Bowlcut’s little piece of the world

I’m just over one year on this install.

Original Install Date:     3/1/2007, 8:11:51 PM

And it used to be a running joke that you had to reinstall XP every year.  Its true.  I swear either the hardware is finally failing, or this install is finaly pretty well mucked up.  It is crashing often, sometimes daily and all Im doing is like surfing.  I am super safe in my surfing with scripting off and in firefox locked down.  But man it sucks.  I just have to hold out another week or so and Ill go buy a mac.  Im just tired of this dang computer its just failing me.  Debating do i want to take it and just shoot it up….who knows

Just on Thursday I came upon a deal I couldn’t pass up no matter what.  A guy on our local forum had a new 3rd gen iPod Nano 8gb for sale for his final asking price of 100 dollars.  My poor iRiver is now like 5 years old and definatly showing its age.  Not that it looks bad but its functionality is not there.  It was designed in a time when all you did was listen to music.  I don’t listen to music all that often anymore, its mostly podcasts now.  But the iRiver has served me well and I still love it.  This was just too good of a deal.  Ive told myself I wouldn’t buy an iPod till I got my own Mac.  Windows and iTunes sucks.  But again…half price for barely 3 month old iPod.

I fell in love quick with the hardware.  Its awesome and the functionality is top notch.  But iTunes sucks still yet, 140m of memory usage just sitting there is not acceptable, but it is what you have to use.  So I delve in and use it.  Man its nice listening to a podcast, pause it come inside, sync up and listen right where you left off.  Or even changing podcasts on it then when you come back it remembers where you were on that particular podcast.  I just don’t know how Ive done it.  I know I can use non iPods for podcasts, but iPods really do make them work well.

So get home, and start my laundry, can you see where this is going.  At least I caught it on the filling of the load.  I got it out of my back pocket just a slight dunking of water, I’ve seen worse.  I’ve shaken all I can, left right up down banged on it.  No visible water in it at all.  We will see if it comes to life.  4 days I’ve seen the light.  I honestly couldn’t wait till I got in the car to get to play with it a bit.  Now all that is gone.  Because it was so small and light I didn’t notice it still in my pocket.

Now do I get another one?  Pay the stupid tax and go on?  Maybe upgrade to the iPod touch for wide screen and wifi?  Still hold off till I buy myself a Mac?  This pc here is trash.  Even the smallest of video podcasts would bog it down to its knees in iTunes.  Meh…I dont know if i want to not have an iPod now…

Well I did basicly nothing this weekend.  Which is somewhat odd, I barely even did any work which is the mostly odd thing.  But it was kinda odd and felt just as odd.  One thing I did today was replace the emissions part on the Altima.  I drove it for a while today, usualy when I reset the ecu it pop’s the check engine light within the drive home which is about 12 miles.  I drove atleast that much of stop and start, then cruising speeds.  So far it hasnt come back on so I think that got that.

The thing right now is, I think Im super sensative to the car.  Because Im feeling every little bump, every little lurch, every little hickup.  I cant tell what is normal and what isnt.  I cant totaly tell if the car has been fixed totaly yet or not.  I do need a new valve cover gasket.  Pulling the plug wire today didnt yield the pool of oil I was expecting.  So my thought that the oil was fouling the plug still causing the miss isnt happening.  This is now a mystry.  Is it really missing, or is it just normal.  3rd and 4th gear heavy load full throttle, I cant feel anything abnormal.  I would think a miss would really show up in that situation.  Only time I really feel anything is light accleration or steady state cruising.  So is that just normal stuff, bumps in the road, or a real miss.  I am going to do some highway driving here in a day or two and see how crusing on the interstate.  Trying to figure out if my butt is just super sensative, or Im just a tard…thats something hard.

I have to get this fully sorted out in 2 weeks.  Cause on the 7th or before I plan on going to Atlanta.  So I need to make sure everything is good.  If not, Ill be renting a car going one way in it each day and just rely on my friends when Im there to haul me around, which should work.  I just dont want to do that, and dont want to have an unreliable car.  So thinking I may have to cruise out somewhere to a friends place one way or the other on the interstate this week to test the car out.  meh…ok back to doing nothing

Me and my computers don’t appear to be on very good terms.  First I get home from Mid-Ohio to find my file server turned off.  It’s power supply, dead.  So I grab my last power supply I have not in use here, and throw it in the box.  I boot and I am missing some drives, I figure “crap Ive lost my data.”  Well it was that the cable came loose when I was changing power supplies.  Get that fixed.  Then because of this heat, it keeps shutting down.  If it lasts all day its amazing.  I may try a bigger heat sink on the processor but they are 3 times as loud as it is now and that sucks.  I also may move the network around this weekend and put it here in the living room where I am never at.  Last night I also noticed my F drive was gone.  It doesnt show up in the bios any more :(.  So I lost a little data, nothing important tho.  Ill work on that later tonight.  If I figure right, thats my oldest drive at somewhere near 10 years old.  I guess thats not horrible….  Ok now on to work, we are starting our every other weekend off again this week.  So its my week to work, sadly.