During the past few months, when writing, I’ve had an urge to use a semi-colon. I resist and tell myself that it really doesn’t know what it wants and restructure things so that no semi-colon is possible. I don’t know where the urge comes from. I’ve read the rules on when they should be used but still I get filled with doubt when presented with the option. I stop and appreciate semi-colons in sentences written by people who know how to handle them. Today I gave in to the semi-colon, doubt and all, and there was no complaint on the receiving end. The urge rose up twice more but how much could I push my luck? Not yet being able to make peace with the semi-colon I had to go back down the road of rejection. Those of you who are semi-colon masters, how do you do it? Help me come to terms with this marginalized punctuation.
At least with regards to keeping current on technology. Before my computer died forcing me to upgrade now, I was planning on an upgrade next year which would have been a 7-year life-span. A few months ago I replaced my video card from 1998, which still worked well, so I could have two monitors. My cell phone is from 1998. My stereo receiver is from 1992 and needs replacing since the right channel isn’t working anymore. My laser printer is from 1994. My dvd player was from 1998, but it was replaced a few weeks ago with one that can play multiple formats including from USB devices. Without the USB feature I think I would have kept it awhile longer.
Hey, anyone want a Panasonic A310 dvd player? It still plays any non-recordable media I throw at it. It has a slightly chewed, but working, remote and still has the manual.
I was out for a week and a half and I feel like a feel red-neck with the old motherboard and power supply sitting out in the front yard, but I’m back! The hard drive getting corrupted wasn’t the problem, just a symptom of a failing motherboard. I pulled off the power connector from the motherboard in an attempt to try another power supply but instead I found four burnt out pins and a small bit of melted plastic. That explained the not-quite burning plastic/not-quite ozone smell I was getting for the few minutes my computer would stay on.
I found on some random hardware message board with messages from a few years ago discussing motherboards with similar failures. They were from about when I got mine (6 years ago) and the failure apparently was drawing too much current from the power supply, making sure to take the pwoer supply with it.
I was planning to do the computer upgrade next year and wasn’t really prepared for this, but I kept in mind my goals for the new machine: to be quiet, to be energy efficient, to be relatively inexpensive, and to be upgradable. I picked up a low-end motherboard sporting AMD’s most recent CPU socket since they change sockets less often than Intel and upcoming processors will be backwards compatible. The CPU is an AMD X2 4600; I’m coming from a dual AMD 1900 world so the speed bump isn’t as huge as it might be coming from a single processor, but the tripling of the RAM speed makes the difference quite noticable. An extra bonus, my old CPUs were about 70-75W each, but the new dual core processor is just 65W by itself and it can be clocked more slowly when not in heavy use for even more power savings. The motherboard has pretty much everything built into it so I have no extra cards installed right now which also helps with cooling and air-flow though if I can’t get the on-board graphics to start driving two monitors I may have to resort to buying a video card.
The RAM was a good brand and on sale so I picked up 4GB. The only thing that kept the previous set of hardware from feeling old and slow after 6 years was the 3GB of RAM in it so I knew I didn’t want less than that.
I wanted to keep my hard drives since they have plenty of life in them. The only problem is that modern motherboards are all Serial ATA and I have old-school drive interfaces. So I picked up some adapters for them that I had only heard would exist when Serial ATA came on the scene. Despite seeming a little sketchy with not even a sheet showing what to hook up and just being a bare circuit board they work perfectly!
The new power supply is an Antec NEO HE (high efficiency) power supply. It’s definitely the heaviest PC power supply I’ve used. It is part of the new wave of pwoer supplies that is about 20% more energy efficient, which means it hovers around 80% efficiency. It controls its fan based on temperature, but with not enough noise that I can hear so far. Another nice feature is that you only plug in the cables you will be using in the system so there is no need to find a place to stash all those loose ends; yet another bonus for air flow!
The result? Something much faster, much quieter, much more energy efficient, and hopefully a platform that will last awhile. Oh yeah, a most of the components are RoHS compliant which means they don’t have the usual nasty stuff used for building electronics.
The final Price is Right with Bob Barker – I hadn’t watched the show in years and I mostly watched it as a kid. It was fun seeing this. The excitement of everyone on the show was awesome and a number of cars were won. The value of the final showcase was about $90,000!
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – I thought this was a good ending to the series, while touching on corporate influence on government and focusing on how corporations try to stomp on the rights of individuals. The final battle is also something I hadn’t seen before.
Night at the Museum – I thought this was going to be fairly light, but it ended up being solid fun all the way through. Dick van Dyke is over 80 and he can still dance!
Knocked Up – This movie had a lot more depth than I was expecting, and it was a lot longer than I was expecting from a comedy. It’s at its best when it’s playing for pure comedy or for the serious moments, when it can’t decide which one to choose it seems to be at its weakest.
Idiocracy – Have you ever feared for the future of society when you look at all the dumb-asses out there? This movie shows you a potential path things might take. I have to recommend this to everyone. It’s funny too, which sometimes makes you wonder if you’re one of the dumb-asses.
Transformers – Who doesn’t like giant robots?!
Anastasia – We watched this again just to make sure everything was hooked up again in the tv-room. It’s still has good songs, is well animated, has good voice talent, and is a good story.
Rocky Balboa – The finale to the Rocky series and it’s right up there with the first one. It gives a good feeling of his loneliness in his search and has been popping into my head in the days since I’ve watched it. If you liked the Rocky movies, or even just the first one, see this.
The Painted Veil – A relationship in the midst of a cholera epidemic. It starts in a broken place and the changes are smooth and subtle. It doesn’t seem like things have changed until you think back to where they were and that makes this one worth watching.
Thursday night I was playing chess with Peter when I heard a clunk-clunk from the hard drive. Then my computer was frozen. I copied down the state of the chess board and tried rebooting which the computer informed me was impossible becasuee it was an unmountable drive.
I tried booting into the Window recovery console, but that told me that I had no hard drives in my system. I figured I was going to be buying and installing another hard drive. I tried different controllers, and different cables to see if that would help but no change.
Finally I was resolved to trying to salvage data and get a new hard drive so I plugged it in as a slave on Nicole’s computer. That managed to boot after trying chkdsk and failing with something like: Unspecified disk error. That’s good for confidence building. I set it for the thorough fixing and had it reboot into that and after about an hour it repaired the file system! I lost all my bookmarks, but I had a recent enough copy that I was able to restore. Yay!