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.   

An IT Christmas (whole lotta cliches in here)

I've got an idea for Tim Burton... yes, the Tim Burton that makes movies. The working title is, "The I.T. Nightmare Before Christmas". The protagonist would be named Jack SCSIngton, of course.

It all started on Christmas Eve, of course. We received three packages from Amazon that day. One contained a 2.5" HDD which would be used as a Playstation 3 upgrade, and a couple 2GB sticks of memory for our son's computer. The second shipment was a brand new refurb XP box for my wife. The third was a cheese wedge-shaped box containing an industrial quantity of mouse toys for our cats. These arrivals brought joy to everyone's hearts.

Our son brought his PC up to the dining room table, which seems to be the designated hardware upgrade area. I spread out some newspapers to keep the case from getting scratched, and laid the PC down. I opened it up, and our son said the memory slots were directly underneath the spaghetti mess of I/O, power, and who-knows-what-else cabling. Since the case has more than its share of plastic, I had to do a bit of looking before I found a substantial piece of metal to ground myself before opening the memory. Feeling pretty positive about my personal electrical field, I opened up the package, gently pried a stick out, and examined the pins and notch at the base of the stick. After a few attempts, I was able to partially seat one end of the memory. The other end, though... well, it was having no part of being seated. When gentle pressure was applied, it rocked. So, I applied a bit of logic and turned it around.

And got the same result. Our son right now was getting a bit upset. "I think you've got the wrong memory" I said, but he quite vehemently disagreed with me. "Nope," he said. When logic, restraint, nicety and reason all fail, there is only one thing left. The cold, hard truth. I put the new stick back in its cocoon, and reached back into the belly of the beast. This time, I had to fight with the previously mentioned spaghetti mess, gently but firmly moving cabling aside to get to Bank 0 of the memory. I disengaged the latches and pulled out the original memory, then grabbed the new memory. Placing them back to back, I showed our son that the notches did not line up, even when I turned one of the sticks around. Nonplussed, our son quickly blamed his brother for ordering the wrong memory, and we took the PC back down to our Secret Underground Lair.

Our other son got an RMA, and the memory should be going back tomorrow.

As for my wife's new PC, it was pretty much a dead out of box PC (geek level here is prolly +7). Now, I've gotta say, I've been working both professionally and at home for a long time with Windows XP. I've done untold numbers of "nuke the hard drive back to the stone age" reinstalls. I own XP recovery disks for SP3; I have the SP2 direct-from-Redmond disk somewhere, and our house has pretty much been an HP "shop" since I discovered the joy of refurbs many years ago.I had a DC7100, and then several DC7600 HP "convertible minitowers". Over the years, I've become adept at maintaining and upgrading them. The PC I got for my wife was a DC7800- part of the family, I suppose, but more related to my XW4200 workstation in appearance, at least.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Even for XP, a 10+ minute boot time is extreme. When this PC is booted, I get a cursor in the upper left side of the display that blinks for ~5 minutes. Then, Windows starts to load. I'd say that's a problem. My wife is taking it very well, because it is just a tech upgrade to her. For me, it was something related to Christmas, and a huge disappointment.

Lastly, there's the database. I don't update very often, partly because I'm also doing my own data entry. I did discover one thing interesting about it, though. In more than one table, I have a user defined field named "ID". It wasn't a huge issue until tonight, when I discovered that two of my tables had identically formatted ID fields.I have since remedied this.

Well, almost lastly. The mice seem to work just fine.