Category: Rant

Ok, which is it?

I got a spam from Verisign. I thought they were a legitmate business, so I have no idea why they’re spamming. Anyway, here’s the bit that annoyed me:

At VeriSign, we respect your privacy and we are continuously updating our mailing lists to make sure that only the people that want to receive VeriSign information are on our list. This will be the last mailing to you unless you respond to this email at this time.

and then later on in the same message

To remove yourself from receiving future VeriSign promotional
mailings, please visit us at http://www.verisign.com/compref
and update your communication preferences and user profile.

Notice the contradiction there?

I hate weather decision making

Once again, I’ve got something to be at in Canada at a certain time. Once again, Vicki gets off work so late that she can only make it if we fly. And this time, as a twist, if we’re not going to fly we have to leave before the afternoon forecasts come out.

My main source of weather information are the surface forecast charts at AOPA on-line. Up until this morning, today was looking like snow showers all day, and Sunday was looking like a terrible mess of rain and snow. But now it’s showing clear for Sunday. And today’s TAF is currently calling for clouds that are just around freezing level, but high enough that I could be comfortable flying under them VFR. But unfortunately, the non-aviation weather sites (weather.com and accuweather.com) don’t quite agree with the rosiness – they’re saying Sunday will be mostly cloudy, a moderate probability of precipitation, and strong gusty winds.

I hate making decisions when it’s murky and uncertain like this. Many is the time I’ve driven home under clear skies saying to myself “I could have flown this”, but a dozen of those are counter balanced by one experience like my trip home from KBAF last month. So I think we’re going to drive again this time. Dammit.

Hey, maybe this time it’s not the hard drive?

Or maybe it’s the hard drive and everything else at the same time.

My Windows box hasn’t been really happy since the move. And a few weeks ago, when I tried to start it up to test my new USB KVM switch, it started behaving badly. It was the first time I’d had it on in a while, and I was surprised that it suddenly rebooted, and while it was running chkdisk, it rebooted again. And again. And again. So I turned it off and forgot about it for a while.

Today I decided to try it again. I booted it with a Knoppix CD, and it managed to boot, and it could mount the hard disk. And I could navigate around. So I took my USB drive, and tried to copy files from the Windows drive to the USB drive. But it didn’t work – it got into the “My Desktop” part of the file system and Knoppix started talking about IDE errors and lost timer ticks.

So I grabbed another hard drive I had kicking around, and slapped it into the machine. There was a lot of dust in the machine, and I took it outside and blew it all off with my last can of “Blow Off Duster”. I booted it up and installed XP. It didn’t seem to want to get a DHCP address, but I gave it a static IP and started installing Windows Updates. But after downloading 17 updates and installing 3 of them, it rebooted with no warning. And when it came up, it said that Windows detected instability in the ATI Radeon graphic card driver. I pushed the resolution down to 1024×768 from 1280×1024, and blew off a bunch of dust in the graphics card heat sink. And it got a little further this time before it suddenly rebooted, and this time I saw a bunch of purple splotches on the display first.

So maybe it wasn’t the hard disk, and maybe it was the graphic card. Or maybe it was something else entirely. I’ve downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD and now I’m testing the drive and the memory and everything else. These tests run in text mode, so maybe they aren’t as demanding on the video card.

We’ll see.