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.