Seven

Back in the early Eighties, there was a somewhat local band I liked called the Lamont Cranston Band. They played a really nice rock-blues fusion, and had some regional hits, but never went on to the big time. One of the more interesting songs from their Upper Mississippi Shakedown LP was something of a novelty called "Seven". In this tune, the singer laments that seven used to be his lucky number, but now everything associated with seven was bad.

Its not really that way with me. I don't believe in "lucky" numbers. If you would ask, I would tell you that my favorite numbers are five and four (in that order)- not that it means anything.

But... seven is a fairly special number for me, as far as this blog goes: its like the ceiling, a barrier to be broken through. With the hours and times that I work, I've found that getting more that seven blogs per month is challenging. And, when those times hit when I've got absolutely nothing in the idea tank, well... I really have nothing.

Today, though... today is a first: I literally just finished the post Drivers, and immediately started this one. As I was waking up this afternoon after a longer than expected Friday night at work, I was thinking about finishing and publishing the previously mentioned blog when it occurred to me that on most months if I publish seven blogs that's quite an achievement. And Drivers is #7 for the month of March, 2014. So , this has the potential of being #8.

                                                       ******WE*INTERRUPT*THIS*BLOG*FOR*AN IMPORTANT*ANNOUNCEMENT******

Up. And. Running. 5.30.14 (30.5.14)

It took nearly a month, but Jennifer's new rig is operational and has been deployed! The machine was complete around a month ago, but then I decided to install an additional top mounted cooling fan. We had the box open today, and I casually mentioned to Mr. T that I had two 120mm fans, so he said we might as well use both, so we side mounted the second one (the blue ones are the ones we installed today). Windows 7 is mounted on an SSD- it boots incredibly quickly.

The only real issue I had was getting the PC online; I get a pass on this, though, because its actually the very first PC I've built from the ground up. We were watching a few episodes of the Big Bang Theory and having some incredible turkey that Jennifer had baked. I think we watched three episodes before the answer came to me: I had not installed the drivers from the motherboard utilities CD. Once I did that, we were good to go. I discovered an interesting quirk about this PC: the two front panel mounted USB ports are only for I/O... this is something new. Mr. T and I had prepared for taking the PC online for the first time by downloading some of our favorite utilities (Avast, CCleaner and Defraggler) onto a USB stick.Strangely, though, the PC did not acknowledge the existence of the stick. Odd, as I had the transceiver for the mouse in the next port over. I pulled the stick out, and swapped places with the transceiver. Mouse worked fine, but not the stick.  Oh, well, on to Plan B- I went to each site and downloaded the software. Suspecting a possible issue with the drive, I plugged it into a top mounted USB port, and there it was! So the rule for this PC is: Front for I/O, top for data.

After the Chrome installation (this is the standard 1st download here at the SUL), I downloaded the Amazon Player. If you purchase music on Amazon, you really owe it to yourself to download the player, as most music purchased on Amazon becomes part of your Amazon personal cloud. So, even though I hadn't loaded my personal music library to Windows Media Player, I had access to a few hundred songs. I fired up Axe's Rock 'N' Roll Party In The Streets and then Night's Hot Summer Nights- classic late 70's rock which are probably unfamiliar to many. I played these two tracks as I downloaded the Steam client.

I think that's all for now. No data news or updates today, but I should have some speeds and feeds in the next blog or so.

Until them. I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

More Steam, punk!

It’s time for a rant. Per internet protocol, this rant is hardly serious- it’s merely an expression against some minor perceived frustrations of modern life.

As compensation for a purchase I recently made, a certain manufacturer included in their product an offer for some .mp3 downloads. Being a fairly savvy consumer, I understood that the manufacturer most likely was betting that the average consumer would not redeem all ten .mp3s that were the offer.

Well, I am quite the music aficionado, and I was happy to get ten songs out of the deal. It literally took around three hours, so I’m not sure what my ROI is. I suppose the bottom line is that I was able to fill a few holes in my collection. The downside was I was not able to fill a few holes in my music collection. There were artists that were unavailable that did not surprise me. What surprised me was popular songs that were not available from certain one hit wonders.

Okay- end of rant. I got some good  music- considering that the actual product cost 14 USD, and an .mp3 generally costs something like ninety-nine cents, I only paid four dollars for the actual product.

Back in the real world, I’m listening to a tune from Axe’s first (and best, in my opinion) album as I write. “Jennifer” is a great tune. Behind me, the XW4200 workstation is resting. I finally got up the courage to fight cables, track down power supplies, and bring the workstation back online. It is re-entering service as an Ubuntu box; our son is all excited that Steam is now available on the Ubuntu platform, so he is going to get the opportunity to start working with Linux. I read some of the Canonical blurbs about Quantal Quetzal, and it looks somewhat different from the last Linux I played with, which I think was 8.10 LTS. The install was slightly odd- about a ten minute preload where not much happened onscreen. The rest of the install was typically painless- Canonical have the install process down. One improvement over the last time I did this is the informational screens… all in all I’m pretty jazzed about this latest version of Ubuntu.

The other benefit to the Linux install is the reclaiming of office space- the Secret Underground Lair is unfortunately no stranger to clutter, and this most recent project forced me to do a bit of straightening, and more will follow.

One final note which pretty much pegs the geek-meter at 11 concerns printers. I think I had previously mentioned that we had picked up a used HP printer at our local Goodwill store. Because of the way the office is set up, this printer sits on top of a pair of PCs- until tonight, it had rested on three. The activation of the Linux box required some repositioning of equipment, so now it sits on top of two PCs. What really pegs the meter, though, is this printer is our third HP printer in service (simultaneously); all take the same ink, and all have output trays which face East.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.