What The ...?

12.07.2004

Ok, my updates have been sparse over teh last week and a half. Here's what's going on in the land of Russ:

• Home PC - laying around in different parts as I try to figure out why I can't reinstall Windows.
• X-mas shopping - 90% done!
• Home repairs - Need to get a leaky spot in the roof fixed and see if the heater is really working or not.
• Car - still liking the Explorer. That's liking, not licking.
• Work - Still working.

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No More Flats

11.27.2004

Ok, so I managed to survive my holiday flat tire the only way I know how. I bought a new car.

Thanks to my gradually improving credit rating and dislike for my pick-up, I found out earlier in the week that it was cheaper (well, almost) to buy a new car than to keep what I had. Ever since renting an Explorer on the last Florida trip I had decided that would be the model I would get next, and I had found a used one in Nashville that was the about the right price, right features, right color. Since I had to wait around and get my flat tire fixed, I thought I would visit my local Ford dealership and see if they had anything not shown on their internet site.

I went ready for a barrage of sleazy salespeople. Instead I got the guy from Rex who sold me all of my electronics equipment at a really good deal(s) 4 years ago, Lee. Lee even remembered me ("Hey, I sold you a 53" Sony back at Rex!"). Thanks to Lee, we cut through all the salesman crap and he found me a good deal with some rebates that made it cheaper for me to buy a new car than the used one I had been looking at. So, thanks to a nail in a tire and salesman I seem to be stalking, I am now the proud owner of a 2005 Explorer Eddie Bauer 4X2 - 4.0L SOHC V6.

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Holiday Flat II

11.25.2004

Ah, Thanksgiving. A time for giving thanks for and eating turkey. And for me, a day to change a flat tire since I managed to drive over a nail last night! Wednesday was just not my day.

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The Loons Are Loose

11.24.2004

Usually the world and I get along pretty well. Part of it is that I respect how the world works, and the world in turn respects how I work. Well, the world's schedule got moved around a little Wednesday and it pissed me off!

The silly season begins on Thanksgiving. On that day, everyone begins to act stupid. You can turn left if you saw that the light was green at some point in the past. People walking in front of you will seemingly stop and move over to get in your way. Traffic triples. I'm ok with this. I know when it starts, I know when to expect it. As such, I usually make plans for my last trip of pre-holiday supplies (food, toiletries, and such) on the day before Thanksgiving to then limit the amount of time I have to spend with the stupid.

Except someone let them all out a day early this year.

I made a trip to Target to get some groceries. It seems each woman there had a minimum of 3 children tethered to a buggy. Each woman would manage to find another woman to talk to (along with their 3 tethered children). The 2, or 8, of them would then park buggies and stand in a fashion to somehow take up the whole aisle. And I managed to find this on 3 separate aisles while I was there.

People were everywhere. Walking slow. Getting in my way.

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Hard Drive Fun

11.22.2004

2 weeks ago I ordered new hard drives. One of mine was developing some bad sectors, which makes me paranoid enough to replace it at the drop of a hat. 1 week ago, a box of hard drives was waiting on my stoop. At that point my real troubles began.

I opened the box to find two Western Digital 250GB hard drives. And that was it. No install discs (usually packed with scripts to transfer data), no instructions, nothing. I'm still running Windows 2000, and I had heard about a problem with large hard drives. It turns out that there's a natural limit of 137GB on a hard drive for most versions of Windows. Luckily, they've patched this for Windows 2000 (in Service Pack 4) and XP (Service Pack 1). I had installed SP4, so I thought I was good to go.

I installed the 1st drive and.... nothing happened. I opened up "My Computer" and didn't see "Your New Hard Drive". I went into the Control Panel to Add New Hardware, and the drive was already there, it even had drivers installed. I was guessing the drive needed to be formatted, but I needed a way to point to the drive to format it. After trying multiple guesses for a day, I finally went to the Western Digital website for an answer. It seems I needed to add the drive under Control Panel - >Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. OK, I can do that. Once I did that it seemed to work ok. I now had a 233GB (after formatting, you always lose a little from formatting) hard drive showing up! I tried the same steps on the second drive. Only 131GB were showing up. That didn't sound right, so I tried to re-format the drive, but the max size it would give me was 131GB.

After trying all kinds of things (including a wrong turn when I accidently knocked the extra IDE card loose), I finally went back to the Western Digital site and searched through their tools. It seems that they have a tool that not only transfers your data and shows you how to install, but also sets up and formats the drive. I only had to search down from the product page 4 extra levels (at about 1.5 days/level) to find out that this was a much needed application to make my hard drive experience a happy one. Western Digital bastards.

So now I have all my hard drives installed and recognized. I'm moving files from old drives to new drives now, hoping to soon have 578GB of potential formatted hard drive hardness from my two new 250GB drives and an old 120GB. All of my old stuff almost filled up an 80GB drive. Now I bet I'll never have to delete anything ever again!

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