Speaking of computers blowing up...

I should know by now never to mention anything about computer problems when the computers are working.

I guess it was the day before yesterday (at night, actually), I was sitting at my computer, thinking about my accomplishments and contemplating my future. I decided to fire up the Mac and watch one of the movies I made last semester - my last music video. About half-way through, the power went out.

This happens whenever our roommate decides to use her newer, larger toaster oven in her room downstairs...when the lights and the computers, and her refrigerator is running. This apartment is very screwey about how it is wired, and somehow my workshop power (except for the lights!) is on the same circuit as her bedroom, my bathroom and my bedroom.

I really hate that.

But instead of getting pissed off like I usually do and going downstairs to see what happened (like I didn't already know), I just sat quietly until the power came back on. My roommate knows how to do that, now, and the circuit breaker is in her closet, which is nearly impossible to get to with all HER stuff piled in the room, so I let her do it this time (and from now on).

My Linux box and my PC are on the same circuit as well, and of course I had a TON of things open on the PC. The PC and the Linux box rebooted when the power came back on, but the Mac remained quiet. I left it that way. I restarted the web server on the Linux box (still haven't taken the time to figure out how to add that to the start-up sequence) and logged in on my PC. Of course, none of my 14 Explorer windows appeared, and a few icons had relocated themselves on the desktop. But aside from losing my context, everything seemed to be working fine.

Then I started going through some old stuff in my boxes of clutter. I dug up a SitePlayer module that I bought a few years ago, and true to my nature to become easily distracted, I unwittingly started down the road of yet another project; I wondered if I could use it to connect my RC4 device to the Internet.

The short version of the story is that my siteplayer is old and I tried to upgrade it to the latest firmware with no success. I spent the entire day fucking around with it - in my obsessive, persistent sort of way - until I finally got it back working just the way it was when I found it. This is a definitive story of how I spin my wheels to get absolutely nowhere while looking into the past.

During my struggle with this device, my PC just mysteriously and suddenly >CLICK< rebooted in the middle of what I was doing. Just >CLICK< rebooted. No warning, no error messages in the event log. Just a mysterious hardware reset. I was using the serial port at the time, so I can only assume it was related to that, but I hate making assumptions when I don't know the >CLICK<-ing truth. But all I can do is just keep my eye on it and go back to using it normally and hope for the best, because I'm too tired to pursue the >CLICK<-ing truth about computers anymore.

So, I fired up one of my older computers to see if the siteplayer would work on there. The serial port didn't even work on that (Windows 98) computer, and after about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work, I said >CLICK< it and grabbed another old (but newer) computer and tried it. I wound up having to dig out another hub that I had buried in a drawer so I could connect it to the LAN to grab the siteplayer files from my other PC. I finally managed to get everything working and I found a nicely hidden little "RECOVER" option buried in a menu in the siteplayer tools, and that was when my siteplayer module came back to life...just before I called it a day and went inside to do some productive television watching before staring at the back of my eye lids for a few hours.

That was last night. Today will determine whether my PC is >CLICK<-ing off on a regular basis or if it just had the hots for some nasty bits yesterday. But that somehow brings me to my other PC - my screaming machine - that sits unused in the office area in the apartment. The disk drive was doing a little dance the other night. I thought maybe it was just SETI or FindFiles in the background, accessing the disk. But it turns out it was having trouble with a bad block, and an examination of the event logs showed almost a constant stream of error messages accumulating over a period of at least two days.

Hmm, let's see...There's a bad spot on the disk so I'll just continuously rock the read/write head back and forth over it for two full days.

THAT OUGHT TO HELP!

I rebooted (which took forever, since the bad block was interfering with something, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense in terms of the OS, since the bad block is on my DATA drive). Finally, the OS came up and I ran a disk scan and I guess it corrected the problem, though it didn't tell me so, because all is working fine, now.

For now.

When it rains on computers, why does it always pour?

Anyway, aside from writing this blog, I'm staying off the computer today and the siteplayer module is going back into the box I found it in (and maybe it will sustain a few blows from my sledgehammer later on). It's time now to go have some breakfast...something I didn't have yesterday.

Maybe that was the problem!

Hmm... I'm thinking of a new (virtual?) cereal: Compu-Bits! Something you can really sink your teeth into.

Again, there has been quite a gap in this blog. But I'm still alive...and my hand continues to improve, though it is frustrating that it takes SO LONG to recover.

Anyway, I am not sure I will be continuing this blog much longer. I am really thinning out, trying to simplify my life. I am basically getting out of robotics, since I don't spend much - if any - time with it (other than the combat robots, if you can consider them robots) and I just have too much crap cluttering up my living space that I don't use. Get it out of my face and out of my head, I say.

I might keep my 12-pound combat robot - because it's RC and fun to drive around - but I am going to unload the Super Heavyweight, Road Rage.

About the only hobby I am considering keeping is my RC airplanes. They're (relatively) simple and provide a lot of enjoyment...when I can find a place and time to fly them. I am discovering that flying them is actually rather important to me, as it serves some need within me, and I have neglected it for a long time. But I'm even thinning that out and putting two of my airplanes up for sale.

I'm not sure what's going to happen with my computers. I have a job interview with Intel about a possible position doing the same thing I hated doing at my last job. I don't want to get sucked back into that, but being Intel, I thought maybe there might be other opportunities there and it might open up other doors. Whether they are opportunities and doors that I want to be led through remains to be seen.

I just have too much clutter. Too many (mostly frustrating) hobbies. I've always wanted to understand and be good with electronics, too, but it's frustrating and I'm not very good at it (unless it's digital), and it doesn't make me happy, so I think I'm going to have a big parts bin sale on ebay sometime in the not too distant future. We'll see.

I'm not even sure about this new direction I took into multimedia. I find I am right back where I left off - sitting in front of the damn computer. I am at a crossroads in my life, earnestly trying to figure out what really drives me and what I want to do. Maybe I just want to be somebody's pet - hang around the house all day, eat what's put in my bowl, and sleep a lot.

Maybe I'll teach.

All I know is that this blog will probably be even at a lower priority than it has been for the past few months. But if any computers blow up in the interim, I'll be sure to make a note of that, here. So far, things have been pretty smooth lately. I filled up a 120 GB hard drive with my video classes over the past two semesters. But that's the problem with the kind of things I do - they just pile up. More shit. Add, add, add, accumulate, multiply, expand... Where does it end? Where's the subtraction?

Well, the subtraction has begun. The trash and recycle bins are filling up, and slowly - ever so slowly - the clutter is diminishing. Right now, just about everything I own is now in boxes. A yard sale is just around the corner, as well as a donation center haul, perhaps a trip to BFI to make a dump, and suddenly I won't know what to do with myself except to fill up the vacancies again. That's my prediction, anyway. What I need is another universe - one I can call my own. That way, I'll have everything and it won't matter because there won't be anywhere else to put it or anything else to acquire, so I'll free to consider other things.

Ha!

Well, consider this the last entry for a while. Wish me luck. On second thought, don't do that. Just wish me good fortune. I like that better.