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Dec. 23rd, 2006 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI honestly spent all day at work Thursday trying to find time to write a little note in here and it simply didn't happen. Our Chicago person was on vacation and my team lead was out sick, so ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serinthia and I were desktop support and ticket entry for the entire pre-acquisition part (we haven't quite integrated help desks yet) of my company. Ouch. Friday was a little better, though I got a bit frustrated over a discussion of the autoloader I was looking at with said team lead. I won't bother going into it here.
But the weekend is making up for it. I spent all day just hanging out withakreaveter and wooisme. We went out for cheap food at Old Country Buffet, stopped at our local comics and games store, Rockheads, (I haven't been there in ages), and then watched the four episode disc of House that we'd rented during our stop at Blockbuster. The posicat and I decided during one of our discussions that House is third level tech support for humans. That's probably why I like him so much; he hates the end-users just as much as we do. I did all this with my hair in Willie Nelson braids too; Andrea did my hair up with a couple of neat leather lace-up devices that she bought for me. I'm so lucky to have a girl who likes to play with my hair. After House, I took my brother home and then Andrea and I watched the first couple episodes of BBC's TV version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; I was once again filled with deep nostalgia as I thought about reading the books for the first time back in junior high school and getting absorbed enough to be able to recite large swaths verbatim, regret for Douglas Adams' death, and a desire to burn every print of the HHGttG abomination movie in existence.
Techy things are occupying most of my time this weekend. I'm working on putting together a laptop foraiela this weekend, and I have a request for one from a couple other people after that, the first one being CJ. I'm using Spinrite to verify the hard drive media before doing an install, and wow but it takes a while to scan a 40GB drive. The first one I started hit some bad sectors about ten hours into the scan, so I just started another one. I want to make sure any hard drives in systems I sell to friends are as good as I can ensure them to be.
While that goes, I rearranged Betawolf's guts and got it up and running. Lots of weird issues. The onboard IDE went bad (it will see drives in the BIOS diagnostic tool, but then won't recognize anything outside of it), so I dropped in a PCI IDE controller card. Then I went through an entire install of Server 2000, only to have it tell me at reboot that the drive had no boot partition. Lather, rinse, and repeat until I realized that because the IDE card was in a PCI slot above the SCSI card, the BIOS was initializing it first and trying to boot from it instead of the SCSI drive that Windows was on. Swapping the cards around changed that, but then my IDE cable wasn't long enough. A trip to the basement failed to produce any longer ones (they must all be in my full tower case still), so I ended up creatively rearranging Betawolf's guts again to make the cables reach. Finally it's up and running. I even got Ghost to successfully make an image of the thing, so that once I screw it up, I can have it back to new in a flash. It is supposed to be my test environment after all.
I treated my eyes by swapping out the old fifteen inch monitor I had attached to my KVM switch with one of the seventeen inch ones I have sitting on the porch. So much bigger and sharper; it's almost as good as the seventeen inch flat panel Istole borrowed from a test system at work. It seemed to me that the bigger desktop deserved nice wallpaper, so I dug up this neat nude of an angel with beautifully feathered wings painted on a crumbling clay facade on an earthen wall very reminiscent of classical Greece to me. When it comes to women with wings, I'm utterly helpless. There used to be a website out there that was entirely devoted to the subject; I mourned that one when it dissappeared into the ether. I'm sure the thought had something to do with the fact that I now have a new volume of the Dark Horse ああっ女神さま (Oh My Goddess) manga to read. Yes, I have a huge crush on Belldandy. For that matter, Urd is growing on me too.
I have a number of other things worthy of note that came from the same place. Andrea, Posi, Tybis, Samii, and I all helped clean out a room of Posi's wife's mother's house that another fur had been staying in before moving away and leaving huge mounds of aging tech behind. Most of it was junk, but I did snag an entire decently sized box of Commodore computer hardware and documentation (the first computer I ever used at home) and an actual Colecovision console! The Colecovision was the first console videogame platform I remember using (my grandparents had one) and having one of my own makes me happy to a silly degree. I even have a few games for it; I'm going to have to watch the thrift stores for more of them. It runs Atari 2600 games too, so maybe I'll pick up some of those. I remember my uncle Mike, ever the technophile (he was the one who gave my parents a hacked mini-dish reciever card back when they were stil easily hackable a few years ago), having an adapter that let you plug some other kind of console game into them too. Of course, I must have been about six or seven years old, so I can't remember the details of it.
We have lunch with some of my extended family tomorrow, and then the traditional Christmas breakfast that my dad makes on the twenty-fifth. I am so very much looking forward to that; it's something very special to me to share that time with my parents and brothers. Then, the day after Christmas, we have our equally traditional family outing to the Chinese buffet. That usually happens on Christmas Eve, but extended family had things going on that we need to go to instead, so my parents did some rescheduling. It's weird to see family, my brother in particular, going off to do things with others on Christmas; Jim has his girlfriend's family to visit. Time goes by and things change, and I am grateful for the happiness in all my loved ones' lives. I'm just glad that I'm going to be with my parents and grandparents. I love them so much....
serinthia and I were desktop support and ticket entry for the entire pre-acquisition part (we haven't quite integrated help desks yet) of my company. Ouch. Friday was a little better, though I got a bit frustrated over a discussion of the autoloader I was looking at with said team lead. I won't bother going into it here.But the weekend is making up for it. I spent all day just hanging out with
akreaveter and wooisme. We went out for cheap food at Old Country Buffet, stopped at our local comics and games store, Rockheads, (I haven't been there in ages), and then watched the four episode disc of House that we'd rented during our stop at Blockbuster. The posicat and I decided during one of our discussions that House is third level tech support for humans. That's probably why I like him so much; he hates the end-users just as much as we do. I did all this with my hair in Willie Nelson braids too; Andrea did my hair up with a couple of neat leather lace-up devices that she bought for me. I'm so lucky to have a girl who likes to play with my hair. After House, I took my brother home and then Andrea and I watched the first couple episodes of BBC's TV version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; I was once again filled with deep nostalgia as I thought about reading the books for the first time back in junior high school and getting absorbed enough to be able to recite large swaths verbatim, regret for Douglas Adams' death, and a desire to burn every print of the HHGttG Techy things are occupying most of my time this weekend. I'm working on putting together a laptop for
aiela this weekend, and I have a request for one from a couple other people after that, the first one being CJ. I'm using Spinrite to verify the hard drive media before doing an install, and wow but it takes a while to scan a 40GB drive. The first one I started hit some bad sectors about ten hours into the scan, so I just started another one. I want to make sure any hard drives in systems I sell to friends are as good as I can ensure them to be.While that goes, I rearranged Betawolf's guts and got it up and running. Lots of weird issues. The onboard IDE went bad (it will see drives in the BIOS diagnostic tool, but then won't recognize anything outside of it), so I dropped in a PCI IDE controller card. Then I went through an entire install of Server 2000, only to have it tell me at reboot that the drive had no boot partition. Lather, rinse, and repeat until I realized that because the IDE card was in a PCI slot above the SCSI card, the BIOS was initializing it first and trying to boot from it instead of the SCSI drive that Windows was on. Swapping the cards around changed that, but then my IDE cable wasn't long enough. A trip to the basement failed to produce any longer ones (they must all be in my full tower case still), so I ended up creatively rearranging Betawolf's guts again to make the cables reach. Finally it's up and running. I even got Ghost to successfully make an image of the thing, so that once I screw it up, I can have it back to new in a flash. It is supposed to be my test environment after all.
I treated my eyes by swapping out the old fifteen inch monitor I had attached to my KVM switch with one of the seventeen inch ones I have sitting on the porch. So much bigger and sharper; it's almost as good as the seventeen inch flat panel I
I have a number of other things worthy of note that came from the same place. Andrea, Posi, Tybis, Samii, and I all helped clean out a room of Posi's wife's mother's house that another fur had been staying in before moving away and leaving huge mounds of aging tech behind. Most of it was junk, but I did snag an entire decently sized box of Commodore computer hardware and documentation (the first computer I ever used at home) and an actual Colecovision console! The Colecovision was the first console videogame platform I remember using (my grandparents had one) and having one of my own makes me happy to a silly degree. I even have a few games for it; I'm going to have to watch the thrift stores for more of them. It runs Atari 2600 games too, so maybe I'll pick up some of those. I remember my uncle Mike, ever the technophile (he was the one who gave my parents a hacked mini-dish reciever card back when they were stil easily hackable a few years ago), having an adapter that let you plug some other kind of console game into them too. Of course, I must have been about six or seven years old, so I can't remember the details of it.
We have lunch with some of my extended family tomorrow, and then the traditional Christmas breakfast that my dad makes on the twenty-fifth. I am so very much looking forward to that; it's something very special to me to share that time with my parents and brothers. Then, the day after Christmas, we have our equally traditional family outing to the Chinese buffet. That usually happens on Christmas Eve, but extended family had things going on that we need to go to instead, so my parents did some rescheduling. It's weird to see family, my brother in particular, going off to do things with others on Christmas; Jim has his girlfriend's family to visit. Time goes by and things change, and I am grateful for the happiness in all my loved ones' lives. I'm just glad that I'm going to be with my parents and grandparents. I love them so much....
