The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • Laptop Repaired

    My laptop came back today after a stunning turnaround time. Much to my delight, they did indeed replace the hard drive (serial numbers prove it). However, they said they didn’t find anything wrong with the CDROM. Odd, I haven’t been able to burn a CD in months. After booting I pop in the same CD that refused to burn while I was on the phone with their support guy, and it worked just fine. Don’t know what to make of that.

    They also returned my battery wrapped with tape saying it was defective and should I put it into the laptop and something goes wrong with it, my warranty is void. I’m suspicious, I think it would work just as well as it did before shipping but I’m going to start pricing them regardless.

    Now on to reinstalling everything, what a chore.

  • Apartment: Done

    We have finally finished cleaning the apartment. It’s spotless and we will be turning in the keys at the end of the week. Next up will be to go through the large pile of stuff we transported into a corner of our basement. There’s no real rush to do that though.

    While we had Ana’s parents’ truck, we decided to make a run over to the recycling center with some of our cardboard boxes from moving. I initially thought we just had two or three laying around the house and garage, but ended up with a couple dozen filling an F150. The garage has a lot more free space with that taken care of.

  • We lost, and other things

    As first reported by David, Ana and I turned on our TV during No TV week. Ana woke up and flipped it on for her typical Saturday morning viewing, and we lost. Better luck next year!

    We went to the apartment today for more cleaning. I sanded down the patched drywall and you cannot tell we had a large hole for ethernet to the living room. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take any more stuff to the house because it started raining and didn’t stop all day long.

    So today was a pretty lazy day, Ana did take another shot at cutting the mats for two new living room pictures. It was a unique idea and they turned out great, you can see them here, here, and here. I had the Date mode on on the digital camera so just ignore that.

  • Lawn

    Finally got the lawn mower out of the box tonight. Since I had gotten that far I figured I may as well cut the grass. The front yard went very smoothly, but the side of the house where our temporary sump line deposits was a pain in the butt. Part of the problem was the grass which had flourished and grown a good 8 inches, the other part was that the ground is super saturated and felt like a swamp as I ran the mower over it. It killed the mower four times it was so thick and wet. We’re calling the contractor tomorrow and inquiring about when they’ll be burying the line.

    After mowing, Ana and I went out to Lonestar for some steak and then to see The Ladykillers. It’s a pretty funny movie, albeit strange.

    I just looked up the status of my laptop shipment and it seems that Fedex has just now (at 6pm!) sent it on its way. I made the trip over to the distribution center last night thinking it would actually make a difference, but I was wrong. Expected arrival date in Vernon Hills is the 26th :(

  • Shipped

    Today I received the box and packing instructions for my laptop, so this evening I spent some time getting my laptop and accessories packed nicely before shipping it off to a place called MicroMedics for repair. Hopefully their work is better than their name and url make them look.

    Without my laptop I have had to struggle working on my desktop (500Mhz). Instead of doing more coding on Chef, I decided to get ASP.NET running on linux with Mono. Here’s the first page! I plan on using ASP.NET on linux for serving up the web frontend to Chef, should be fun.

    No TV is going good, although Ana is really looking forward to the end of this week. I think that if the TV were on tonight, I probably would have been too lazy to get Mono up and running.

  • Quiet Evening

    Went over to my parents’ house after work to help them setup a new entertainment center. It’s a very nice piece of furniture and looks great in the room.

    I mentioned to them about the whole No TV thing and yet again I was given looks of confusion. Personally, it’s been two very pleasant and quiet evenings and I’m enjoying it.

    Ana and I were discussing dinner for tomorrow night and we both have a craving for some BW3s. As a substitute for driving to Champaign, I found that you can order sauces online! Ordered 3 and found there is free shipping, such a deal.

  • Circuit City Support absolutely blows

    Today during my lunch hour I went to Circuit City to drop off my laptop to get its problems fixed. I was quickly handed a pamphlet and told they don’t do repairs like this anymore. In the literature was a 1-800 number to call. Uh oh. This could be bad.

    Oh my gosh. I’ve done the tech support calls before and they’ve been relatively easy to guide in ‘diagnosing’ the problems. What I experienced tonight was pain. I tell him that I notice very loud knocking when I’m doing work on the second partition of the drive. His solution? Let’s run chkdsk on the first partition, even after I told him I ran it on both the night before with no errors reported. I tell him about the entries in the Event Log, and he’s completely confused about what that is. I have to call back after 45 minutes of chkdsk running – I get a new guy and he tells me that I have to now run a system restore. I argue with him about how that will most likely just hide the problem (I won’t hear any noise/trouble when it’s done). He agreed but says I have to do it anyway…

    Continue reading “Circuit City Support absolutely blows”

  • Click, Click, Click

    As I write this, I am frantically copying data off of my laptop. Every minute or so a very loud clicking noise is followed by disk thrashing and a very sluggish OS. The Event Log reports bad blocks on the drive and explorer is crashing frequently with I/O errors.

    Click, click, click, thud. Ahh the familiar sound of a hard drive dying. Yay for the 4 year service plan I bought. Circuit City here I come.

    Since I’m going to be sending it in for service, I’ll also mention the horrible battery life lately (just over an hour at most) and the inability of the docking station’s DVD/CDRW to read or record CDR or CDRW.

  • New Toy

    This morning after coming back from breakfast, Ana and I stopped in a Best Buy to finally look at a new cellphone for me. I’ve been very reluctant because I like my old phone so much, even if the screen has gone out and it’s only about 10% effective as a phone. Anyway, Ana finally got me in and looking at new phones and I ended up with an awesome phone/pda Treo 600.

    From playing with it, it seems to be an awesome device. Ever since getting rid of service for my Motorola T900 text pager, I’ve missed being able to chat with David and others at pretty much any time of day.

  • Beautiful Night

    It was a very clear night tonight. Since I was too tired from cleaning all day to get the telesope out, I pulled out one of my astronomy books and the following text jumped off the page at me:

    “Children growing up in the final decades of the 20th century or the early years of the 21st century represent the first generation in the history of civilization to live in a world where the stars are almost certain to be the last thing noticed at night instead of the first.”

    – Terence Dickinson, NightWatch

    I cannot help but wonder if this will have an adverse affect on the desire to explore space in future. A large part of me thinks it won’t, but what if Galileo (or Kepler, Newton, etc.) didn’t have the night sky to inspire and intrigue him? I think it is safe to say we would be in a completely different situation right now.

    It’s pretty saddening to me.