(no subject)

I noticed the Neon give me a low oil light when turning into the parking lot at work earlier this week. I stopped at the first gas station on the way home and got oil for it and added a quart. The next day I added another quart 'cause it was still low. It's been hard to see if there's a leak or not since it's been raining so much. This weekend I need to figure out where it went though. May have to replace the oil pan. I know it's leaking at the camshaft sensor too, but I didn't think it was much.

It also has very occasional hesitation and missing again, especially when accelerating hard. It's throwing code P0133, slow response from O2 sensor circuit. C'mon Igor; hold together for me? I may replace the sensor this weekend and see if that helps at all.

In the meantime, moiracoon is driving Igor to work today since her KIA needs work. I was in it yesterday with her and the wheel bearing is sounding like the probe from Star Trek IV. Wub wub wub wub. Not so good. I'm thinking I'll have to have our mechanic look at it next week, 'cause I looked at the service manual at www.kiatechinfo.com and it looks complex. I will not work on any system on my mate's car that has the potential for catastrophic failure unless I really know what I'm doing.

My Aveo will be paid off next month. Finally. We'll be able to start putting that monthly payment toward future car stuff.

This weekend, with the exception of a trip to a book sale with posicat on Saturday morning, is cleaning weekend. I'm so glad it's Friday today. Wanna go home now. Still have eight hours.

Oh; and happy May Day to all the workers of the world from our unenlightened country that doesn't celebrate it!

'Cause I forgot to put this in my last post

I just brought home about a dozen laptops that have, in one way or another, 'issues'.

My plan at present is to just put them up on Ebay, one at a time, with starting bids of a dollar, and see where they go. If they sell for ten bucks, at least it's ten bucks I didn't have. If they sell for a dollar, I'll probably quit 'cause the postage hassle isn't worth it.

Any better ideas on what to do with these things? I'm all ears!

(no subject)

One of these followed me home from work earlier this week.

It's a an external SCSI drive tower. It has eight bays and takes IDE hard drives. It has an onboard hardware RAID controller that supports 0, 1, 3, 5, 0+1, 30, 50, and stand-alone modes. Pretty slick.

It also came with 8 200GB drives slotted into the little individually locking drive sleds. Which I had no key for. As it turned out, all I had to do was call up the manufacturer, Promise, and ask them to send me the key. Yay!

A few problems getting it up and running lead me to, at Posi's suggestion, start individually checking each disk with SpinRite by putting them into a desktop machine I have sitting around. I figured that would take ten hours per disk or so. Well, I'm done with four already; they choked within the first hundred megabytes. Not surprising; SMART reporting says that they have 37,000 plus hours of run time. That's over four solid years.

I'm finding the good ones and keeping them, and I'm going to replace the bad ones with little drives I can dig out of my basement. I'm hoping I'll have at least three good 200s. If I do, they're going to become a RAID 5 partition, and I'm going to back up my network attached storage to the tower. Redundant backup makes geeks happy.

I also snagged an Ultrium tape drive that I think uses 200/400GB cartridges. I was thinking about backing up to tape, but I'm not sure that it's really worth the bother. I think I'm just going to Ebay it.

And now back to your regularly scheduled cleaning. Hopefully the cloud of dust that I blew into the air when I cleaned out the inside of the vacuum cleaner (The bag had fallen off of the little nozzle and all the dust had just coated the inside of the cavity. I used compressed air to get it all out.) has settled and I can work without sneezing myself unconscious.