Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
You know how you think of the best put down for somebody hours after you actually needed it? Well, I just had the exact opposite happen – I though of a put down that I don’t actually need right now. So I guess I should file it away. The put down in question:
Reality called. It says it misses you.
(Yeah, I know I haven’t been posting much. Mostly because the sort of stuff that’s bugging me right now doesn’t need to be shared with the entire web.)
I did the Ultimate Boot CD diagnostics that I wrote about in this previous post. And DFT said nothing was wrong with the drive, several memory and CPU testers found nothing wrong with either of them. And of course, I still have that message about the video card. So I’m thinking it’s almost certainly the video card.
I have an old ATI of some form or another in my desk drawer at work (I tried to give it to somebody there but he decided he wanted something with a driver disk and a manual). I think I’ll bung that in and give it a try, see if the system manages to stay up. If it does, I’ll try the old disk as well, to see if the problems with it were just a matter of needing a chkdisk or scandisk after all those power cycles. If that’s the case, I need to buy a decent but cheap AGP video card. My only two criteria are that it must be cheap (I think I mentioned that already) and it must give a decent frame rate in Half Life 2.
Friday I agonized over the weather decision. Today the TAF (Terminal Aerodrome Forecast) is calling for fairly strong gusty winds – nothing I haven’t dealt with before, but not conducive to passenger comfort – and the FA (Area Forecast) is mentioning widely scattered thunderstorms. The surface analysis map shows a not too wide or strong line of showers approaching, but a strong occluded front and a very low Low right behind it, so who knows what might be popping up during the day. So yeah, I probably wouldn’t have been happy with myself if I’d flown Vicki up here, knowing we’d be dealing with all that turbulence on the way home.
Yesterday and early this morning there was a lot of wind shear in the forecast – David Megginson comments on it (in context of Watertown’s forecast, which was similar to Rochester’s) over on his blog. It appears that whatever weather mechanism was making strong winds just above the ground yesterday is extending down to the ground today.
It’s our first year in the new neighbourhood. It’s in the city, and it’s pretty nice neighbourhood, so it’s no surprise that people come from far and wide to trick or treat here. So there’s been a pretty steady parade of kids. But you hold out a bowl full of “fun size” chocolate bars and Hershey’s Kisses, and they ONLY TAKE ONE. Even if the kid takes a Kiss and you say “take a big one too”, they just say “no thank you” and leave.
It’s creeping me out.