lifebsideben

Why is MySpace so popular? It can’t be because of their tour. The first slide, uhm, ok, I should create a profile (not bloody likely), ok, well clicking ‘next’ just gives:

Sweet!

Tags: bitching

This project started so innocently… build a RAID server for the house… out of mostly parts I had (except for the drives and drive enclosure). Now, there’s absolutely nothing left of the old machine I started with except for the keyboard and the monitor (which is actually not mine, I’m borrowing it from the stuff in storage at my place.)

Most recently, I suspected my motherboard was getting flaky–it had been through some rough times, and it wasn’t always recognizing the AMD CPU properly. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, even after BIOS upgrade. Ok, picked up a mobo+CPU combo (super cheap!) from Fry’s… $99 for a P4 506 (2.6GHz) and ECS mobo with onboard video. This goes into the used, but new to me, case I bought off a guy at work (it’s a really nice piano-black Antec). Oh, and this new mobo has 2 DDR2 and 2 DDR ram slots. Well, I’ve only got DDR RAM of course, 1×512 and 2×256. So that’s a max of 768M. Not too bad, but hey… now the VMWare Server is free, and works great on this fast processor… should get some more RAM! 1G of DDR was $90 (to take me to 1.5G total), but 2G of DDR2 Kingston was $149 with a $20 rebate. Let’s do that…

So, now I’ve got 2G RAM. How come it takes 30 minutes for Linux to boot? Web searching… experimenting… arrgh. I realize setting mem=900M on the boot line makes it work fine again. Anything 1G+ doesn’t. After much web searching, I get pointed to /proc/mtrr. Every region in there is “uncacheable”, which is a Bad Thing. Another post points to the onboard videocard. I really want to use the onboard video, that was part of why I got this… hmm. After much more exasperation, tweaking the video aperature (I think it was) to 64M instead of 32M, cleared everything up. Why? I don’t know. But all the mtrr regions are now cacheable and happy. Totally weird. And another PC upgrade that should have taken 15 minutes, that took 4 hours.

But at least now, X doesn’t lock the machine up hard, it doesn’t randomly crash, there isn’t near-constant noise in the logs about USB devices (and said USB devices actually work now), and I don’t need a video card in there either. So, looking pretty positive now.

Anyone want to buy an old Asus mobo with installed AMD XP+… real cheap?!

There’s a little water in the garage. Maybe from the washer? No worries.

Hmm, there’s more water in the garage. Water connections on the washer look good. Uh oh, hissing noise coming from the water heater. Better turn off the water and electricity to it and call the plumber! Email the owners of the townhouse to tell them what’s up. Getting a recommendation on a plumber… calling first thing in the morning.

Awoken at 7:30am by the next-door neighbor, she thinks her water heater might be leaking and is it wet in our place? Uh, no, that’s from us. Sorry. Damn, it’s in her garage (which has carpet–of course) too, although it doesn’t look TOO bad over there. Criminy. Oh, and there’s more than I remember the night before in our place, even though I turned off the water… including damn near everything in storage down there, is wet. The server is OK, but the UPS is sitting in 1/4 inch of water (as is the hacked-up power strip!). Amazingly, everything’s still on and functioning. I move some stuff to higher ground, open the doors and plug in some fans to try and dry stuff out.

Neighbor has a plumber she likes, we call him. Leave messages. Really, a plumber without a cellphone? What’s up with that? Anyhow, finally get him over at 10:15. A few checks and he says “yep, you need a new water heater… that’ll be $85/hr and I need to go buy the new water heater. no, I don’t take credit cards.” Grrr.

So right now, he’s still out shopping for a water heater, or something. It’s noon. I keep thinking I’m paying for him to be in line at Home Depot. Let’s hope not.

Tags: home_repair

Hmm, is this what happens when you stay home during the day? I’m getting the water heater replaced after it dumped a bunch of water all over our floor (oh and through the wall to the neighbor’s place!). I just got a call from someone asking to speak to the “lady of the house”. Pretty quaint, and after some deferrment, they asked for the “man or lady of the house”, which I guess means me although the wife might sometimes disagree. Anyhow, they were from the “Dove Foundation”, and were doing scoping calls I guess for something called “Feature Films for Families”. I yahoo search’d them while she was talking, and came up with http://www.familytv.com/ which actually didn’t seem too offensive. I asked if they were associated with the Mormon church at all, as I noticed a site “ldsvideo.com” in the search results, but she claimed they weren’t affiliated with any religious or political group. She wanted to know if these folks could give me a call back, and now I was intrigued. What’s the scam here? Sounds like they want fundage to film “family friendly” movies. Now, understand I’m vehemently anti-censorship… so if this turns into any kind of fight-Hollywood/stifle-creativity thing, I’m going to do my best to undo whatever I think they’re up to. But I do have a little kid, and I must admit I’m game to at least hear what these folks think they’re going to accomplish. That’s a long way from giving them a donation, and I’ve probably already put in motion the forces which are bound to produce junk mail / calls by the boatload, but ah well. Let’s see how the old phone soliciting game is played these days…

Yahoo Tech launched this morning, and it’s looking good, although I still don’t like the giant slide-o-focus flash module. Check it out–even though the primary target audience is less-tech-savvy folks than myself, I can see using it a lot to keep the list of “my tech” up to date and comparison shopping for various new items.

It’s worth checking out just for a preview of some of the dhtml-enabled site features I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of from Yahoo in the future.