Luke got married in Japan today (which I guess actually happened early, early this morning for us in EST). Yay! Congratulations go out to both him and Chie on that from Meghan and myself.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 11:06 AM EDT

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Not much really going on with me lately. Basically, Meghan and I are just killing time until we find out where she gets hired as a teacher. She’s applied just about everywhere, except for a few places that we’ve already decided that we’d rather not live. Basically, I don’t care where we go; there are pros and cons to living just about anywhere. On Thursday, I found a serious pro for living in the Chapleau region.

In the aforementioned meantime, we applied to more temp agencies to do odd jobs to keep on top of things until we leave, but that’s even less interesting than everything else I have to say…

What else? Scored some good finds at EBGames the other day: Mint copies of Chrono Cross and Tales of Symphonia. Should help keep me distracted more or less constantly. It was hard to choose though, since there were cheap copies of quite a few of the other titles that are on my list, including Gradius V, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil & RE-0, and a bunch of older games that I never got around to grabbing like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Other than that, there’s just the usual soundtrack of Windsor in the background: Mustangs doing burnouts. I’m not sure if I’ve already mentioned it, but seriously, you can hear it more or less constantly around here. There are five of them on my end of the street alone (a beater mid-80’s GT, a late-80’s GT Cobra, a hopped up late-80’s LX 5.0, a hopped up mid-80’s GT with a T-roof, and a 00-04 generation GT convertible); Windsor really is Mustang-town. I guess that makes sense in a way, since the factory that makes the V-8 engines for it is located here. One of the most storied Ford powerplants, the 351-Windsor, used to be made here (obviously), and now they make the 4.6L, and the 5.4L Triton as well, if I recall correctly.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 10:06 AM EDT

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I did some testing yesterday on the problems plaguing my computer recently: random BSODs.

I cleaned a bit more inside the case, which was not actually all that dirty considering the amount of time that had passed since its last thorough cleaning. I checked all the PCBs out in detail for blown components (particularly capacitors, which are most prone to failure) and could find none. All fans were running smoothly as well, so it wasn’t an overheating issue. It does run a lot hotter in this apartment during the summer, but still nowhere close to the chip’s Thermal Design Power limit. So nothing physical that I can tell.

I ran Memtest86 from the Knoppix 3.7 release for six and a half hours last night and it found no errors whatsoever, having run through its battery of tests 15 times. Granted the memtest version on the Knoppix CD is a bit dated, so perhaps I’ll try again with the latest version of the program, but I’m now fairly convinced that Luke was right, as I was hoping he would be, that it’s just Windows that’s pooched.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 9:56 AM EDT

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Every time I think I’ve seen Bell sucking at their worst, they find a new way to surprise me. This is a contiunation of the ongoing mission to seek out new ways to fuck their customers in the ass, to boldly rip people off as no company’s done before.

Okay, that was a bit cheesy and melodramatic, but I have good reason. It is the continuation of the saga of Meghan and I trying to switch to another provider for cell service. You know, normally when customers want to switch, in an attempt to keep their business, you offer them a deal or something to get them to stay. Or, if you’re like Bell, you just make ridiculous “errors” like “forgetting” to process a ‘do-not-renew’ order on a contract when its term is up and then attempting to gouge said customer with your insane charges for breaking a contract that they never committed to in the first place.

I’m referring, of course, to the lovely bill we got in the mail today claiming we owed them about 450$. One more month of charges on phones that hadn’t been used since February, plus the two aforementioned 200$ ‘termination liability charges’.

Another, slightly less painful call to Bell Mobility customer [lip] service resulted in us being told to simply ignore the bill and they’d straighten everything out. Right. I’ve heard that one before.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 3:47 PM EDT

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A little while ago, I tried installing Debian Linux on my “Legacy Box” with mixed success. Some stuff worked, and some stuff didn’t. I kept plugging away at it for a while, but to no avail. Eventually I blew that installation away and threw Win9x back on there in the name of Legacy gaming goodness.

Also, recently, my sister bought a fancy-pants new Compaq Laptop, so she decided to donate the old desktop PC to my dad. Now rather than putting him, and myself through the torture of Windows98SE, it’d make sense to slap XP on there, but there turned out to be a problem with this; the key I’ve been using for the past few years has become compromised. It seems that ’someone’ sent in an error report after a program crash and MS now knows that the key I’ve been using is invalid. So scratch that.

This leaves us with one viable option: Linux.

My dad is not a computer guru by any means, which is not in any way a slam against him; I think he’s a really bright guy, and he can do a lot of things that I just wouldn’t even know where to start, but computers is not one of those things. In fact, I’ve gone as far as to suggest that he has ‘gremlins’. So this makes the installation of a strange OS kind of a gamble. On the one hand, he doesn’t need it for anything too advanced, just email, web browsing, and word processing. Yet on the other hand, he may be prone to causing random glitches. However, I decided to chance it.

I’m now posting this from a mostly functional (more on that in a second) Debian/GNU desktop running KDE, Mozilla 1.7.8, Open Office.org 1.1.3, and a few other standard apps. I built it from the only flavour I’m all that familiar with: Knoppix. Knoppix, as some of you know, is primarily designed as a Live-on-CD Linux distro, designed to demo the power of the OS to the Micro-shafted masses, and also as a utility desktop for any otherwise ‘damaged’ OS, to allow you to back up your files or effect a repair. However, I discovered that it also has a hard disk installer program which gives you the option of loading it to your hard disk in any of 3 configurations: a duplicate of the Live Knoppix installation, a “beginner” Debian/GNU desktop, and an advanced version (lacking hardware autodetection).

I opted to go with the ‘beginner’ version, because I’d already tried a full Debian install and found it quite difficult. This time, however, it worked like a charm. Knoppix detects everything correctly, and almost everything is working. I say “almost,” because I can’t get the Windows-compatible networking components to function, and since I only need that to share the printer downstairs, it’s not a huge deal for now. I’m still working on Samba and LISa and all that, but it’ll take some time. I’m not scared of the command line or anything, but I have to learn everything from scratch, all over again. It’s like Yoda said, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

The version I’ve used for this was 3.7, which gives you the option of kernel 2.4.27 or 2.6.9 in the lilo, and has full apt-get functionality. I tried previously with 3.8.2, but it proved to be unstable and unreliable on this box, so I went back a version or two.

The more I use this, the more I like it. In light of my current WinXP box failing, I think I’ll have to make the switch on it as well, assuming that my problems are in fact software-related and not my hardware failing. As I said, it has enough CPU horsepower that I can probably run any Windows app at full speed emulated, and if not, I don’t care THAT much about any of those programs. Especially considering that most of them have Linux equivalents. Whee!

Posted by Ron as Computers at 3:39 AM EDT

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A tired cliche to be sure, but I’m a tired person, so it’s forgivable.

We left for Sudbury at 5am this morning for Meghan’s interview with Rainbow District. That went pretty well, apparently, and I can think of a lot worse places to be than Sudbury… like here in the Sault, or Windsor, for example.

I’ve logged a lot of wheeltime in the last few days, and a lot of kilometres too, but not much sleep. Though I did manage to catch a catnap at College Boreal while the interview was being conducted. I crashed on one of the hallway couches, slipping my shoes beneath it and clutching Meghan’s laptop bag for security. It was surprisingly comfortable, if not entirely restful.

Only a few more days and then it’ll be back on the highway again, heading south to Windsor once more…

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 3:25 AM EDT

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I’m back up in the Sault for a bit, maybe until Monday, maybe a little longer. Meghan has an interview in Sudbury with Rainbow District Board of Education, so I’ve got my fingers crossed on that, as usual.

Hopefully, the weather will be better than last time she had an interview; we nearly died on the 401 a couple of times that trip. Come to think of it, despite clear weather in Detroit, we almost died once this time too, and it wasn’t because somebody was shooting at us (surprisingly). If you think that urban Canadians drive like assholes, then you haven’t spent enough time on the “wrong” side of the Detroit River.

It seems like something retarded like that happens every time I get in a car these days, which is kind of scary because statistically, my luck will eventually run out. Or maybe I’m just good. Who knows. My car does have cat-like responses, after all, and I didn’t spend all that time playing Gran Turismo for nothing, you know.

Anyway, other than that, just hanging with the fam, fixing my sister’s old (previously my old, and first that I bought myself) compy up for my dad to use. That should be fun, considering they left half the cords and such in London. Well, time to call in some favours from Clockwork, I guess. Other than that, it looks pretty clean inside, and I’ve added some more RAM (it has 256MB of PC-100 now…. wow!), and re-added the 10/100 NIC that I took out when I gave it to my sis.

It’s funny; I bought that NIC ($60!!!) and networked my family’s computers before home networking was on anybodys radar. We did it the old fashioned way: hiding cables under baseboards, drilling holes, etc. Ah, good times.

Other than that, I should go see my cousins, and I’m supposed to get together with an old pal of mine at the Cellar Tap, which should be kinda fun. Mmmmm… Cellar Tap ‘burger….

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 10:08 AM EDT

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My computer keeps bluescreening on me; this is not good.

Ever since the latest incident, it hasn’t exactly been all that stable. The stop errors are varied in type and frequency. At first I thought it was related to playing games, as it seemed to only occur when playing a game that had been alt-tabbed, so probably a driver issue, or maybe related to that + Gaim, since that would be the reason for alt+tabbing back to windows, but yesterday it happened both while actively playing a game as well as while just sitting in windows (I was running a virus scan and surfing for possible root causes).

This resulted in a Page Fault. That usually points to main system memory, but I suppose it could be a few other things (CPU? overheating?). I blew some of the dust out of the front vents on the tower and set the memory timings in the BIOS to ‘optimal’ (read: safe and slow). So far, so good. I’m not too concerned about the performance hit from scaling back the timing, since this machine is already way, way faster than I need it to be. Besides, memory timing isn’t that big a factor unless you’re a tweak freak seeking a few more points under some benchmarking program.

At least the slower memory timing has improved my complaints of occasionally skipping audio, which I have always thought was a buffering issue. Why it didn’t occur to me to do this previously is beyond me; I know that the onboard nForce ‘SoundStorm’ audio uses main memory for the buffer, so why I didn’t put 2+2 together sooner is beyond me. I guess because it didn’t start out doing this? Which could indicate that the RAM is ‘degenerating’ or something… well, I’ll leave it like this for a few days and see what happens, keeping my fingers crossed, of course.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 1:01 PM EDT

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Been a bit since the last post, so I figured I should say something.

Let’s see… at some point I had a really bizarre dream involving a terrible storm, tall buildings and flesh-coloured fish with rows of tiny human arms growing out the side of them. It was quite disturbing, made moreso due to the soundtrack (yes my dreams have soundtracks sometimes; in this case “Warning (Power Down)” from Metroid Fusion), and probably influenced by the huge centipede that I found in my sink last week when I went to brush my teeth before bed. *shudder*

This past week was socially rather fulfilled for me, which is odd, since I don’t go out much (deliberately). Monday night I got together with some pals to watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian, one of whom had never seen it before, so that was quite fun. Ent up staying out until 6am chatting with them.

Normally I wouldn’t be out so late, but again I’m laid off due to GM stock continuing to tank. I mean, sure, it looks pretty bad right now, but those of you old enough to remember the early 80’s will recall that things were once this grim for Chrysler, and they pulled out of it by unleashing the totally forgettable K-car on the unsuspecting public. My dad even bought one back in ‘86. Let me tell you, they were every bit as bad as you may have heard; he got rid of it 6 months later. Still, if it was enough to save the company…

So, as bad as it looks, I wouldn’t count either Ford or GM out just yet. Still, you’d think that they’d learn something from the Japanese, or even the Koreans, about how to make a car, but no. I’ll wager that if Ford and GM haven’t improved by the time the Chinese enter the North American market (mark my words, it’s coming), that it’ll be all over for them.

So, tuesday was underscored by the most incredible barbeque chicken wings I’ve ever had. We went out with some friends that I’d met on a local forum to a downtown pub called Popper’s for some 10-cent wing night action, and despite the 45-minute wait, it was still worthwhile.

Unfortunately, the next day I was horribly sick with a headcold, prompting me to change my MSN name to “My head is a fountain of snot”. I don’t get sick that often, but when I do, man, is it bad. Well, besides going through several boxes of tissues, I’ve been basically living off Buckley’s. I love that stuff… I don’t even think it tastes that bad, but then, I’m half Dutch, and we like to drink Gin, which is made from fermented Juniper berries and tastes like Pine Sol smells.

Anyway, next week looks pretty busy too; Meghan has an interview with Rainbow District next Friday, we’re joining another D&D Campaign starting Tuesday, and I have some computers to fix for family members. Whee!

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 11:27 AM EDT

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