Joey’s Crappy Day

A new year and a new blog entry. Big fucking woop.

As you may or may not realize I have migrated this site over to Blogger. I hope that you will click on this link and sign up because Blogger will send me lots of money and make me rich! Okay, no they won’t, but do it anyway. Blogger is the fastest (and probably easiest) way for anyone to get a blog site up and running. It lacks a lot of the frills, but this site is my “no frills” site.

Now if you are all about frills, then visit my other site. It has been totally geeked out by Geeklog. Geeklog is a CMS. It is totally rad with tons of features and stuff. Of course it does lack a few things like valid XHTML and the ability to read Atom feeds, but it has so many other great features I can overlook the drawbacks for now. I have been adding content to that site over the past two weeks, so look for more good stuff from it soon.

Nothing much else going on. After taking up smoking again for about three and a half months, I once again laid them down and kicked the habit like a naughty puppy. I am also on a diet after blowing up to a rotund 271lbs. I have already lost about 4 pounds. In a month or two maybe my pants will fit again.

I have also completely destroyed any sleeping pattern I may have had. Now I just walk around like I zombie all the time with no clue as to the time or date.

Mmmm… pie.

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.