Joey’s Crappy Day

Well, the new video card didn’t quite work out like I expected. I was still having issues with random lock ups and blue screens. So I went back to the drawing board. I read forum after forum about people with similar problems, trying each solution. I had almost given up and was ready to RMA my motherboard when I stumbled across the real culprit. I reduced my RAM speed from 400MHz to 333MHz and that did the trick. No more lock ups and no more blue screens. I am relieved that the issue was finally solved without having to return anything.

Oh, and work sucks. Not just my job, but work in general. I am getting that urge to move again. I had it a couple of years ago, and eventually got over it. But I don’t want to get over it this time. I am going nowhere fast and I am just working for a paycheck. I try to have a good attitude and think about my job as a career, but it is not something that I love doing. It is just a paycheck. Next year I will have 5 years in and I will be 100% vested. There won’t be a better time to go.

And my house is infested with fruit flies. I think it is from all the melons I’ve been eating lately. These damn things never die.

Well, after having a good day at work on Saturday I had a real shitty day on Sunday. I screwed up bigtime and caused about 20 minutes of downtime. Oops.

I migrated my main site to b2evolution. It is an extremely powerful blogging backend, but it is also extremely complicated compared to other blogware. I will be experimenting with it for a while and maybe I’ll finally get around to learning some PHP.

I was having some major computer problems over the past few days. It was randomly crashing with various error messages, lock-ups, and blue screens. (The errors were PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA and IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL from blue screens and various driver failure messages from within Windows). After reading tons of information on similar problems I had narrowed everything down to a hardware problem. Of course it could have been the RAM, motherboard, hard drive, network card, or video card. I started with the RAM. I took out one DIMM and was still having issues. I replaced that DIMM with the one I had taken out and Windows wouldn’t even complete the boot sequence before crashing. I suspected that I had two faulty memory modules, one more defective that the other, but I wanted to check a few other things to make sure. I updated my BIOS and drivers, but that was no help and I ran various tests on my hard drive with inconclusive results. I finally decided that I could switch hard drives and see if the problem cleared up. But before doing that I checked online one more time to see if I could find a simpler solution. One online forum had a post with similar symptoms to my own. The root cause of that one was a faulty video card. I remembered last week having some video problems that I thought were overheating related. I bought a fan for my video card and the problems seemed to go away, but perhaps the damage had already been done. I swapped out my video card with an old one and so far everything is back to normal. No crashes or blue screens since the swap. This is why I never recommend you build your own computers unless you REALLY know what you are doing.

I was totally relaxed at work today. I wasn’t stressed about anything and I just went around doing some things I felt needed to be done. Tomorrow will probably be more hectic, but who cares? I almost took a lunch today, a real sit down at the table lunch. But I decided to sit in from of my computer and do some work as per usual. Now if I just had a good book to read, I’d be doing okay.

I have a new LAD (Liberty Assurance Device).

It is an 1851 Colt 44 caliber revolver. The word gun has a lot of stigma attached to it, so I came up the the acronym LAD. I think everyone should use LAD from now on to refer to their personal firearms. For example, I have three LADs: the pistol above, a Rossi 410 shotgun my Dad got me for Christmas, and a Ruger 10/22 rifle I bought after 9/11 to protect me from al Qeada and overzealous government agents.

A special shout out to everyone at the Black Powder Message Board for helping me figure out how to take my gun apart. It is a great resource for anyone interested in Black Powder LADs.