Christmas 2008: The Quickening

truly, there’s nothing quite like jamming dinner parties, holidays, and the ressurection of long-dead/forgotten relatives you haven’t seen in oh, 364 days, into a week of otherwise restful holiday. the only thing that it does tend to bring is fond recollections and remorse, while you’re more likely to be considering banal things like consolidating your sudden increase in credit card debts into a personal loan from your existing bank who, while shamelessly admitting they do like you, will only offer you about $400 at 15% pa interest when asked… and not the $9000 or so increase you asked for.

ahh christmas. the time for forgiving. forgetting, drinking, petty bickering, animosities brought to a head, burying the hatchet into family members. dismembering the bodies and wrapping the parts in old tinsel and chickenwire and dumping them in a deep mineshaft somewhere in the middle of australia where GPS fears to track. Hmm, there’s some new profiteering right there, see, they dont put that on the tourist pamphlets: places to bury a body. it would probably be the general kick in our economic downturned pants, sophistry notwithstanding.

so, yep. it’s that time of year again. let the elf-medication begin.

it’s time

Remember that article about home NAS storage i wrote … oh yeah, a few days ago. turns out it was prescient.

One of my Desktop’s 500gb drives stopped working, with it being the one drive in your system that has all the backups of your photos and music, books, drivers, apps, games, etc. was the drive i started my PC with really. and it’s a western digital, so anyone i ask will either be surprised, or not that surprised it’s a western digital.

i’m still in the ‘Why God Why’ camp of ritualistic failure prevention strategies, and have not yet graduated beyond that stage, as with all rituals, you find something that works until it fails and you still end up going back to it. 

and, it really failed. a complete dud. it doesn’t even spin up, and the freezer trick, does nothing. i could replace the PCB with another WD5000AAKS, but it’s only a year or two old, feb 2007, and i don’t want to destroy 2 drives, well, one temporarily . it’s still pissing me off when i look at it. grr.

So to remedy, i bought a $100 Samsung 640gb drive from Jantech, got home, moved some drive letters around, and decided to go from 5 drives to 4 drives, with the E for external (and M for my macbook pro, S for the NAS server, T for TV shares, U for iTunes, V for video, etc. sounds childish when you spell it out)

The other frustrating thing is, and probably the most annoying overall, my Microsoft Habu Mouse (it’s a razer in a microsoft branded shell) , is for an ungodly reason, turning itself off and on while i’m using it, and it’s doing double and triple clicks instead of one click. I know it’s disconnecting, , because it makes the connect/disconnect noise in Vista, so i know it’s “broken”, i just can’t tell why. replacing the drivers is not helping, and it’s very recent, i.e. after last weeks patching blitz from microsoft. 

There’s very likely a log of the hardware events somewhere in vista, but i can’t deign where or why microsoft would hide hardware failures in some pokey little backwards fashion… yeah, i can’t see anything in the hardware filter of the event viewer’s logs, and it’s insane stuff like this that gets under your skin, ’specially having to literally ‘tab’ in the new enhanced event viewer when the mouse stops working for 12-15 seconds, every 10-20 seconds.

 i have no choice but to blame microsoft, but that’s only good to a point, usually the point where you realise, with ‘kratos-like’ patience, that chasing the issue is like chasing a mountain. you get there and … nothing. stabbing the mountain in the eyeball with a spoon might be a bit overdone, but it doesn’t help.

i suppose it’s a learning experience i.e. avoid microsoft, and it’s a dubious way to bolster logitech’s bottom line this christmas. maybe it’s a loose wire or a fused switch or something ‘at fault’  but it’s been perfect up till now, ans maybe it’s not software, perhaps whatever caused issue #1 caused issue #2 ? maybe.

and just maybe, it’s time.

Home NAS: why, again?

Ahh Space.

It’s good to have space. but there always comes a time when you run out of it. especially if you have the internet, or children, or a life. etc. there’s always something to fill that void, and while that’s all very zen, it’s also leading to a dilemma of mine.

I’m running out of space and it’s becoming more expensive than i’d like to fix it. I Don’t have the heart, or the time to trash things, so i keep it around, bookshelves, CD’s, DVD racks, etc. are filled with the iconography of thousands of varied influences on my life. but on my PC, it’s less organised.

last year, i fixed this by getting a NAS to help sort and organise things. But, if i was recommending NAS to a new user, it would be a dilemma. 

Do you need NAS ? do you have a penchant for a neat/empty PC Desktop, like the LaCie and the typical sterile lines of archive/storage boxes, or have a need for a few terabytes of reliable storage ? if all of the above, NAS makes things organised if you’re in the need for organising your storage options and want something a bit different, (and tucked away, my NAS sits right next to the ADSL router on top of a bookshelf)

I, on the other hand, have a lot of content. a Lot. i don’t quite need it, it just accumulates. It’s a terrible habit for IT professionals and home users, and it perpetuates the storage industry. It’s a problem, i’ll admit that. it’s a problem that requires a few terabytes than i have. 

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lazy sundays

Sunday’s probably not so lazy, but it sounds nice when you have that aphorism at hand.

It’s  just … well, it sounds better than spending time  at the computer, baking in the summer heat (was 17′c and raining yesterday, now 25′c and sunny) and the occasional breeze off the headlands.

Or listening to the more frequent drunken reveller making their way home up the hill past where i live. Cowboy Bebop’s playing on the TV behind me (queued up on the foxtel iQ), so i’m multi-basking, the glow of the LCD from behind and in front of me. all v. lazy.

Let’s see, i spent most of yesterday sleeping in, reading the paper, checking email, watching TV, going out for shopping (non constructive), and then looking at better storage options for clearing up my desk of all the random DVD’s i’ve got strewn all around my desk & bookshelves. i’m sure i did more, but that seems to be pretty fulfilling right there.

Instead of doing legwork for nothing, i just put together an article on some basic NAS options for people to look at their options.
(I might still dress it up before posting it online, but it seems considered. informative. Rambling.*shrug*)

What else, added a stack of generic “prettifying” plugins for wordpress 2.7, the only one i wanted to get working is the WoW achievements widget, which seems to be pretty good. but i can’t seem to configure it (i have the feeling the setting tab isn’t 2.7 compatible, but the saved settings are carried over through the upgrade from 2.5/2.6). More intriguingly, it’s got the wrong readme.txt file in the archive, so the Wordpress.com plugin entry has the wrong title i.e. “Add to Any Subscribe Button”, linking from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/world-of-warcraft-recent-achievements. While Lady Jess got her blog working (looks very good BTW), i’ll just hold off, it’s rather incidental for me.

As for Warcraft, i think my last decent achievement was getting “I’ve toured the Fjord” . So, post-guild collapse, i’ve been slacking in getting ahead. Though, memorably, i think i’ve seen Thrall get taken down 4 times since the lvl 80’s have been storming Orgrimmar for the achievements. Usually when i’m on, i usually spend more time trying to make money from DE’ing greens for infinite dust and Great Planar Essences, which is not ideal, but i do have 70+ dream shards by now instead of a lvl 80 warlock, or a lvl 60+ death knight.

Perhaps i’ll join the new rehashed guild AWAKEN if i get an invite, but i just recall spending so much time running around in circles before the achievements doing pointless things for guildies, but there’s really plenty of time to ding 77 and save up the 6k in gold for the dalaran flying mount or a netherdrake mount or pugging for achievement titles. Plus, with the levelling guides on hand (Zygor’s), it’s a bit like cheating. but not enough to feel any kind of guilt or remorse, i’m seeing a lot more of the game this way and doing other things without it really taking over.

i do like the plugin for flickr, if you’ve got barely any interest,  you can have a look at my old photos if you’d like.

Salutations

Good morning,it’s good to be up and running again with the new WordPress 2.7 on a whole new site, at a wholly different price. 

i’ve installed a few plugins, but haven’t tuned or updated the widgets or plugins so far, it’s really just another update frenzy, but far more sedate and affecting less people overall than the last one i was subjected to.