Oh, and Dad, this is not a reflection of you asking me to help you with your computer, but my own personal failings and reasons that I have started to wonder how I can put my socks on in the morning by myself. Since you don't have a computer right now you won't be seeing this until after I've explained in person the problems I had with it.

Anyway, you'd figure any moron with 15+ years dealing with computers and PC hardware could deal with the issues, right? Throw in a disk checker (such as SpinRite), use something to clone the bad disk to a new one, do some cleanup, upgrade everything, install all the patches and updates, done in an evening right? Heck, I even had an older USB hard drive that, when taken apart, yielded a nice 230G PATA drive to use (and being the computer is 5+ years old, with C: being a whopping 13G drive, even this small-by-today's-standards drive would be a huge improvement). Even better I even had a better (not by much) video card to put in.

So I started.... here's a list of what went wrong to start with.

• Spent lots of time mucking around and cloning the wrong drive. Cloned C: to the new drive instead of E: (clearly written on the paper that I got) which was the one that was failing.
  
• Spent lots of time plugging drives in and out figuring out which was which and what names windows (XP) would give the drives if they were plugged in and out.
  
• Finally decided to just get rid of the E: all together, re-install / move the data on E: (which was where program files were being moved to as the 13G C: was 90% full), and leave F: (digital photo storage) alone (other than re-partitioning it, as it was a 40G drive with 10G of NTFS available and the rest old linux partitions!).
  
• At some point a wayward IDE cable made it's way into the CPU fan unnoticed, and the system ran for a while with no CPU fan, until it slowly crashed and (almost) burned. Left it overnight at this point to let everything cool off nicely to stop the warbling motherboard alarm from going off and telling me the CPU was slowly sizzling itself to death.
  

Almost all done, just need to swap the new drive in and done!

Now up until now the computer had been sitting sideways on the floor, with all the old drives still in it (just in case I needed to remember where one was plugged in or something) and the new one sitting on top.

You other geeks can see what's coming can't you? Yea....

I moved the new drive just a tiny bit on the top of the case and heard a tiny little "pop" and that smell that no computer person wants to smell, the smell of the magic smoke escaping.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

Now this was mid-day today, after 2 (calendar) days of working on this.

And there was no luck for me here, no drive magically working afterward, it was dead, dead, dead. Completely setup, updated, patched, and not-recognizable by the BIOS at all. My wife can attest that I had none-too-kind words for myself after that.

Did I mention that yesterday I was out at the lake with some friends and got myself nicely sunburnt? Not even a nice all over burn, instead it's all blotchy. Bleah. And hurts.

OK, back to the computer. What to do. OK, start over again.

• I found another older USB hard drive, only 160G but still usable. Nope, won't boot, dead and old. Pitch into the garbage.
  
• Last shot was a nice 500G external that I have (sorry Brian). Complete overkill for Dad, but it'll work.
  
• Repeat the same steps. Clone the drive to start.
  
• Clone done, swap cables.... drive starts to boot to windows and reboots. WTF? OK, maybe 500G is too much for the BIOS to handle. Re-jigger some things and try the clone again, oh, and there it goes again working. Odd (more on this later).
  
• Reboot, ensure it's booting the right drive, backup the bad drive to it, do the Windows Update and Patch Dance^tm. Software moving, re-installing, re-updating, etc.
  

OK, so the motherboard was one of the first ones with ATA100 PATA ports, and it actually had 4 IDE ports on it, 2 "standard" ones and 2 that show up to a secondary SCSI BIOS. For best performance I figure C: is master on the first ATA100, the pictures drive is master on the second ATA100, and the DVD drive is primary master on the "standard" IDE ports.

Plug it all in and boot up. Computer goes "beee woooo beee woooo". Hmm.... not good. Unplug DVD drive, computer starts booting. Weird. OK, lets boot up without the DVD in at all. Boots, windows boot screen comes up, aaaaaannnnnnd....... reboots.

Again with the screaming at the sky.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

Another hour or so of fucking around with it it looks like something either in the form of a drive incompatibility or maybe the magic smoke got let out of the the SCSI controller. Re-do the drives so they're all on the "standard" IDE ports, reboot (pray), see it working, shut down, reboot again to make 100% sure, it boots, and shut it down and get it ready to go back to it's home tomorrow.

Yay.

Then of course there's my other buddy's computer that he wanted re-installed, so that was started next.

All's well that ends well at 2am on a Friday :)

This time the conversation went something like this:

• Telemarketer: Hello? (almost like she wasn't sure why the phone was ringing, wonder in they have people working from home)
  
• Me: Hello.
  
• Telemarketer: Hello, this is Sunny! You were interested in lowering your interest rates?
  
• Me: Not really. If I ask to talk to a manager will I get to talk to a human, or will I get put in an infinite hold loop? Like what happened last time
  
• Telemarketer: Pause Do you really want the truth? OMG, honesty!
  
• Me: Ah, say no more. How about if I ask to get taken off the call list?
  
• Telemarketer: I'll take you off manually.
  
• Me: Thanks and hang up
  

For A's birthday last night we went out to the Blue Rodeo concert out in Abbotsford. Had a good time, even with my allergies starting to stand up and make themselves known. I saw them back in 2002 in Vancouver, where they were great as well.

The concert itself was awesome, the opening act was Dustin Bentall, son of Barney Bentall, who I'd honestly never heard of before. Apparently Canadian Rock Royalty though. For the encores they brought out Dustin and his band as well as Barney on stage, and did a great extended version of "Try". Dustin's music was good enough I bought the CD, supporting local music and all that stuff.

All pics were with my LX3, chosen more for the colors and lighting, as sadly the only 2.5x zoom didn't give a whole lot of choice in view (I was jelous of the 18x zoom that the person beside me had!). I think the pics showed up pretty well though.

The band doing their thing.

Ohhhhh.... light show....

Jim Cuddy rockin' out.

Everyone on stage for the encore.

Click through to the image page on Flickr for my helpfully tagged who's who.

• Sometimes having a faster shutter speed is worth a bit more noise. Most of these shots were ISO 200-400, with some noise cleanup afterwards. The noise sucked, but it's way more fixable in post processing than blurry band members.
  
• Your camera will lie to you about the exposure, you want to select either spot, 'center area' or a similar exposure setting and then focus on the center of the band, where it's lightest. Otherwise the camera will try to make the entire field of view (bright band area and dark theatre) into focus. You only really care about the band on stage, and generally speaking they will be bright enough that you can still get a good exposure without having to bump up the ISO of slow down the shutter speed too much.
  
• A little bit of a bump in the "clarity" setting in lightroom can give just a hint more definition in things like the heads in the foreground in the last image above. Just a hint though, or you start to lose/blur out the definition of things you care about.
  
• Shoot RAW if you can (ie: always). It'll give you the most forgiveness in post processing for dealing with lighting conditions (IE: your camera trying to figure out if the red/blue/yellow lights on stage are supposed to be white or not), noise reduction, etc.
  

I took some movie clips as well, so I'm playing with those in iMovie right now.

I have to say too, that technology is pretty awesome. While in the concert I was taking (horrible) pictures with my iPhone and posting them to facebook, able to research who Barney Bentall was on Wikipedia and could have either bought the latest CD from either of these guys and had the music loaded on my phone, or (through a few different tools) found their music on the pirate sites and had it starting to download onto my home computer. Wow, how the world has changed....

• 26" Computer case with 450W Antec Power Supply
  
• CCNA Course Bundle: 2x Cisco 2501 and CCNA books
  
• 24 Port Unmanaged switch
  
• APC Back-UPS CS 350
  
• SCSI Hardware RAID Box
  
• Antec P160 Computer Case
  

There are lots of other things, old hard drives in the 2/4/40gb range, USB cables, tons of PATA hard drive cables, etc.

About a month ago I bought a set of "premium" apple headphones for use with my iPhone. The default iPhone headset had been the victim of being crushed under my laptop, and the microphone/clicker wasn't clicking properly. I figured why not. Two days ago the clicker and microphone on the new, premium, expensive headphones stopped working. Aside from the fact that this is the same issue as before, I was a bit perturbed. So I call the store that I got them from. First they told me I'd have to go through apple, but when pressed (as in "I bought them a month ago and they're not working, why the hell can't I just bring them back for exchange?!") they said I could bring them back, but they were out of stock. I told them to order them in, but that I would deal with Apple and if they could help me, that'd be fine.

Based on my previous Apple support experience, I figured this would be a quick 5 minute call which would end up in waiting a couple of days for boxes to be delivered to the right places, and all would be fine.

This is where my troubles started.

Is it wrong to think that the guy isn't completely insane?

Now, on to the spoilers and bitchings!