Yet another night wasted on this damn POS machine.
Ok, UFies update for ya’ll who care. Looks like the brand new drive I bought at
London Drugs less than 3 months ago is pooched. Ever put a marble in a tin can
and rattled it around? Well that’s the sound the drive makes when it boots up.
Sometimes.
Course, the problems may or may not have been compounded by the power supply,
which seemed to boot up the drive depending on if other drives were plugged in
or not. My trip to Paralynx consisted of swapping cables, watching the bios,
swapping IDE controllers, watching the monitor, etc. Wierd stuff that was
happening was things like when in the bios I could only go to the
BOOT tab, no further… it would lock up on me so I
couldn’t move around any more (and it didn’t even finish drawing the screen I
saw later). I could hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot, but not much more. Other
things that were weird was the monitor would show up all fuzzy and wierd, as if
there was a bad VGA pin or something. There was a bad pin by the way,
but the monitor would switch between good and bad reboot to reboot, no touching
the cable or the video card. At one point it booted up into this fuzzy video
mode, got into the POST, then rebooted, as if it knew it wasn’t in the right
state.
Messed up.
Mucho thanks to Jay for helping me troubleshoot and steal a hard drive from him
to replace the root one that is going to be going back to London Drugs for a
refund ASAP. I did drool over the penguin boxes he had, which had real server
hardware….. yummy…. good quality stuff. I’ll have to see if I can get one
off him or figure out how to get a system like that of my own.
Driving back in the snow really, totally sucked 🙁 There were 4 distinct states
of snow I encountered between New West and Abbotsford.
- No snow. Either cleared by traffic or cleared by trucks. No problem to
drive on.
- Snow with grooves down to the concrete. Again, not a big deal to drive
on, just follow the grooves.
- Flat snow. This was a bit worse, with just an even layer of slippery
snow across the road, but again, not a huge deal. Just don’t stear, brake or
hit the gas too hard, and follow the general direction of the road.
- Snow with grooves down to snow. This sucked to drive
on, as you had a slippery top, with grooves to butt up against the insides of
your tires, and a slippery base underneath it. This meant you had to try to
follow the grooves, while not steering too hard lest you slip on the
under-snow. A few times my car seemed like it just wanted to go sideways
towards a ditch (mom, don’t read that last sentence k?). No fun at all. I
did make it home all right though, as you can tell.
So now it’s past 2am, I’m high on cola which I don’t drink anymore but did on
the way home so I could not fall asleep, and I’m working on rebuilding this damn
box again. Lots of fun…
Especially when I factor in the fact that tomorrow morning I’m leaving to go to
Comdex with some friends from highschool and college (in the snow, which was
still going strong when I got in around 1:30am)…. some winner decided that
breakfast was in order, so we’re meeting at 8am to head out to richmond, to pick
up Derf_VW. Yay! Ooooh, only 58 megs to download to update the system. Not
too bad… I’m really glad I’ve got good backups 🙂
Misc Ramblings While Waiting for Things to Download
- I have successfully trained my goldfish! Everytime I turn on the
desklamp near their bowl I give them food, so whenever it’s turned on now,
even in the middle of the night like now, when I turn on the light, they
shoot to the top of the bowl, and give me little fishy accusing looks when I
don’t give them food.
- Ask, or be asked. After a certain point it really doesn’t matter which
way you go.
- Looking for good wallpapers that will work with a dual monitor setup of
2560 by 2048 or so. The closest I’ve found is here, but they are still relatively low res
- Comdex is going to suck. Comdex has sucked for the last 10 years or so,
but the only reason I am going this year is to hang with old friends. The
last few years I’ve either been an exhibitor there, or gone with the minute
hope that there’d be something interesting. Sounds like this year will be
more of the “Microsoft-comdex,” where MS takes over most of the floor space,
and then creates “partner pavillions” where MS-ass-kissers get to set up
their booth space.
- Awk, 3am 🙁
More Misc
Yay! I’m not an idiot! I didn’t back up the directory, but I did do what I
knew I had to do to keep track of the packages insatlled on the system, and back
them up. I didn’t just back up /var/lib/dpkg (which
would have made sense). I did think one step ahead however 🙂 I would have
backed up this data so I could put available and
status into a directory, done a “dpkg –get-selections” from
it to get a listing of the packages that are installed on it, then used that
with “dpkg –set-selections”. Well, smart me had the backup script do a
–get-selections to start with, so I just have to copy the file to the box that
I’m restoring, run –set-selections, and voila!
And I just did that, and it’s downloading the new archives now :P~
Goodnight.