This is a piece of a bigger picture. I welcome one and all to guess at what it is. In one week, or so, I’ll give the answer, and post a new one. Good luck and may the guessing begin.
Esta es una parte de la foto grande. Hay que adivinar lo que es. En una semana mas o menos regreso con la respuesta y otra foto. ¡Suerte!
Last Friday (June 12), I went out for an afternoon bike ride, and when I got home, the monitors connected to my main work computer were dark. I wiggled the mouse to bring them back to life, but they did not revive. The computer had crashed.
While such a thing had never happened with this particular computer before, we’ve all seen random system crashes, and I didn’t think anything of it. I had saved all my files before going out the door, after all. I pushed the power button on the computer case to shut off the machine and reboot it…
…And nothing happened. The case LEDs were still on, keyboard LEDs still glowing. The machine had all the appearances of being alive, but was dead. I tried again. Held the power button down for 15 (it should turn off after 10), 20, 30 seconds. No response. It wouldn’t turn off.
Hmm. This is strange.
I flipped the rocker switch on the power supply and the machine shut off instantly. After a short wait, I flipped it back on and pressed the power button.
Nothing happened.
Again, I pressed and held the power button. No case LEDs, no keyboard lights, no fans spinning up, nothing. Great.
I love the small town where we live, but one of its downsides is that there’s no decent place to buy computer parts in a pinch. Thankfully, there’s a big internet electronics warehouse store that’s located such that when we order things with the cheapest UPS ground shipping, we almost always get them the next day. But, it being late Friday afternoon, I knew anything I ordered wouldn’t actually ship until Monday, so I wouldn’t get it until Tuesday. Oh well, at least I still have the laptop to keep me on top of things.
I decided that the power supply was fried, so I ordered a new one, which arrived tuesday afternoon, just as expected. Tuesday evening, I sat down with the ailing computer and swapped out power supplies. I got it all plugged in and put together, and hit the power button.
Nothing, again.
Dangit! For those of you lucky enough to have never had a computer die, here’s a hint: When you have a computer that’s just dead, the culprit is almost always either the motherboard or the power supply. In this case, I had good reason to believe the power supply was the problem. Apparently it wasn’t (or at least it wasn’t the ONLY problem). Now I need to order a new motherboard.
Again, it’s after shipping time, so anything I order will ship Wednesday and arrive Thursday. Fine. I ordered a new motherboard, and went back to work on the laptop (which, by the way, is a Mac, and doesn’t have all the Windows software I need to work on my main business projects). The new motherboard arrived Thursday afternoon, and went easily into the computer case
Cross fingers. Say a prayer. Do a rain dance. Push the power button.
It booted right up. No other hardware damage, no data loss.
The rest of Thursday was spend installing new drivers for the new chipset and audio all that stuff that comes with a new motherboard, and Friday I was finally back in action. A full week without my main computer was quite a bit of lost work, and put me behind schedule, but I’m catching up quickly.
The moral of the story: While I didn’t lose any data, it made me take a good look at my backup strategies. While the source code that keeps my business running was always backed up in two different places, other things (like iPhone app sales records) were not. If there had been a hard drive problem, some important things could have been lost.
So please take this opportunity to review your backup strategy and make sure that everything important is backed up and will survive a hardware failure or worse (Question: what would happen if your house burned down while you weren’t home? Would you still have your precious data intact?). We work way too hard on creating our digital lives to have them vanish at the whim of a few faulty bits of silicon. Be careful!
This was taken early one morning on the way to one of the marching band contests this last fall.
This is a piece of a bigger picture. I welcome one and all to guess at what it is. In one week, or so, I’ll give the answer, and post a new one. Good luck and may the guessing begin.
Esta es una parte de la foto grande. Hay que adivinar lo que es. En una semana mas o menos regreso con la respuesta y otra foto. ¡Suerte!
“On May 20th, 2009, Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer: Hodgkins Lymphoma.
“Ever since that day, Drew has blamed everything on his cancer. Losing his keys, misplacing his wallet, Twitter being slow, the Phillies losing, etc.
“Why? Because you have to beat up on Cancer to win… and you can help out.
“Blame Drew’s Cancer for everything you want….”
It takes a strong guy to take his cancer diagnosis and turn it into a viral internet phenomenon. People by the thousands are using twitter to blame Drew’s cancer for their problems, and we can see them all at http://blamedrewscancer.com. They’re hoping that some nice companies will donate a dollar for every person that blames something on Drew’s cancer to the American Cancer Society or the Make a Wish Foundation. Sounds like a bit of fun and potentially a good cause….
Marcia blames Drew’s cancer for the squirrels that keep attacking our garden, and I blame Drew’s cancer for every software bug I’ve fixed since May 20th.
Thankfully, Hodgkins Lymphoma is one of the most curable kinds of cancer, with a 90%+ remission rate. Still, Drew will have a tough road ahead, and we wish him the best.
So if you use Twitter, go and #BlameDrewsCancer for something. Then watch http://blamedrewscancer.com for yours to pop up (mine took about 10 minutes to show).
So, I was pretty convinced there were raccoons in my plants.
Until this morning when I opened the front door and saw two squirrels pulling on the bird feeder post. They had it bent clear to the ground and were eating the seeds.
I got mad! I told them I hated them, and never to come back; then I shook my fist at them. Mostly because one of them was digging in a flower pot that was barely beginning to sprout. They had better not have destroyed our flowers.
I went to Farm King and found squirrel repellent. When I pulled back into the drive, there was another squirrel digging at the base of the post. I will have to re-dig and re-place the post.
The repellent is a wolf or fox urine based product, 100% organic, and stinks! It won’t (shouldn’t) scare the birds away, and ought to not harm my produce. I hope it works!!!
This is a piece of a bigger picture. I welcome one and all to guess at what it is. In one week, or so, I’ll give the answer, and post a new one. Good luck and may the guessing begin.
Esta es una parte de la foto grande. Hay que adivinar lo que es. En una semana mas o menos regreso con la respuesta y otra foto. ¡Suerte!
As I sit on my porch, admiring the garden I have been working on, I figure I had better post pictures of the garden as much as I have.
Picture heavy!
View of front of house. I like to sit in those chairs and enjoy the warmth, and try to catch glimpses of the birds.
Here is from the west. The edges here are rain gutters that were taken off the house(they have been sitting on the ground for quite a while so I figured I can use them). I cut them and buried them as borders.
Same section, different view.
East section.
Sunflower-this is the first I had seen of it above dirt, it grows fast. These are the Mammoth Gray variety and will get heads about 20 inches wide and we will be able to eat the seeds, if the birds don’t get them first.
It is really cool-I think-to see the ground split from the pressure of the plants growing and breaking through.
Here are the beets once they broke through. I had to put the beets in a bigger pot, not pictured.
Here are blooms on the tomato plant (there are two opened, more not yet, one may be harder to see).
There was a furry creature that dug up in this flower pot. I think it must have a death wish!
Then I saw that it was digging up the pot where I had planted carrot seeds!
And if that wasn’t enough, it decided to dig into the unopened bags of soil that I hadn’t gotten to yet.
This picture was taken through the window. The birds like the food I put out, but must not be comfortable around me yet, because if I am on the porch they tend to stay away. Or if they do approach, they fly when they notice the camera.
However I was able to finally capture a few birds. Here is a sparrow.
And here is a Cardinal, we think he is still young and growing his red feathers yet.
We have beets, carrots, green bell peppers, big hamburger tomatoes, roma tomatoes, sun flowers, potatoes (white and red), and some strictly decorative flowers.
I started this post Sunday, so it gets that date, however I did finish it on Monday.
After I let Mallory play with it. I think this is from around Thanksgiving time. Right after I had it cut short. And it would stick however I pulled it. It was weird.
