Cootie Recouping

10.28.2004

I'm still getting over my cootie invasion, so there's not been much going on. I did come across a well done Star Trek Play By Email RPG the other day. They've got some nice graphics for rank insignia and uniforms.

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The Ahhhs of Chooo

10.26.2004

I have fallen victim to the latest cootie. I am one with sickness. Yesterday was scratchy throat and sinus pressure, today is sinus draining and hacking up a lung. Today hurts more, more I'm hoping it's progress, letting whatever is in my body that wants out, out!

Of course, the important part of all this is who to blame for making me sick. The easiest choice would be the Poplin clan. I went to shower the eldest of the Poplin children with gift on Friday, and the clan has a recent history of being sick. But no, although I enjoyed playing with clan members, especially the Dogs Poplin, their measly city cooties shouldn't be able to affect (effect?) me.

This narrows the field down. Gina returned from Florida Saturday night, so I went to bid her a fond welcome. Yeah, read into that what you want, ya pervs. Gina has been in her new house for a little over a month (I think), and one of the things I remember was on of the inspectors reporting that there was mold growth under the house that needed to be taken care of. Oddly enough, I awoke at about 4:00AM Sunday with a scratch in my throat. I'm thinking it could be a mold-induced scratch, since I haven't had time to build up my immunities to her new home. Curse her new found mold!

Maybe this will guilt her into making me some chicken soup?

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Russ Vs The PC: Part 2.5

10.23.2004

As I sit at home in front of the PC on a drizzly Saturday night, I've decided that the computer has won. After trying to uninstall, reinstall, and just plain install things over and over, I could never get the blamed thing back to working stably again. So, hoping it was something spooky with the drive the OS was installed on, I switched some drives around, reformatted, and reinstalled everything from scratch. I even bought a DVI to VGA adapter so that I'm now using a single video card to run 2 monitors (even though early testing shows the DVI adaptered monitor looks a little blurry).

So now that I've reorganized everything on the home pc, maybe it'll behave for a while. I'm tired of fighting with hardware, it generally gets the better of me.

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Russ vs The House: Part 1

10.20.2004

As I awoke to the smattering of rain against the house and thunder in the distance yesterday morning, something struck me as amiss. It was dark. Way darker than it should be at... 8:50 IN THE MORNING!

Well, obviously I was tired last night, I had managed to sleep late. Too late. I got up and started to get ready for work, when walking through the kitchen I noticed something was amiss. This can't be good, 2 amisses not just in the same day, but within about 10 minutes of each other. I looked up to the kitchen ceiling and saw the source of my amissness. I water spot. I big freakin' water spot. A water spot about a foot and a half long.

I climbed up into the attic to see what I could see, which unfortunately wasn't much. By my best guess the water spot was underneath the piece of the air conditioning unit that was in the attic, or maybe it was on the other side. either way, there was about half a foot of insulation between me and the water spot. I looked around the attic roof to see if I could track down the waterfall that had to be producing my spot, but it all looked fairly dry.

I returned to the kitchen to investigate the spot in more detail. It didn't seem to be growing, but it was very, very moist. I decided to work from home so that if disaster struck I could provide a handy bucket for everything to drip into, but luckily it was never needed. With all the wind and rain yesterday this might have been a one time occurence. Maybe the roof is hosed. As is my way, I'm going to wait until the next storm to see what happens.

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Russ vs The PC: Part 2:

Tuesday morning I turned on the pc, everything worked fine. I turned it off and on about 3 times yesterday, everything worked fine. Maybe the water spot fixed the pc?

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Russ vs The PC: Part 1

10.18.2004

This weekend I was playing on the computer, something I haven't done in quite a while. No websites to work on (not that they're not there), no real work to catch up on, nothing with a deadline. I just surfed some, wandered around and found some old files I didn't know I had and don't know why I kept. While I was at it, I loaded a couple of video drivers to watch some avi files that weren't working right.

I never should have done that. The next time I rebooted the pc it froze at one of the start up screens. 5 tries later and the same thing happened. Even Windows Safe Mode was denied me. I got out the old 2000 install disk and tried the repair option. The pc then told me that the disk was corrupted and could not be repaired.

So I re-installed the OS. After that I had to reinstall drivers, files that needed an entry in the registry, and all of that good stuff. Last night everything was working fine. I had been rebooting most of the day (it seemed like) while installing stuff, and the last batch of reboots had gone off without a hitch.

Except that as I tried to turn the pc on this morning, it froze at the Windows start up screen. 3 times. It may be that there's a problem with the actual disk. So maybe it's time to replace the drive. There's a 120GB drive in it now (well, 2 120's and an 80, but the others are working fine) that's not even half full, but I'm not one to replace computer hardware with the same thing, it's got to be bigger and better and faster! Or at the very least cooler sounding. Right now Office Depot has a 200GB drive for just under $100. That's bigger and cooler sounding. Especially when I think back to my first pc, a 386SX-16 with the massive 20MB drive. Oddly enough, you can get a used 20MB drive for $30, which doesn't sound like that good of a deal when you figure out that the 200GB drive is a nickel/MB while the old drive is $1.50/MB. If you want to be more modern, you can even get a 16MB Flash Drive for $13 (but they're hard to find that small).

So, now that I've investigated the historical price structure for hard drives, I have to decide the next step.

Try to repair the existing installation (if possible)?

Get a new hard drive and install everything all over again?

Dig out an old hard drive and install everything again?

Some other option I haven't quite conjured up yet?

I guess I'll figure it out when I get home.

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