Main screen turn on

Now this is more like it:



It's headed this way so I hope there isn't too much hail in it...

Someone set up us the BOM

There's nothing more depressing than a blank weather radar image. No, actually there are more depressing things, like Camry drivers, imitation butter and infomercials. But the BOM website is one of my most visited places, mostly for the Sydney weather radar and it's great to watch the vast lines of thunderstorms rolling Eastwards on a summer afternoon. The last few days however have been bereft of those brooding yellow (or, on a good day, magenta) storm cells, seething with rain, hail and terrawatts of malice. Sad.

Busy Busy

I've not yet fully settled into holiday mode. I'm not stressing about work stuff or anything, it just seems that I'm rather uncharacteristically getting stuff done...

In the last 3 days I've:

- Done all the laundry
- Cleaned the bathroom!
- Done some shopping
- Cooked hamburgers with homemade tomato ketchup for dinner
- Bought a new speedo cable and oil filter for the alfasud
- Fixed a broken door lock plunger on same
- Had it re-registered
- Bought some tomato stakes and staked the tomato plants
- Bought and collected tickets for Singapore
- Mowed the front yard
- Made chocolate mousse
- Shifted my MAME cabinet website to its new home
- Cleaned and set up a stereo that Mum found at a garage sale for $20 (perfect too)

All good fun, now's there's just this little Christmas thing to get out of the way..

Bad JuJu Box Full of Bad JuJu - Part 2

Sorry, more bleating about broken computer. Take my advice and skip this one too..

Forget what I said about NERO last time, I don't think it was the culprit. I know this because the morning after I wrote it, the machine died again. No, it seems what the problem is is that the system hive (a part of the registry) is getting too large for it to be loaded into the memory available during boot. So the thing is only half loaded or something and appears corrupt. Doing a repair on the registry (or a reinstall of everything) would allowme to boot, but was not preventing the problem from recurring.

The number one suspect for causing this is the Silicon Image serial ATA drivers. I managed to track down a newer version than the one I had, but it's still in beta so all bets are off with regard to stability. Never mind, still worth a try. I also flashed in a new motherboard BIOS, also a *choke* beta version but it specifically mentioned that an updata SATA controller BIOS was included.

Now it's just a matter of waiting and watching the size of that system hive as I reinstall all the software...

Ergh. Enough already.

RAR!

I'm not quite sure when Syn started calling me Bear. So I'm tallish, with some hair and tend to say RAR! on demand.. But I have nothing against robots. Not keen on street performers though.

Bad JuJu Box Full of Bad JuJu

Been having a bad computer time lately. You probably do not want to know the details. In fact I'd recommend that you don't read the following. A casual glance over my chronicle of misfortune (or misunderstanding) should be enough to convince you that it was no fun for me.

*****************************

For those who require the sordid details, it started a few months back..

1. Bought new shiny 200Gb SATA hard drive.
2. Installed in system
3. Installed SATA drivers. Nothing.
4. Realise there is a jumper for enabling SATA on the motherboard.
5. Enable SATA.
6. New hard drive is recognised! Hurrah!
7. Manage to format with NTFS (on 3rd attempt).
8. Try to set up as boot disk in BIOS. Keeps booting to old hard drive.
9. Flash in new BIOS to give option of booting from SATA.
10.Try to install Win2000.
11.Find it needs additional drivers to see SATA drive. It gives you about 3 seconds to let it know at the beginning of the 4-floppy boot disk process. If you miss the little message at the bottom of the screen, or fail to press F6 at the right moment, you find out 15 minutes later that you have to start again.
12.Copy SATA drivers to floppy disk
13.Repeat steps 10 & 11, this time with SATA drivers.
14.Install Windoze! Yay. It only takes an hour or so.
15.Spend the next week or so installing software, patching Windoze, Office, etc and making it so it doesn't piss me off with reminders, hiding files or looking dumb.
16. Start the computer one day to find BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH with a "config_initialization_failed" error.
17.Consult Microsoft Knowledge Base on this error: "This error should not occur." Thanks, very helpful. Basically it's registry death. I thought it was related to trying to run an old copy of Battlezone when it hadn't actually been installed. Dunno.
18.Try to repair intallation, go through same 4-floppy boot sequence, select repair option, CAN'T FIND INSTALLATION TO REPAIR.
19.It then leaves me with no other option that to exit and reboot.
20.Another floppy reboot and overwrite existing installation. There. Done.
21.Repeat step 15.
22.Start machine a week or so later to find ANOTHER BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! This time with systemroot/system32/config/software file missing or corrupt. Another registry death.
23.OK, not so bad, because this time I'd gone to the trouble this time of making a Magic Windoze Emergency Repair Disc!! Saved!
24.After 4-floppy reboot find that Magic Windows Emergency Repair Disc is useless. Cannot find existing Windoze installation.
25.Repeat step 20.
26.Install minimal software but don't do Windoze updates beyond SP3.
27.Install NERO 5.552 which came with the burner and has worked well for the last few years.
28.Reboot and BLARGH! Death! I guess that was the culprit.
29.Repeat steps 18 to 20.
30.Towards the end of the installation process the USB mouse is not recognised, which didn't happen previously. Install finishes, still no mouse. Shutdown, plug in PS2 mouse, restart.
31.YET ANOTHER BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! Again Registry! WHY??
32.Repeat step 29 in the hope that it might work a second time. The old turn it off and on again tactic, which often works on digital electronics for some reason.
33.Get Windoze going with PS2 mouse and install drivers. USB seems to be working now.
34.Repeat step 26.

So that's where I'm at today. It's up and running again with minimal applications and NO NERO 5.552. I'm sure a later version would be ok, but it appears this earlier version does not like SATA hard drives and overwrites their drivers or something.

*****************************

Sorry about all that. My mood was not helped this morning by more compudramas. My car is due for registration so of course needs it's annual inspection. No problem. See test guy, he gives me paper, take paper to registry, pay money, get sticker. Well, no. You see from this year, for convenience, it's all done electronically. Test data sent to motor registry by cutting edge modem dialup to mainframe and we're away! Alas this Futurist-boggling tech was not functioning today. No dialup = no test = no registration. I try Monday.

Which reminds me of another similar incident on Thursday. Syn and I wait in line for the purchase of consumer goods at a shop (the name of which I will not mention but it does have a big W in it). After the woman in front of us has her $400 worth of stuff scanned, the EFTPOS system dies. Then the same thing happens one by one for all the other registers. Sales drone stops functioning too, and just stands there staring aimlessly at nothing. Ignores woman behind us asking to pay cash, and only 5 minutes later wakes up when I start taking 20s out of my wallet. We pay cash, we get away from angry people..

All this makes me sound miserable, which is weird because I'm not!

I'm on holiday for a month!

Gotta go now and cook Syn soft-boiled egg or something. If she still wants one.

Redundant already

It seems the one reason for getting an ID, and therefore this thingy, no longer exists. That said, I'm now on holidays so have lots of time to waste.

Web thingy working

I'm not allowed to use the b-word. Syn doesn't like it. Fair enough but there must be some better word than "thingy".