MikeBrum.com

I took my laptop apart tonight. For a while, the screen has been fucked. It powers on and everything works with the exception of the screen being exceptionally dim. I can just barely make out what’s going on and I can see that it actually boots to the Windows login screen. I can hook up an external monitor and that works, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of a laptop, now doesn’t it?

I was hoping that in my boredom-induced tinkering that I’d find some “overly obvious” problem that could be resolved by wiggling a few wires, but no such luck.

I priced new, used and refurb’ed screens and I’m looking for anywhere from $375 installed to about $100 if I install it myself. I’d be all about just buying a used one and putting it in myself (since I’m very confident now that it’s very easy to replace), but I don’t know if it’s the screen that’s fucked or if it’s something else that’s just causing the screen to appear to be fucked. I don’t want (nor can I afford) to drop $100 and be completely wrong about this. Having an extra laptop screen if this one isn’t actually broken helps me not a bit.

But beyond that, I don’t really want to junk the thing because it does work completely fine aside from the screen issue.

Oh well. I was hoping I could magic up a laptop before going to Hawaii next month, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I certainly don’t think I can afford $100 right now with that coming up.

Marria and I were out late at a friend’s belated birthday party. It was dubbed a “geek party” and pretty much consisted of playing different board and card games. I had a good time, even if I was caught in a game of Munchkin for something like 3+ hours. We ended up getting in about 4.

We got up sometime this afternoon and made it to the mall for a bit. Marria did some shopping and I pretty much just hung out. No biggie. On the way out, I noticed a sign for a carnival and I swung around to the back of the mall parking lot (it’s big!) and there it was!

We ended up going on two rides and walked through a small funhouse called Mardi Gras. The rides were the classic Tilt-A-Whirl and the Artic Blast.

We had a great time – didn’t stay long, but long enough for some rides, some food that’s really bad for us and me to take these pictures with my trusty Treo 600!

I got around to taking some pictures of a necklace I’m working on for Marria. It’s made of an aluminum alloy that’s pretty damn shiney. The rings are 16g and have an inside diameter of 5/32″.

I’m having a bitch of a time fashioning a clasp for it, but I’m going to focus on that soon as I’d love to finish it.

End-to-end right now the chain is 14″ – so despite how jagged those ends look in the close-ups, they’re not that bad. Realize that the pictures were taken just a couple inches away. Besides that, I’m going to clean up any non-perfect ends and the burrs will be taken off as well.

Yesterday was long. It wasn’t bad… just long. Got up late and Marria and I had to run around to get ready so I could get her to work and then get me to work. I sped a lot yesterday. I probably averaged around 80mph for the day – which is fun, albeit dangerous in the rain.

From home to Marria’s work is 30 miles. From home to my work is 40 miles. From my work to Marria’s work is pretty much 70 miles since the apartment is literally on the way. Doing quick math (30*2+40*2+30*2), we see that yesterday was a 200 mile day for me. Ugh. That’s a lot of time in the car for no huge, super-fun reason. I’ve certainly done more on a number of roadtrips… but it’s nuts when it’s just doing what you need to do.

Today will be considerably less. I’m at work right now and it’s quiet (I hope I don’t jinx myself). I was playing around with one of my BSD machines and I got sshd listening on some alternate ports so I can ssh in directly instead of having to ssh into my main machine and then ssh from that console into the other one. It’s just a hassle. And since my router only port forwards (it doesn’t relay), I had to deal with the hassle or do some tweaking. Luckily it’s super minor and only took about a minute (which included reading the appropriate man pages since I had no idea where the ssh config was – ok, some idea, but not a lot).

I’m pooped though. Far, far too little sleep in the past 48 hours. I think I’m going to try to nap a bit today. I was only able to get about 20 minutes yesterday before I got a call. Despite that, I still managed to get a crink in my neck in that 20 minutes. I’ve been here since about 10:40 and the phone switch activated at 11:00. Half hour into the shift and we still haven’t gotten any calls. Hopefully it stays this quiet and I can get some quality snoozing in. I’m fortunate that I’m very responsive to phones when I’m sleeping. Even if the phone rings at 2:00am and I’m dead asleep, I’ll wake up and be able to get it. (right? :)) While frustrating at times because it means I wake up, it’s also useful as well.

Fire alarms, however, are a completely different story. I tend to sleep through them no problem.

Oh – and I realized yesterday that I was smarter than I realized (which would imply that I’m not -that- smart if I didn’t notice beforehand). The pictures that I thought I had lost on my phone are not lost. I did have to wipe my phone and everything on there is gone, but I had been saving the images to my SD card and not the phone’s memory, so they’re still preserved. That’s always helpful!

Well, time to wrap this up. I need to kick up my feet and relax a bit.

Ok, been lazy with the updates lately. Sorry. I meant to update a few times with some goofy pics I had taken on my phone but it hasn’t been playing nicely and I had to hard-reset it a few times – losing all of those pics. Pissed me off something good. It’s “stabilized”, so we’ll see how it works.

Work has been nuts as usual. It’s particularly nuts right now. Paul (many of you will know him as Smeg) is out and I’m covering for him and doing my work. He’s no slouch and that means a lot of work for me until he’s back. On the good side of things, my raise was finalized today and while I’m not going to divulge my salary, I’ll say that I’m now making a full 25% more than I was before April. That’s damn good news!

Other than that, things have been going well. Marria and I have been staying rather busy but in a good way. I’m working this weekend as well. Again, busy but it means more $$… so not entirely bad. It’s just a matter of finding sleep.

Tonight I’m left to my own devices. Marria is “out with the girls” and probably will be crashing at a friend’s. So the question is… will I find something to do or bum around here and crash early? More than likely the latter… but I’ll at least try to do something.

Well, the last week hasn’t been bad to me. Work has been, as usual, very busy. We’re still understaffed and still getting more and more workload every day. Luckily most of the people I work with are cool and nobody gives us a hard time about the casual environment we work in. For instance, bringing in Lord of the Rings toys into work and having them sit on top of your computer.

Though, one thing that I’ve never been able to figure out about the building we work with is the foyeur – in the middle of it is this huge (and rather ugly) statue of two marlins (I’m pretty sure they’re marlins). Here’s a shot from above and straight on.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I should be asleep right now I’d wager. Unfortunately, I’m still up writing this. What’s wrong with me? I keep feeling like I’m going to fall asleep when I’m driving home. It’s scary – my ability to fall asleep anywhere has a very specific downside.

Here’s a random pic of the dog when I walked him tonight. I didn’t know if there was going to be enough light for my phone to get anything more than blobs, but they’re not that bad. I got one pic of him peeing, but I deleted that one.

So last night Marria and I went out for a very low key birthday dinner for her. She’s so popular. I just use my phone to take pictures – she actually uses hers to talk to people. Wiggy.

And here’s some random pictures just for fun.

Heh, I love stuff like this. Ignore me if you don’t get it.

class FightClubRules # 1 def to_s &#8220;&#8221; end # 2 def inspect &#8220;&#8221; end # 3 def over? @fighters.each do |f| return true if f.limp? or f.gets =~ /stop!/ end false end # 4 def add_fighter(fighter) @fighters ||= [] @fighters.size <= 2 or raise "Too many fighters!" @fighters << fighter end # 5 include Singleton # 6 def clothing_valid? @fighters.each do |f| return false if f.clothing.include?(:shirt) or f.clothing.include?(:shoes) end true end # 7 def timer_expired?; false; end # 8 def initialize(crowd) crowd.each do |visitor| if visitor.first_visit? add_fighter(visitor) end end endend

Oh, and the language that this was crowbarred into is Ruby. And if you need a tip, here’s a refresher.

And today’s question is, “Who loves me?”

If you raised your hand and said “I do! I do!”, then please follow this link and purchase this item for me: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=348&item=5967479188&rd=1 – your money will be well spent.

That is all.

I’m damn tired today. Yesterday wrapped up 12 days straight of work… I’m glad I have two days that I don’t need to go into the office. Unfortunately, Saturdays are early days – so it’s not much of a reprieve. I didn’t really have any plans for today, but I think I’m going to hang at the shop for a bit, visit my mom, then come home and sleep. I have some things I’d like to do around the apartment if I can… but we’ll see where I’m left with that.

After work last night I went down and met everyone at the shop. We then saw Sin City. I was very impressed with the movie. Great cinematography, great story, boobies… what else can you ask for? I’d highly recommend it.

I think my mom is giving me an old computer that she has. I had fixed it up a while back when she got her new computer and gave it to my aunt. She’s now getting her own computer and was going to throw that one away. If you saw my previous post, you know that old machines can be resurrected and put to good use. We’ll just see how useful this one can be. Worse comes to worse… I throw it away – but not before trying. Oh – and she also has an Easter basket of some description for me :)

Well, time to go wake up Marria. The alarm clock isn’t doing a good job and we need to get going in about 30-45 minutes.

Last night I discovered that sp1 for Windows 2003 had become available on Windows Update. Being a glutton for punishment and one that enjoys exploring the unknown, I decided to install it.

Let’s start with the download… the thing is 330Megs. That’s nuts. I can’t even fathom how many changes are in a 300+ Meg [compressed] patch.

So that took a while to download. It ended up finishing just before I went to bed. After the file was unpacked (which took a bit), the rest of the installation looked like any other normal service pack install. I woke up to find my machine sitting at the “finish” screen with a reboot required (as one would assume.

All-in-all, the patch was like any other patch and went smoothly (excpet XP sp1 which fucked a lot of people’s profiles – thus XP sp1a was released). It was just -massive-.

I added a little screen shot for fun. You’ll see in the first window the upgrade succeeded. You’ll see in the second window why it’s absolutely amazing that the OS is even running on that box! (it amuses me every time I look at it) To make matters more ridiculous, Exchange 2003 sp1 is installed on there too! (but the machine only has about 3 clients so that makes up for it being grossly underpowered)

Anyhow… that’s what I did last night/this morning. I’m trying to download the stand-alone patch so I can get it to work, get it scanned and we can go through the changes (as things like this ultimately impact our support of these systems)… but downloads.microsoft.com is timing out. Looks like they’re getting SLAMMED with requests. Glad I did this last night :)