As I mentioned in my Facebook status, the problem with my computer was the keyboard. It’s slightly more complicated than that, though. I’ll begin the saga from the beginning:

Saturday evening, Windows noted a stack of updates to be installed (from Patch Tuesday), so I dutifully installed them. A system restart was requested, so, after finishing whatever I happened to be doing, I pressed the “Restart Now” button. So far, so boring. “Configuring Updates…”, then it went through the typical restart sequence. This is an MSI board, so I’m familiar with the series of beeps it makes on boot—but this time they were different. The third beep was lower, and there was a fourth, that I had never heard before. Already I was worried, but I figured if startup went fine, I’d ignore it and move on with life. I knew that I had a hard drive that SMART marked as bad quite some time ago, so I had put it as the culprit in my mind when I started wondering when the Windows logo would show up. I saw the screen with the words “Starting Windows” and the copyright notice; Windows 7 has red, green, blue, and yellow points animate and then form the familiar flag, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. Thinking that it was just taking longer because of the updates, I went and made myself a bedtime snack and watched an episode of Robot Chicken. Back into the office, I found it still stuck at the same screen, no Windows logo. At this point I really started to worry. Did my boot drive die? I attempted to boot to a USB stick with FreeDOS on it, and I had verified with another machine that it worked, but no luck. I really wasn’t sure what to think. I managed to get to safe mode, and in the listing of files that loaded, it froze (didn’t pay attention to the filename on which it stopped, though it later turns out to be important). I didn’t have a copy of Windows 7 lying around on DVD, so I tried to burn one with my HP computer. The drive made some horrible noises and managed a substantial gouge in the blank disc, so I gave up for the evening.

The next day, I had a friend burn a copy of Windows 7. The goal was to run repair, or System Restore if I could manage it (not sure if the install disc provides that option). I inserted the disc, fired it up, and…”Plugh”. No dice. I then decided that it must be the hard drive (no idea what gave me that idea, probably it was just late), so I bought what happened to be on sale at Newegg at the time: a Crucial M4 128GB SSD, and a 3TB WD Caviar Green (figuring that I could transfer the contents of my 1TB and 2TB drives to it). As I said, it was late, so I went to bed. Had work the next morning anyway.

After work I tried the next troubleshooting step: disconnect everything that isn’t necessary. Out come the plugs for all the peripherals: the printer, the speakers, one of the two monitors, even the internal non-boot drives and the Blu-Ray burner. Still needed the keyboard and mouse, so that one USB plug remained. And nothing. The same four beeps I had noticed as suspicious made me begin to question the BIOS, motherboard, processor, or RAM. The video card could also be the culprit, but I was going to start with simpler things. I went into setup and enabled all the extra checks for POST. It took considerably longer to boot, and as the RAM count consistently paused at 3328MB, I was beginning (I thought) to focus in on the issue. Once it got to the problem spot, I made note of the three numbers cycling through on an LED display on the motherboard itself. I looked them up in the manual to find…they weren’t even in there. What next? I made the (erroneous) conclusion that the problem was the motherboard itself, and began begging for opinions and options from friends, as well as shopping for new parts. Best case scenario, I could come out spending (another) $300 or so for something comparable. But who wants that? It was a 3 year old system, and only middle-of-the road back then, so I looked to upgrade, figuring about $700.

I brought the computer in and had a coworker/friend look at it. Because of transportation, he wiggled the video card and RAM to make sure they were properly seated, and fired it up before trying any of his spare parts. It made it all the way to the login screen, no issues! So he brought it back to me yesterday. I took it home…same problem. On a strange hunch, I pulled a PS/2 keyboard out of my basement and plugged it in instead of the USB keyboard/mouse combo. Booted right up. I almost cried, it was so ridiculous.

But! My USB keyboard hooks to the computers through an IOGear KVM switch. Thus there’s only one USB plug for both. Looking back, I recalled that the last file being loaded when I went into safe mode had “PNP” in the name. Specifically, the file was “\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\CLASSPNP.SYS”. Now, while I am unaware of the specific details of what’s in this file, it’s clearly related to the plug and play system. Which deals with IEEE-1394, PCI, PCI-e, and, of course, USB. I wasn’t yet ready to give up on my video card (PCI-e interface) which made me think of the PS/2 keyboard.

That last paragraph is pretty much retcon, but it fills in all the logical holes and comes to the same conclusion my brain managed without telling me.

Anyway, despite having a computer that functioned, there were a couple of things I wanted to verify. First, that it could handle my 3TB drive. I bought it, might as well use it, right? My HP refused to see more than 746.39GB, and there was no BIOS update for the board. Same deal on the other box, but I was 13 versions behind on the BIOS, so I updated that. The MSI tool installed a bunch of cruft, so I got rid of that, and rebooted. Still 746.39GB, despite the update history saying it would handle something like 4000EB drives (not really, but it was far, far more than any currently available individual storage medium). This, plus the excitement I had at putting together a new machine convinced me, at long last, to make the purchase. So, by Wednesday evening of next week, I should have a sweet system. Final specs are much like what I posted the other day, in a table to compare with what I’ve got now (apologies if the table lines don’t show up; I’ll fix it later):

The deal comes with Dirt Showdown, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Nexuiz, three games I’ve never played. I’ll probably give ‘em a try, but they’re not really my thing. Dirt, though, would probably be a fun way to pass the time: I don’t expect the tracks are as complicated as some in Nitronic Rush, but it could be fun. They also threw in an extended warranty on the motherboard for free. Why not, if it’s free, eh? I had to buy the processor through Amazon, as it was unavailable on Newegg at the time. I could wait for them to get some stock in before I placed my order, but there were discounts totaling over $200, all ending at or before the end of the month (one at the end of the week), just to save $50, I figured I’d go for it. I’m hoping for a “Windows Experience Index” score well into the 7s. Not that that number is really anything to go by, but I’m currently sitting at a ___. And with Batman: Arkham City GOTY coming out on the 29th…

Now, you’re saying, “But what about budget? Could you afford to spend that $1400?” Normally, no. But circumstances changed that. I closed on a refinanced mortgage this morning. It cost $1842.87 less to close than expected. Additionally, I get to “skip” my June payment, leaving an additional $1662 (or $1688.06, depending on which payment you go by). Which means I had roughly $3500 more in the bank than I had budgeted for. Not that I’ll always splurge like this, or even every 3 years. But I managed to recapture the excitement in speccing out that machine, and I’m eagerly awaiting the boxes on my doorstep. Which, more than likely, will be delivered, and the welcome mat will be “inconspicuously” placed on top. As if you could hide a 3′x3′x1′ box under a 2.5′x2′ doormat and no one would notice.

Tentative specs for my new computer. This assumes I move forward with the purchase; in other words, that some combination of my coworker’s parts and my own don’t play well together.

• ASUS P8Z77-V Motherboard
• Intel Core i7-3770K Processor
• Corsair Vengeance 240-pin DDR3 PC3 12800 RAM (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C8)—I checked, this is in the mobo’s QVL
• Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid 850W Fully Modular (PSU RS-850-SPHA-D3)
• 2 Crucial M4 128GB SATA III SSD (CT128M4SSD2CCA) in RAID-0
• Antec Three Hundred Two case
• One of:
• Galaxy67NPH6DV5ZJX GeForce GTX 670
• SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950
• 500GB HDD WD Caviar Black
• 1TB HDD WD Caviar Black—This one’s on its last legs. SMART says it’ll fail anytime now.
• 2TB HDD WD Caviar Green
• 3TB HDD WD Caviar Green

So, I’ll have a boot drive with ridiculous specs: 256GB, 500MB/s sequential read, 175MB/s sequential write (this is “worst-case”, for large files, which I shouldn’t be using on these disks). In this configuration, supposedly 600000 hours MTBF (the warranty’s 65 years shorter than that, though). I’ll have at least 5.5TB of additional space on magnetic media. The graphics card, should I jump to one of these PCI-e 3.0 beasts, would allow me to play Arkham City at 60FPS, highest settings, according to benchmarks. The downside with the Radeon is that I don’t get CUDA, which many say is the “easiest” way to transition from CPU to GPU processing. As I write fracture, I want to leverage as much power as possible (generating a deep-zoom Mandelbrot takes way too much time with my current method), but I suppose I should focus on OpenCL because of licensing anyway. And the Ivy Bridge CPU gives me bragging rights, even if there are only 4 cores.

I must admit excitement at the prospect of building a new machine, despite the hit my wallet will take. So I may go ahead with the build, and see how much I can get for the unused parts on eBay or Craigslist.

Which reminds me, I’ve got two comic books that I need to post on the CCL store.

Wow…the title of my post is vaguely related to the primary subject matter!

Great swaths of time I spend alone, either at home on the computer idly playing a Facebook game, or waiting until my ship in X² makes it to its destination, or at work idly copying a test from an old report to a new one, or in the car when I don’t feel like listening to music or a podcast (believe it or not, that does happen), leads me to thinking about what I want to do with my life. What kind of legacy I want to leave. Yes, I have grand designs which I would love to see come to fruition, but I have more recently come to realize that I can’t bring them all about on my own. I would love to see reforms in government, education, intellectual property, entertainment, and subsets of all of these, but I need more focus if I’m to accomplish anything. I can surround and associate myself with people who have similar goals, similar ideas, similar ambitions, with focuses in all these areas, and hope for a critical mass to arise that will spur the changes that are necessary, and to recognize the changes that aren’t.

I decided a few months ago that I’d like to make my focus education. Specifically science education. This doesn’t mean I’m going to go off and become a science teacher, but I love telling people about sciency things, and learning about them myself.

I believe I’ve mentioned my idea for a lab/museum here before. A coworker whom I greatly respect, and who has done his share of work in particle physics and astrophysics disappointed me with his opinion that Wichita is too small a town for my idea to take off, but it hasn’t deterred me completely. He suggested I visit the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the SciTech Museum in Aurora, Illinois, and the “creatively named” Science Museum in Oklahoma City, and volunteer at one of them if possible, to get a feel for what it’s like. I did volunteer for the local SWE Engineering Expo this past February, and helped kids make slime all morning. It was more fun than I expected it to be, and more exhausting, too.

Some forays have been made into transforming education: MIT’s OpenCourseWare, iTunes U, Khan Academy, and I know there are many others. This is a good start, certainly, but I still feel that Internet lectures remove the importance of face-to-face interaction. And homework, or work in a classroom, to indicate and measure a student’s grasp of a particular concept, is difficult, if not impossible, to “grade” or judge in an automated way. Traditional education is big business, and students are often merely a waste product (¶4).

I failed a class I took recently in a standard university setting. While I believed I had grasped the concepts presented, my final grade indicates otherwise. It wasn’t actually a failing grade, but I don’t expect I will be able to move forward in the field until I understand what I didn’t. I would value a tutor, or a classroom setting in which I could go through the problems in detail, noting and explaining my mistakes. That was the primary problem with the course I took. I’d see a “3″ at the top of my page, and know that my solution was deficient in some way (a “5″ indicated a perfect score on the homework), and I’d have to compare it with the barely legible solutions provided by the professor to determine the source of my error. When problems were discussed in class, her handwriting was complimented by a verbal explanation, so everything she explained made sense.

To change the subject, I’ll give an example regarding the current state of scientific education, and it is just as much a linguistic issue as it is anything else: the words “theory” and “law”. We have the “theory of evolution”, the “theory of relativity”, and the “law of gravity”. Both are terms which must be understood by a scientific definition rather than their colloquial ones.

A Physical Law:

• Explains and predicts behavior of a system.
• Cannot be “proven or disproven”; has been repeatedly verified, but its scope can be narrowed when new theories or principles are discovered.

A Scientific Theory:

• Explains and predicts behavior of a system.
• Can be disproven but not proven; has been verified, and is supported by evidence (experimental or empirical).

I am open to disagreement as to my summary of these terms.

Newton’s Laws of Motion have been displaced in the scientific community by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, yet they are still extremely accurate for the majority of systems encountered in everyday life, which is why the general public may find the distortion of spacetime in a gravity well, the universal speed limit of “the speed of light”, and quantum mechanics difficult to comprehend. The disconnect in understanding is a constant source of conflict in debates regarding climate science and protology.

I hope that we will be able to teach the average 10 year old calculus by 2364 (Star Trek: The Next Generation, When The Bough Breaks). In fact, I hope it will be sooner than that, and well before the technological singularity. I believe there are limits to the speed of human comprehension, and it may not be possible to cram what is today considered a full academic career into, say 8 years, but in order to spur innovation that might lead to technological marvels such as Type I energy generation/usage, artificial intelligence, interplanetary or interstellar travel, and concepts that do not even exist in science fiction, an individual’s ability to merge multiple concepts needs to expand, and in my view, the only means to that end is better education.

I would also like to see venues of learning similar to the fictional South Hampton Institute of Technology (Accepted). The unique trait that I’d like to see emulated is a selection of courses designed, and perhaps taught, by students themselves. In contrast to the school of non-stop partying as it began, it became an institution of learning the students enjoyed, because they were a part of it. Universities traditionally gain their funding through research grants. Their professors are paid more to research than to teach, the latter sometimes being an inconvenience, an ancillary task with their position. Some professors do enjoy the teaching, and they are the ones that you will find students gravitating towards, the ones who consistently get high marks on reviews, the ones who are truly enthusiastic about imparting their own knowledge to students. It is these who should gain recognition, who should be paid for this work rather than research. And if there is a subject they would like to research, it should not be difficult for such teachers to enlist the aid of other enthusiastic students.

I am not advocating an abandonment of “core” studies. I still believe it essential that everyone have a basic understanding of physics, biology, math, English (or the prevalent language or language of the area), chemistry, history, geography, etc. Most of this, however, can, and perhaps should, be covered by the time a student leaves elementary school, or perhaps middle school. While I think it’s absurd that there are people out there pretending to be functional members of society who don’t know that Delaware is a state, it is equally absurd to expect someone whose career aspirations are no higher than flipping burgers or filling potholes to have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university.

High school should be a place students can decide where they wish their lives to take them. They like art? Allow them to enroll in as many art classes as they like, but be pragmatic without being discouraging about career prospects for their chosen field. This applies equally to pretty much any field. No matter the state of the economy, if it’s a bull or bear market, finding a job in one’s desired field isn’t necessarily possible. Not everyone gets to do what they want for a living, but if you’re lucky, and if you can find the right group to associate with, you might be able to carve a new niche.

Following that, on-the-job training is probably more valuable than further education. I could easily do my current job without the extra “book learnin’”. The main problem I see here is with maturity. It may be valuable to give people a year or two for walkabout, for trying their hand at art, to see if they can become a Hollywood or Broadway star, to “slum it” as it were, or wander Europe for a few months. There’s plenty of stuff that I would have loved to do, but after college I’m deep in debt, and the only way to crawl out of that is a job. And the job leads to a career, and I’ll be working until I’m 75 probably, and by then I’ll be too old to enjoy what I could have when I was 20.

Anyway, a college education would then become what it used to be, and what I believe it still should be: slightly elite, far more rigorous and specialized, and for those that take the academic journey, amenable to opportunities beyond the mundane.

I sit in my cubicle day after day, writing reports and test plans. I’m not saying that such work is unnecessary—industry regulations require it—but I was educated for something else, and my interests are only tangentially related to my education. I would probably enjoy my job if I was crunching numbers, actually running the tests I write, writing software, collaborating in a project larger than myself (the insular nature of my current work environment is frustrating to say the least), or shifting between endeavors on a semi-regular basis. If I were to buck rivets for a few weeks, that’d be fine by me, even exciting. I like a taste of everything.

I realize my brother and I are somewhat alike. When he worked at a music store, he strove to know everything about every instrument in the place, especially the ever-popular guitar. Got to be a pretty good player, too. He worked at a shoe store for a week or two, and in that time learned more than I would ever have thought there was to know about the foot. He worked at a Sears store, and seemed to know their tool catalog by heart just a few months later. He now works for an insulation company, and can rattle off energy efficiency statistics like nothing.

I, on the other hand, have worked very few jobs, and haven’t been proactive about learning other aspects of the industry in which I worked. At the hardware store, I swept floors, stocked shelves, and cut keys. I never ran the register because I was only a summer employee, but if I had pressed the boss, there is every chance I could have started to do more, and could now claim to have had at least a small bit of experience in retail. At Sprint, I wrote complex macros to consolidate large database dumps into a spreadsheet. After four weeks I had completed the task they expected would take me one, possibly two summers to work, but I sat and surfed the Internet the rest of the time instead of seeking out other opportunities. And now, at Cessna, I’ve burned through six bosses in two positions, and I’m still a bit unclear on what I’m supposed to be doing. This is mostly because regulations and oversight have changed dramatically in the past 10 years, I’m working with old material, and I do not have the option of scrapping this and starting over. Not that my entire job experience will be this dreary, but I need more encouragement than I’m getting to complete this piece of s***. Meanwhile I wish I had more experience in other departments in this company. I think the gulf between manufacturing and engineering is far too wide, and the gap between flight test and engineering isn’t much smaller (not that the FAA will let me behind the controls, but that’s a rant for another day). Part of it is that customer service, engineering, manufacturing, line flow, etc. don’t bother talking to each other, but part of it is that there’s very little cross-department experience outside of management (whom we lowly serfs usually see as disconnected, interchangeable talking heads anyway).

I’m deviating from the topic, though. Education, as it stands now, is fairly uniform throughout the developed world. In terms of style, at least. Discipline from parents for behavioral or academic issues seems harsh in anecdotes from Asia, and their higher scores in standardized tests seem to bear that out. Part of that is cultural. Yet the structure of the education—a formal school setting from roughly 6 years of age to 18—is pretty much the same.

Standardized tests are another thing I find slightly disturbing. It’s the only quantitative measure I can imagine for comparing one country to another, one district to another, one classroom to another, but there’s just something about them that feels wrong to me. I know that with No Child Left Behind, the much-derided (for good reason) government program, education was standards-based, and districts fought to “teach to the test” to get their funding. And the act set minimum goals, with no bonus for overachievement. “Gifted” students, with whom I was grouped in elementary school, are bored. I can attest to that from personal experience—I didn’t study one bit until my junior year of college because I wasn’t challenged until then.

Timing of the beginning and end of school days is also oddly skewed, at least in my view. The youngest children, who seem to be awake and eager to “do something” are jumping all over their groggy parents at 06:00, but school doesn’t start for them until 08:30 or 09:00. And high school students, in the middle of puberty, who probably require more sleep, are falling asleep in class because they have to be in their seat by 07:30 or earlier. This is precisely backwards.

Additionally, the start and end of the school year used to coincide with harvest schedules (so the story goes). It seems that there’s been creep of the academic calendar into the summer bounded by these dates, and when I did a search to see if the traditional calendar was tied to specific crops, I found pages full of studies indicating year-round school calendars showed no difference, or were detrimental, to students’ performance. It seems to me that the old way made sense, but neither should that deter school sessions during the summer months. With a dearth of the old chores, children who are too young to work but too old for daycare or a babysitter can get into a lot of trouble. Some structure might be desirable. Organized trips, even weekly, to a zoo or science museum or farm might be a joy to the kids, and a relief for parents.

Again, I don’t want to appear to be advocating something I’m not: parents should be parents to their kids, not pawn them off on the state or a private institution. I might say that, if you want your kid to be a part of such a program, you have to participate as well, perhaps as a chaperon on these outings. Someone can get off of work for one or two days a summer. Nor do I think that “helicopter parenting” is in any way a good thing. There’s a happy medium that isn’t portrayed in the media, because it’s not a story, but people often take news stories as the “norm”. Getting off topic again.

Dropouts. How to deal with them? I think that depends a lot on the reason the kid dropped out. Was he unchallenged? Did he feel inadequate due to his treatment by an instructor? Was he bullied? Was he the bully? Whatever the reason, it can be addressed. Certainly there are reasons the school has no control over, but some they do.

What about school police? That’s another issue that’s making waves. Apparently, 48% of schools have on-site, gun-toting police officers, who can and do make arrests for offences like cussing, bad attitude, even doodles depicting violence. And I mean arrested, handcuffs, dragged down to county lockup, strip-searched, the lot. Not all such incidents end this way, but a violent doodle does not mean the student intends to shoot up the school. One incident has an officer who observed students “walking back to class slowly” after lunch “encourage” them with pepper spray. Instead of causing them to run to class, they wound up in the hospital. So…a choice between kids being 30 seconds late to class or missing the rest of the school day? I know which the kids would choose, but I’m sure they’d rather have been in class than having capsaicin rinsed from their eyeballs. And we wonder why respect for police officers is on the decline, and why prison populations are on the rise. Oh, there are other reasons that can get me worked up, but I won’t get into them because they’re not quite so directly related.

Back to summer and extracurricular activities: some kids have amazing creativity locked up inside them. Caine Monroy built an arcade out of cardboard one summer, and it eventually became international news. Let the kids have lemonade stands without forcing them (or their parents) to get a business license or a food safety license. They’re doing it for fun, for something to do, and maybe to make enough money to buy a ticket to a theme park or something. Let them have some input into playground designs for local parks: they’re going to be the ones using them, after all. How about incentive programs at public libraries for reading books? The Book It! program I remember from childhood is still around, but that’s school-centered. And I’d regularly beg my parents to spend more money than they wanted to at the Scholastic book sales. I always had to put some books back. There are so many things for kids to do, some that we adults don’t have the time for anymore. We sometimes need to help them see that, though.

So, back to what I can do, what I’d like to do. My vision has always begun with a few nifty devices that pique the curiosity. A musical Tesla coil. A theremin. A trebuchet. A Rubins tube. A Van de Graaff generator. A tornado in a box. The Tower of Lire. Some require more work than others. All require initiative, and many are easier with help. But once these devices exist and installed in a static display, the fun begins. Showing people how they all work! Showing people the fun in non-Newtonian fluids, holography, internal combustion, and more. Inspire them to become teachers or scientists, or at the very least open their eyes to the amazing world around them.

Then they can join in open projects. Making slime, superballs, molding clay, slot cars, model railroads, to building Arduino-powered home automation systems, model rocketry, electrostatic speakers and more. The plans and instructions are out there, but I’ve not found a good repository for them, so I’d like to make one. And provide equipment from soldering stations to oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers. Support would be on hand to make sure the equipment is being treated properly, to help place parts orders, etc. My domain is the electrical, and computer programming. Someone else should be around for the chemical, someone else for DIY car repair, etc. There are legal issues involved, but I’m currently far from having to deal with them, as it’s all just a dream right now. I would hope the project grows, and if Wichita truly can’t support it, well, someplace can, and I want to be in the middle of it.

This is my vision of an extracurricular, a summer or after-school field trip destination. Once it exists, it should be easier to build portable versions of everything to tote to schools for demonstrations, perhaps even a loaner program.

On Wednesday, I “took the plunge” as it were, back into the ocean of online dating. I settled with eHarmony, because of the distance most of Match.com’s “matches” came from. One match caught my eye immediately because she’s apparently a gamer—and she had contacted me first. I’ve sent out first questions to a few others that interest me as well. I only signed up for 3 months for now; we’ll see how it goes.

Yesterday, I went to see This American Life live. I’ve been listening to the show for a couple of months now, and last night was awesome. Except for the segment I was most excited about: OK Go and TAL had a smartphone app for everyone. It looked simple enough: three buttons, each produced a bell-like sound when pressed. Each time you open the program the buttons are a different color. I didn’t know what that meant until we were all in the theatre and the “event” began. The reason it wasn’t awesome is that the audio cut out for the whole segment, so we could only guess as to what was going on. Until it started. OK Go were on handbells, and the screen showed arrows scrolling down to a white line. Just like Guitar Hero, you press the indicated arrow on your color stripe when it hits the line, and we get music! But without the rest of the handbell sound, it was a little dull. Apparently one of the songs they played was “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, which I’m sure sounded really cool on handbells with the audience participation. Otherwise, there was a hilarious short film by Mike Birbiglia (starring Terry Gross of Fresh Air), David Rackoff, David Sedaris, Tig Notaro and Taylor Dayne, Glynn Washington, Ryan Knighton, and The Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company. And, of course, stories typical of TAL that could never be aired on the radio due to their visual nature. If and when they do this again, I know I’ll be there.

Mark your calendars! Find a local observatory (Powell doesn’t list a program on their website, but I’m sure there’ll be some people there with the appropriate equipment) or get some solar viewing equipment yourself. Grab some glasses here, or, for the real good stuff, from someplace like here or here. A pinhole’s not gonna work for this, but it’s your last chance to see it unless you plan to live another 105 years. The transit of Venus happens, at least in my neck of the woods, on June 5, beginning at 5:01pm. Check here for details on your location.

Microsoft ruined my computer yesterday. I installed the latest batch of patches, which required a restart. But no luck. However, while I like to blame it on Redmond, I have a sinking feeling that it’s a hardware issue, because during POST, I get an extra beep. Until yesterday, I got 3 beeps on boot, now there’s 4. I disabled the BIOS splash screen, enabled the extra tests, but it hangs at the “Starting Windows” screen, before the logo appears. I get no chance to boot into safe mode (is there one for Windows 7?), and the startup recovery mode also hangs. Tomorrow I suppose I’ll try disconnecting hard drives until it boots (I think I know which one is causing a problem). C’mon, industry! We’re waiting for prices to come down… Still $300 for a 4TB HDD, and I want 4 of ‘em for 12TB of RAID-Z storage (one of these kitted out with 72TB flash storage and FCoE would also do the trick, but I’m trying to be realistic here).

Looks like today is my Mayan birthday. An article like this inspired me to create a spreadsheet to convert between dates, and it indicates I was born 1.11.0.0.0 ago. That’s 31 360-day “years”, or 1 Ka’tun, 11 Tun. Because Excel is picky about dates (it doesn’t allow them before 1900/1/1), I had to deal with formatting myself. Also, to do the conversions, I had to fiddle with Julian and Gregorian dates. I was slightly surprised that Excel didn’t have a built-in function to do those, so I made my own, which required the use of the Decimal class. But VBA (at least version 6.5) doesn’t let you directly declare a variable as Decimal, you have to declare as a Variant, which irks picky programmers like myself. For some reason I prefer static types to dynamic.

Speaking of which, I need to make sure I have Mayan, Discordian, Hebrew, Chinese, and Arabic sections under Horology on my wiki. Which is still not completely restored, but is well on the way. I had a small handful of templates that took care of playing cards in the old site, but the ones newly copied from Wikipedia lead to a seemingly endless stream of broken links to additional templates that were not previously required. So my poker page is a mess now. Also, many of the pages that include mathematical formulas are also broken. Either there’s something wrong with texvc or something with one of the other supporting programs, but simple polynomials like aren’t parsed, yet a couple more complex ones like show up fine. Which is really weird because WordPress here handles them like a champ.

Also, on my server, PHP seems to be more than a tiny bit slow. While I’m using “fastcgi”, I know Apache with mod_php ran things faster (I just can’t handle the memory footprint of that monstrous server). Nginx manages to blaze through anything that doesn’t require preprocessing, and I know my server back end is no slouch, but something needs to be done about that. And I’m still struggling with e-mail.

I got an e-mail notification from Google sent to my Yahoo e-mail address. I had signed up for Blogger before Google acquired it, and before Google had e-mail, and they’re “transitioning”, and I needed to update from the “legacy” to the new if I wanted to keep my account. But my site, as it was hosted by the University, went offline soon after I graduated. Seems that Blogger, and subsequently Google, still held on to my entries, which I expected were long-lost with my old computer and/or hard drives. It’s quite interesting to revisit what I posted back then. My most recent entry is over nine years old! And the entries that I’ve looked at are largely short, but it was updated much more often. Now my blogs are updated close to monthly, typified by this type of long, rambling entry…

Valproate semisodium. Paroxetine. Rizatriptan. Fenofibrate. Pioglitazone. Metformin. Insulin detemir. Insulin aspart. Methylcellulose. Two weeks ago I was young, ignorant, and only taking the first two (and occasionally the third). Now I’m less young, less ignorant, and taking all of that stuff (except #3, which is still “as needed”). So now I have two chronic conditions: migraine headaches, and diabetes mellitus type 2 (blood work is out to ensure it’s not late-onset type 1).

I must admit, the revelation was a bit of a shock. Now I must go about paying close attention to my carbohydrate intake—I had already mostly cut non-diet pop (soda) out of my diet, with an occasional indulgence now and then when out with friends. I tried Diet Coke the other day and decided that it was absolutely disgusting. I’ll stick with water and powdered instant drink mixes. So far it seems that much of my typical diet falls within the guidelines I’ve been given, even when and where I eat out.

I finally get to perform Orff’s Carmina Burana! I was considering taking a season off of the symphony chorus, but certainly not when that’s the work! Much of this group has done it once or twice before, even with the WSO, so they’re not as impressed with the choice.

Migrated the server, most likely to a new physical box in the same datacenter. Figured I’d do it myself instead of waiting for some unspecified migration time and date. Now I’m looking to hire someone to get the mail server working. I’ve got Postfix installed, and it sends mail fine from the CLI, but the server doesn’t receive mail, much less make it accessible. I’m going to change whatever mailing list addresses I can recall to my main working account.

My WordPress site is back up (obviously), and so is my Wiki, but I don’t have the old posts or articles there yet. They were appropriately backed up, but restoration on a new installation proved…problematic. Especially with the wiki, since it went from using PostgreSQL to MySQL. I still have no love for Oracle, but unless and until WP has native support for something else, I’m stuck with it, and I’d rather not run two database servers as I used to. Streamlining is the name of the game now. If only I could get Munin running over CGI, so I could get nice graphs of important things like memory usage. The server hasn’t crashed yet, so I know I’m doing well compared to before, but since I’m currently not running Munin or Django, and the mail server ain’t doin’ squat, there’s less load at the moment.

Meanwhile,

• I’ve got an application in to refinance my house at 70% of current interest and about 100 fewer payments (depending on when this gets approved). Downside is that the valuation of my house has decreased, so it will cost me $1900.77 to do this. Now, if I had waited until my yard was re-done, I might well have come in at or above the value I wanted, but I probably would have missed out on the sweet rate.
• I know how to remove, disassemble, reassemble, and install a garbage disposal now.
• Both my credit cards are completely paid off. Yes, I managed this with yet another loan, but this one has all kinds of cool benefits: lower interest rate, I pay the interest to myself, it doesn’t count against my credit rating.
• I need to make time to buy shoes and jeans. The ones I have are well past their worn-out date, and there’s that lost-weight thing, too. These barely stay up with a belt! One notch tighter is too tight to comfortably sit down, but when I stand up they don’t stay. Oh, for the days when I didn’t need a belt.
• I discovered the “range” setting on my thermostat. What I’ve been looking for pretty much since I got it. Now I need to set the schedule, and convince myself that it’s got the temperature right, because it felt cooler than it claimed this morning. I tried to do the schedule thing from work, but something in the proxy is interfering. Perhaps the same thing that interferes at the website for Cox.
• I have a Tesla coil still in a box and still unassembled. And no soldering iron to put it together.
• I got a pencil bag for my notebook just in time for my last math class. I’m sure it’ll come in handy for future classes, though. Anyway, one class, then the final exam.

I’m dropping a few titles from my pull list at the comic shop: Demon Knights and Green Lantern Corps are sure to go, probably Grifter and Detective Comics as well. Static Shock, Hawk & Dove, and Men at War have their last issues this week, so those will drop themselves. Still waiting to drop Batwing, Batwoman, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and Wonder Woman. Eventually, I’d like to pare (the DC side of things) down to Batgirl, Nightwing, Supergirl, Action Comics, Superman, and maybe Justice League. And while I’m caught up on Deadpool, I’m sorely behind on my Wolverine.

Interesting…Google Docs (now Drive) doesn’t know the word “sweet”. Or at least didn’t at the time of this writing.

As I’m feeling a desperate need once again for a best friend and hopefully lifelong mate, and I know I keep saying I’m going to dive in, but now I can (mostly) afford it, it’s time to join eHarmony or Match.com. The former has failed me in the past, but the latter keeps serving up “matches” from hundreds of miles away. I might be okay with 100; 50 is the range I set, but 300 or more? I don’t think so. I’ve tried the long-distance thing 3 times, and it didn’t turn out well in any of those cases. While eHarmony seems to be slightly less discriminating in the matches I get (in terms of “compatibility” based on my statements), at least they’re nearby. In an earlier post I made note of probability based on the Drake equation. While I doubt its veracity (like I doubt that of the Drake equation), it appears the pool of potentials is greater in the eHarmony waters than in the Match.com waters.

While I hoped I might meet someone in my math class, I lacked the courage to even tell the one I found most attractive that I liked her hair, or her Batman bag, or anything else. I asked to borrow a pencil, but that’s pretty much been the extent of our interaction.

As the saying goes, “There are a lot of fish in the sea.” To which I can simply reply, “Where else would they be?”

CMS has observed a new particle, composed of the up, strange, and bottom quarks: they call it the . So the LHC has done more than destroy the Earth.

I notice this new version of WordPress has a few features, like a “Quote” format, which I may well take advantage of. I need to find a theme I like, still.

And it turns out that I need to adjust my clock, set tzinfo to the proper value, because it thinks it’s 5 hours later than it really is. Obviously on UTC still.