the server I'm using or not, for now he's content with blogspot. From here on out I'll refer to him as the Captian. I had been getting exercise by going along when he walks his dog.. though, the dog wasn't a good fit with the crew so the Captain made him walk the plank. we're still walking regulary... though slowly... it's exercise so it's a start.. we both need to loose weight and we are both very good at being lazy so we seem to use the other to force ourselfs into it.
my mental state has been.... inconsistant. I've felt motsly like Q@#$^ lately. I'm just so sick of living in Beemer. I'm so sick of looking for work. I'm so sick of everything. I need a social life, I need to get out of the house, and I need to make some money. I realized last weekend that my life really isn';t that bad but it's the constant errosion that's killing me. It seems like I'm working with sand. no matter how much harder I try or how much better I am at being responcible and just doing normal stuff I should be doing, it all gets washed away . Back to the shore analogy I guess... what I'd like right now is to have a place to stand where I can go on without worrying about the sea sweeping me away. Like the coast, change is iminent. That I'll just have to accept. Is it too much to ask to be on a place where I can move forward without feeling like I'm struggling or burning my feet on the sand? (eventually I'd like to be up on the boardwalk where I can finally relax and just check out all the hot girls on the beach ;) )
August 07, 2004
In memory of WRECK July 1999 - August 2004 Rest in Pieces. (literally)
My computer died last night. I killed it. As I mentioned in the previous post I needed more hard drive space. I purchased a nice 80Gb Western Digital Hard drive. I got a good deal on it. I was happy. Last night I took it out of it's anti-static bag and installed it. I decided to put my current 10GB hard drive in as the primary slave and I would then use the New hard drive as the Primary master, My DVD burner would then sit as secondary master. So, I screw it into the chassis and plug in the cables. Boot. Everything seems fine but it doesn't seem to recognize the drive properly. It does recognize it's there so I figure eh, I'll just put an OS on and we'll go from there. When trying to format the drive and install Windows It starts acting weird. WELL this means only one thing. My motherboard isn't interfacing properly with the new hard drive. Considering the age of the board it's not a surprise. I go on the internet and I download the latest BIOS for my board, get a boot floppy ready and flash my BIOS. I was nervous because things can go seriously wrong. Everything looked fine. With the new BIOS I got a fancy new splash screen at boot up and it recognized my hard drive perfectly. "yay!!" I'm thinking. Well I shut down the computer. and came back to it a little later. It's dead. When I turn on the computer it just beeps at me. It's a long beep, like a busy signal but higher pitched. (I'm guessing around 2kHz or a bit lower - since I can hear it but it's not clear) I dug through my motherboard manual and found a possible solution. By moving jumper J1 to pins 1,2 to 2,3 and back it will clear the CMOS memory. I do that and it POSTs!!! "Whew!!" I thought. Well, I change the date, and time on the clock and save and reboot... it beeps. "CRAP!!!!!" the only way it will POST is to move the jumper over and back. but I can't re-flash the BIOS because I can't save changes to it's settings. The BIOS has a flash protection. You have to set it to flashable, but it's non-flashable by default. The board is dead. I will need to buy new guts for my computer now. When I do have a machine going again I think I'll give it a new name. I named this one WRECK because I had it in the back of the Jeep (along with a lot of other stuff) when I totaled it a few miles south of Beemer. I was moving back into the dorm, it was the fall after I built it. ( I ended up replacing the motherboard; the PS/2 ports would fail at odd times, and the system would hang from time to time. other than that it survived the accident)
Yesterday morning I went in for a job interview. I was 15 min late. UGH. Other than being late I think it went well. I'll just have to wait and see.
My parents and my youngest brother are camping this weekend. Part of me wanted to go along but, I had decided to stay back. When I got called for that job interview I felt it was fortunate that I hadn't planed to go. I was hoping I'd find something to do this weekend. Something to get me out of the house but it didn't happen.
I'm continuing to loose more weight. It's a good feeling. I weighed myself last Tuesday. Part of me wants to display my progress but I have a long way to go so I'll just wait.
My computer died last night. I killed it. As I mentioned in the previous post I needed more hard drive space. I purchased a nice 80Gb Western Digital Hard drive. I got a good deal on it. I was happy. Last night I took it out of it's anti-static bag and installed it. I decided to put my current 10GB hard drive in as the primary slave and I would then use the New hard drive as the Primary master, My DVD burner would then sit as secondary master. So, I screw it into the chassis and plug in the cables. Boot. Everything seems fine but it doesn't seem to recognize the drive properly. It does recognize it's there so I figure eh, I'll just put an OS on and we'll go from there. When trying to format the drive and install Windows It starts acting weird. WELL this means only one thing. My motherboard isn't interfacing properly with the new hard drive. Considering the age of the board it's not a surprise. I go on the internet and I download the latest BIOS for my board, get a boot floppy ready and flash my BIOS. I was nervous because things can go seriously wrong. Everything looked fine. With the new BIOS I got a fancy new splash screen at boot up and it recognized my hard drive perfectly. "yay!!" I'm thinking. Well I shut down the computer. and came back to it a little later. It's dead. When I turn on the computer it just beeps at me. It's a long beep, like a busy signal but higher pitched. (I'm guessing around 2kHz or a bit lower - since I can hear it but it's not clear) I dug through my motherboard manual and found a possible solution. By moving jumper J1 to pins 1,2 to 2,3 and back it will clear the CMOS memory. I do that and it POSTs!!! "Whew!!" I thought. Well, I change the date, and time on the clock and save and reboot... it beeps. "CRAP!!!!!" the only way it will POST is to move the jumper over and back. but I can't re-flash the BIOS because I can't save changes to it's settings. The BIOS has a flash protection. You have to set it to flashable, but it's non-flashable by default. The board is dead. I will need to buy new guts for my computer now. When I do have a machine going again I think I'll give it a new name. I named this one WRECK because I had it in the back of the Jeep (along with a lot of other stuff) when I totaled it a few miles south of Beemer. I was moving back into the dorm, it was the fall after I built it. ( I ended up replacing the motherboard; the PS/2 ports would fail at odd times, and the system would hang from time to time. other than that it survived the accident)
Yesterday morning I went in for a job interview. I was 15 min late. UGH. Other than being late I think it went well. I'll just have to wait and see.
My parents and my youngest brother are camping this weekend. Part of me wanted to go along but, I had decided to stay back. When I got called for that job interview I felt it was fortunate that I hadn't planed to go. I was hoping I'd find something to do this weekend. Something to get me out of the house but it didn't happen.
I'm continuing to loose more weight. It's a good feeling. I weighed myself last Tuesday. Part of me wants to display my progress but I have a long way to go so I'll just wait.
