I've never been a fan of New Year's Resolutions. I grew up in the tradition of making these resolutions, and they were generally forgotten by the time the second week of January had rolled by. However, as I've grown, I've come to realize that resolutions are not necessarily bad things. Maybe we need to repurpose them as goals.
The preceding was written three days ago, and is a perfect illustration of why I still set goals, but am not horribly crushed when they are either not realized, or not realized within a stated timeframe. One of my 2014 blog goals is to write more than I did in 2013. If I publish this before the end of the month, I'll be tied with my 2013 January output. If I publish more more blog, I'll be ahead. There's just one little problem, and that is the intersection of blog and life.
I've had overtime on every weekly 2014 timesheet I've turned in so far. Now, don't get me wrong- overtime is quite the blessing to this salaryman, and Jennifer certainly appreciates it, but at a certain point one needs a bit of balance. After all, I've had my Raspberry Pi for ~a month, and because of both timing and equipment issues (and weather!), have barely had time to do much more than install Raspbian. This makes me moderately internet iSad (which means I'm not really losing any sleep over it). Today was a regular, eight hour shift, and it was nice.
The other challenges the Secret Underground Lair has experienced as an organization over the past month have been equipment related. I still need to acquire an inexpensive powered USB hub for my Pi. Daniel had a catastrophic video failure last week- fortunately for him, it was a cable that failed rather than the monitor or video card. Just our luck, I suppose, as cables don't generally just fail. Then, just a day ago, Mr. T's monitor failed. This scenario is actually more interesting- and frustrating. Mr. T has a Dell Win7 box with a 23" ASUS monitor. The monitor and video card are both less than two years old, so failure, while an option, is not highly probable. Jennifer and I had been out shopping when Mr. T texted Jennifer and informed her that the power at the house had gone out. Not soon after, Daniel texted a similar message. Not long after we got back, the power did a dipsy-doodle for a third time, and I called Commonwealth Edison (our electricity provider). I spent a couple of minutes doing the auto-attendant menu game, and finally got a work order to investigate the brownouts.
Mr. T's monitor eventually came back to life, but what I don't understand is why it failed in the first place? We have a whole house surge protector, and he has his system hooked up to an APC UPS. We talked about this issue for over an hour, and finally he mentioned that the monitor had an external power supply. We disconnected that, and then plugged it in to a different outlet. The power light came on (always a good sign)! I then showed him how to use a digital multimeter (DMM) to test the output of a power supply. Everything checked out fine, and he reconnected the power supply to the monitor. I don't think I was surprised at all when the monitor started up.
Once again, no real data news to report. I've made a very rough training template- its so rough its more suggestion than draft. This is more than a bit frustrating, as I have plenty of data, but no analysis or output.That's all for now. As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to,
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