16 posts tagged “technology”

So as an addendum to my last post, when I brought my PC back home and plugged it in, the problem started happening again.  Neither hard drive was accessible.  I opened up the box and plugged in only the primary (boot) drive, and although I still get an error when I boot up, I can read from the drive and run Windows.  I wish I could get at the files on the other drive, though! The DVD burner burns CDs like a charm, so I spent some time this morning backing up my latest photos. These include photos from three Flickr Meetup events and Sasquatch, so it took a few disks.

Last night, I went to another Flickr Meetup event at Victrola's new roastery cafe. I didn't stay super long because Elizabeth arrived after her movie for a ride home, but it was fun. I took a bunch of photos, too.

Hole in the head

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Tonight starts the six-movie weekend with La Vie En Rose. I get the feeling this weekend's going to busy, especially if I try to fit in a trip to Fry's to buy a new power supply or IDE cables.

Well, now I've done it. My CD burner just upped and stopped working a couple of weeks ago (right after Elizabeth burned a mix CD for the mixclub), so I ordered a new drive (a DVD-burner, since even the better ones are around $30).

Today, I tried to install it.

Somehow, when I was in there replacing two plugs, I messed up something major. Now, the hard drives aren't recognized upon bootup, and I've checked all the connections. I'm really worried that I didn't ground myself well enough and I damaged the hard drives. I haven't been incredibly diligent with the backups lately, although most files don't change much. I would lose photos from the last 3 weeks or so, any minor file changes (including our wedding spreadsheet), and many MP3s that I downloaded legally over the last few months.

As I do use this computer as a backup for my work computer, my employer's tech guru is currently trying to diagnose the problem. So far, he hasn't had much luck (he can't even get the PC to boot from a USB floppy device so that he can flash the BIOS).

I guess the worst case scenario is that I lost all my data and the computer. If I didn't lose the data but the box itself is useless, I guess I can get a new PC and an external IDE case to read my old files. Not that I can necessarily afford that right now...

Edit: Somehow, he got the thing to work. He flashed the BIOS and gradually added the drives, primary (boot) first, then the second one. He's going to add the DVD burner while he's in there, and I guess it's good to go. His theory is that either the BIOS was having some trouble with one of the new components or the power supply could use some help. I guess this means I'm about to be in the market for a new PSU.

Not me, I'm doing fine. Instead, I'm dealing with a couple of other injuries:

• Linus got in a fight sometime late Sunday morning, or at least I think he did. He lost his collar in the process, and he had a few small wounds, mostly around his neck. He was acting pretty mopey all of yesterday, not jumping up to higher perches and taking it easy. But today he's acting happier, so maybe he fought off any infection. I hope so!


• My CD burner may have just crapped out. Either that, or I'm having a string of bad luck in getting it to recognize blank discs. I just burned a music CD yesterday afternoon, and now that I want to back up some photos, it's balking. Boo. It won't even read existing (burned) discs, and I know they're OK because my work laptop opens them. I've restarted the computer with no luck. Shoot. Adding a hard drive was one thing. Replacing the only CD-R/W drive I have is a little more daunting. Good thing I have an external HD for temporary backups.

The latest release of uTorrent caused me to stop being able to download stuff, which usually isn't a problem because I really don't download much TV or anything. However, I missed the latest episode of the Legion of Super-Heroes cartoon, and I hadn't been able to download it. (Dude, it featured the formation of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, plus Matter-Eater Lad and Tyroc appeared!)

Despite my fears at messing up my router or Internet connection, about 10 minutes' work set up port forwarding and I was able to download the show right away. Yay Internets!

So things are starting to come together for the wedding, except for the hundred or so things left on the checklist:

Venues: Both done, reserved, deposited for. We need to find a rehearsal dinner site, but then I have to pick my wedding party, too...

Photographer: We found this woman on Craiglist who is trying to get into the lucrative wedding market (she usually does portraits), and she's giving us a great deal. Her rates were reasonable and she's giving us a Craigslist discount. I think between her photos and those of all our friends, we'll do OK. (Taking a cue from itsolivia, we're going to set up a group photo pool on Flickr for guests to share their photos.)

Wedding dress: Apparently it's amazing, and I can't wait to see it (six months from Sunday)!

Save-the-date cards: Ordered and on their way.

Web site: Already made (or version 1.1 anyway); URL will be shared with potential guests first.

Now for the stuff that we need to worry about address soon:

Food: We're saving on other parts of the wedding, so we'll probably spend the bulk of our money on the food and drink. We need to start testing caterers and call the few restaurants that we know cater and see what they can do for us.

Music: I refuse to spend hundreds of dollars for your typical wedding DJ, who will force us all to do the Macarena. I either need to find someone cool who would be willing to play songs that we like for not too much money (I don't know too many DJs personally), or we need to get a laptop, load it with iTunes and massive numbers of songs, and make some playlists. I'm leaning toward the latter, but maybe we can come up with a solution for the former.

Wedding party: I have a pretty small group of close male friends, and one of them is going to be living in Africa by the time the wedding comes along. No matter what, I can't put them all up there with me because someone has to be in the seats. I'm trying to figure out what to do; should I go with one Best Man, two groomsmen? Three groomsmen? This is one of those things that's stressful because you have to rank your friends. Elizabeth is waiting for me to decide on numbers so she can form her party.

Lodging: Thanks to fisticuffs for her tip on putting wedding guest lodging up for bid from various hotels in the area. A number of them don't seem to feel my maximum price means anything, but some have been good. A surprising number see my e-mail as "smohundro@", see "Steve Mohundro" on the form I filled out, and they still address the e-mail to "Mr. Muhundro". I don't use "smohundro" because "smuhundro" was already taken! Geez.

Wedding bands: I guess we need to work on those at some point.

Honeymoon: We have enough frequent flier miles for at least one of us to fly free, and we have a few ideas of places to go. Alaska? Hawaii? Mexico? Thailand? We need to give it a little more thought.

I suppose I could just keep all this checklisty stuff on theknot.com, but that site depresses me a little. And it's completely geared toward a bride doing the planning and the groom keeping completely out of the picture. You can't even have two separate logins/passwords for a couple's account!

We are currently snowed in by a little less than an inch of wet snow. We have provisions for the next few days but that's it. I hope we can survive.

Back yard snow

negihama

Raymond in black and white

He is huge for only seven weeks old. I also got to see my sister and her husband, my aunt, uncle, and cousin from Bellingham. We ate all the usual food, lots of it, plus some Greek dish that my sister's friend brought.
- We cleaned up some of the house, in case we get guests.
- I tried to fix my Dad's computer, which was b0rked when he installed Norton Confidential. Or rather, Internet Explorer was b0rked. I installed Firefox for him and it works fine. It sounds like his hard drive is about to fail, so he has bigger problems in the works.
- I contracted a pretty lousy cold: Stuffiness, sniffling, irritated throat, the works. I spent most of today inside.
- We got a little snow in Seattle. It will probably melt tomorrow afternoon and turn into ice that does not go away for days. Still, it was very pretty tonight. See my photos.

I hate close races and recounts (go Webb, go Burner, etc.), but things turned out very well.

I still need to upload my photos from the Anathallo show, but it was excellent. Very, very good. I haven't enjoyed a show like this in a long time. Chop Suey has such a small stage and they fit seven people (with a dozen instruments between them at least) up there. And the sound was great. More on that later.

Iminur

Re: My previous technical queries: My hard drive is now in DMA mode and seems a lot faster. I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 this morning, and it seems to be working great.

Firefox: Is FF 2.0 working well for everyone who's tried it? I've held off upgrading in case there are some show-stopping bugs, but I'd love to start taking advantage of some of the new features soon.

Hard drives and PC power: I've had this new hard drive installed for maybe a month, and I've experienced the following problem: When the computer is accessing the new drive, everything in Windows seems to slow down. I don't have this problem with my old hard drive. Both drives are IDE drives; the partition on the new drive is 241 GB in size; I also seem to have a slightly slower write speed to the new disk. I'm wondering what the cause is: 1) My power supply isn't enough to handle both drives/the new drive on top of everything else, so that's why things are slowing down; 2) the drive, one of the newer ones with Perpendicular Recording, is somehow too good for my pitiful computer; 3) Some sort of caching configuration is off (that only affects the new drive; or 4) I have a defective drive. Any ideas?

So I signed up for last.fm as mynameisnotkent (surprise! "kent" was already taken). I got the scrobbing plug-in to work with QMP, so I don't have to switch computer mp3 players. Everything was going swimmingly until I cleared out some cookies and tried to relog in to last.fm. Every time I enter my password and click OK the page goes blank. I checked the support forums, and this has happened before but clearly isn't widespread (it may be happening because of a slow Web server; however, no one else has reported it recently and it's not in their FAQ). I cleared my browser cache and had no success trying it again.

Anyway, it was fun while it lasted. Someday, I guess I'll use the site again.

I dreamt last night that I forgot my sketchbook in Seattle when I went to SPX, so I was contemplating a new sketchbook theme and trying to find a new book in Bethesda. I hope this means I definitely remember to bring it and not that I definitely forget it. A bunch of cartoonists that were at SPX in 2004 are there again, so either I get a new sketch from them or I don't ask them a second time. I'm thinking about getting some "time" sketches from any repeats; however, I don't want to carry the big "time" sketchbook around with me. So I might make a list and bring it along. Not sure.