Not a musician

I as many of you know am not a musician, oh at one time I had delusions of granduer, and took up band class. The mental scars still haunt me to this day. So my view of high school bands is naturally twisted. From time to time I find weird and unusual instruments very funny and the contortions that people go through to play them even more so. Now with that in mind can you imagine Don Ho playing "Tiny Bubbles" on this?

Middle Name Syndrome

I'm a fan of Chuck Shepherd, and his column on MSNBC.com the "News of the Weird". Periodically, he has a segment called "The Classic Middle Name", to whit I copy here:

The Classic Middle Name (all new)

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: John Wayne Lewis, 59 (McAlester, Okla., June); Kenneth Wayne Beck, 34 (Warren County, Mo., June); Timothy Wayne Coalson, 44 (Senoia, Ga., July); Charles Wayne Thomas Jr., 22 (Dallas, July); Ira Wayne Cloniger (Washington, Va., July); John Wayne Thomson, 46 (arrested in Victorville, Calif., on a Washington warrant, August). Pleaded guilty to murder: Michael Wayne Nelson, 23 (Palatka, Fla., August). Executed for murder: Darrell Wayne "Gator" Ferguson, 28 (Dayton, Ohio, August). Committed suicide after escaping from a halfway house: convicted murderer David Wayne Nelson, 42 (Anchorage, Alaska, June). [KOTV-TV-AP (Tulsa, Okla.),6-26-06] [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 6-24-06] [Charlotte Observer-AP, 7-18-06] [Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 7- 28-06] [Rappahannock News (Herndon, Va.), 7-19-06] [The Columbia (Vancouver, Wash.), 8-7-06] [Palatka Daily News, 8-8- 06] [Dayton Daily News, 8-7-06] [Anchorage Daily News, 6-7-06]

The reason I find it so humorous is because my middle name is Wayne as well.

Sincerely,

The Wayne's of the World!

MMMM chocolate

For anyone that doesn't know, I am a chocoholic, I admit it, freely. I am one of those who likes the dark chocolate too, almost to the point of eating the bittersweet baking chocolate, not quite, but almost... Well for anyone else out there who might be interested, Hershey's has put out a new super dark chocolate, 60% as they call it. It is dense, dark chocolate! However, the name is kind of weird, 60% of what? 60% more chocolate? 60% less milk, or 60% of some unknown substance?

For what it is worth the chocolate is grand!

The Heat, leads to darkness

As many people here in Oklahoma (and other points abroad), know it has been extremely hot this summer. As my friends know I am bad enough normally about liking things dark and cool. My house has lights, but I primarily keep them turned off, using only the cool glow of my LCD monitor to brighten the office area.

The way that the heat leads to darkness is somewhat of a misnomer, but it does lead to more time spent in front of the computer staying cool instead of being outside, since it is so hot. This gives me time to find more interesting things like:

The Lego Guitar

and

The Google Flight Sim

and

Strobe Drops

not to mention...

Inspirational Star Trek

Enjoy!

Computer Troubleshooting 2

As I promised this is the continuing stoooory, of pc's that have gone to the dogs.....

Ok, bad plagarized and modified quote from the "Muppets" but still..

I am officially now on a budget as far as my computer spending goes, so I'm always looking for deals on things that can improve my existing systems, instead of building new ones. Recently someone brought in a brand new Seagate 40GB HD, I was like ooooh!! So I take it home and put it in my second pc with the video capture card, thinking it will be good to have a disk designated to recording my favourite shows.

So I put the drive in as secondary slave configuration since the primary cable is already full and the secondary cable already has CD drive on it. I jumper the drive properly, and boot up the system, the bios recognizes the drive and it boots into windows. Alright things are looking good till I try to use the drive, it isn't listed anywhere in Windows, not in "My Computer", not in device manager, not in Administrative tools.

Ok, ok, I say to myself, maybe the drive is in parked mode or something, it did after all come with an install disk. I look at the install disk warily, not wanting a drive boot manager or drive overlay on my system, and I shouldn't need it, but I bite the bullet and run the install program..

The install software detects the drive and the correct configuration spot and all. So my fears are somewhat subdued, but when I reboot, the system won't pass the bios anymore..... I can hit the delete button and the message changes to entering setup, but it never actually gets there, much less past the bios post to boot into windows. In fact, the boot gets up to the HD detection and hangs.

Those fears that were subdued come raging back up screaming "I told you so!!". During the next week I try small changes to the setup trying to get it to boot. I unplug the power to the primary drives and it will boot, plug them back in and no go...

Unplug the new HD and still no boot. I get all upset and let it sit for a week.... Not wanting to spend any money on getting it back up and working. Well Sunday night, I unplug everything, pull it the mouse, keyboard and monitor out to the main table where I can work on things. I pull all the drives out all the PCI cards out and reset the heat sink on the processor. Now all I have in is the video card and the RAM.

Boots up through the bios, ok, we have a starting point. now I plug in the new HD, the CD drive and the floppy. The system won't even post anything, processor fan tries to spin and stops.

Ok, reset the bios and try again, same result. Hmm, ok, now down to 3 things that could be the problem. I unplug the floppy drive and the system boots! Ok, drive is recognized, all looks good, so I say to myself lets try the other HD's since I didn't pay attention to the power cabls, the floppy is just normally plugged in with the main HD's. Lo and behold it was the floppy drive the whole time. For no apparent reason the floppy drive decided to crater and my system was down for a week!!

Computer Troubleshooting

I used to be a computer technician, and one of the reasons I was any good at all was the fact that I face computer problems on a regular basis and end up fixing them on my own. Thing is I am now a bit rusty, I don't change out hardware as often as I used to, but when I do, I still get the cool problems!

Recently I've had 2 upgrades to my 2 separate computers. In both cases things went drastically wrong, but they looked worse than they turned out to be. I'll be posting both problems, but since they are rather lengthy, I'll post them one day each. First my main computer I upgraded my Sound Card.

I got a deal on a new sound card, one of those X-Fi Fatality cards I've heard good things about, from my knowledge of computers I went through the normal stuff, uninstalling the existing sound card software, drivers and such, then powering down and pulling out the hardware. I put in the new Sound Card and booted back up to 4-bit color. Not 32 Bit color, not 16 color mode, I was in 4 bit color, thing is the sound card and the video card shouldn't be interacting, especially without software installed. But it was. I pulled the sound card back out, video card goes back to functioning normally, put the sound card in any slot in the pc, bam 4 bit color..... So here I am wanting to be proud of my purchase, enjoy it and I'm stuck with a "working computer" but basically working in black and white, with my new 19" widescreen LCD monitor... Yea, not a good feeling. Put the old sound card back in works fine too.. So here goes I call tech support.. So I call up the manufacturer of the sound card, yes it is a new purchase I received it today, yes I had a previous sound card in the system, yes the onboard chip is disabled.. On and on.. Finally get to say what my problem is, silence from the other end.... Finally the tech comes back with, I thought you were calling about a sound card. I reiterate, I am, when I put your sound card in the system, the video goes to 4 bit color, I take it out video card functions normally.

More silence..

Ok, I hear, let me go ask the help desk... I wait while they put me on hold to go ask. When they come back to the phone, they are like "Update the bios on your motherboard and if that doesn't work call your motherboard manufacturer for more help."

Now I've had this computer for what 2 years? It's definately out of warranty, and the motherboard manufacturer isn't going to want to talk to me about this, they will say what happens when you enable the on board audio? So I press the issue a bit, and get a troubleshooting step I always discounted when I was a tech, in fact I had used it to end a call with video cards when I was on a call I didn't see a resolution to. Change the value of the AGP aperature size to match the video card's memory.

To the tech's credit, I am talking to a sound card tech, about a video card, so I don't expect them to know that much about video, but in my mind I'm like well that's that, I'm down to my own abilities, (which didn't get me past the issue already).

At this point I'm thinking I've got a real problem and an expensive paperweight in the new sound card, complete with a 5 1/4" drive bay. Seriously considering putting the old soundcard in and just running with what I have. But I say to myself, it can't hurt to do what the tech said, so I reboot and set it up, wham! Booting back into windows, I'm running at full resolution and color! I can't believe it, a stupid step that I didn't feel the tech even had any faith in with worked!

So with this in mind, I start looking around and found that since the new sound card has 64 MB of RAM built on, the BIOS was seeing all of the memory on the PCI bus as video memory and trying to map the RAM on the sound card as video RAM. Windows didn't like this, didn't know what to do with it and in classic windows style, freaked out with no messaging as to what might have happened.

I love windows!

Then to top all this off, my burner wouldn't burn anymore, I was trying to back up some of my downloads during this whole process, and it would begin the burn but would be unable to finish and write the lead out of the disk. Nor could I install games, I would randomly get "file can not be found and data corruption errors", just copying files from the CD ROM, either one of them. Now I must specify, I had not changed any ribbon cable configurations in my time in the box, but guess what! The system now had a problem with the drive configuration, previously I had the two CD ROM's set as master and slave but on the reverse plugs on the ribbon cable. Yes I was using an 80 pin cable for them, they work and the 40 pin cables are increasingly more difficult to find. Well after reversing the location of the cable, the system was back up to operating specs!

I just don't know how it was running properly before!!!

P.S. Told you it was long!

Friends and moving

Ever notice that many people choose the summer months to move? In the last 2 years I've helped 4 friends move and 3 out of 4 of them chose the months of July or August to move. Now I would understand if they were moving to go to college.. That starts in August or September, but these friends moved to town, or away from town during the hottest months of the year!

Today it was 106° outside and my friend waits till 2 in the afternoon to start moving. By the end of the first load I was soaked in sweat, and while I don't mind helping friends move, I just wish we could have started early in the morning, and take the afternoon off!

Just my 2 bits!

I'll never understand corporate america, true there are a ton of companies out there that haul in a lot of revenue, but it seems sometimes that companies don't want to make money.... I work for a company that manufactures and sells computer addon on equipment to the public. Through their own channels and through retail store channels. Even though forecasted sales are reported to the production line, the reality is that we run out of stock on a regular basis. So much so that we have procedures in place that tell us when to remove a product from the site so that it can't be ordered.

Recently I spoke with another friend of mine who worked in a similar company, and he said it was the same there. How can a company realize it's potential sales if they don't make the product to bring to market?

It just amazes me how sales goals are set and then undercut by not having the product that the customer wants, and that the sales team wants to sell!

FIRST POST!

I have found a new source of heat in my life, "Blair's Death Rain Habanero Potato Chips". These lovely chips are just one of the hot foods found at ExtremeFood!

Enjoy!