Year: 2003

Random bits

First of all, it’s my first wedding anniversary today! Wow, that was one fast year! I’ll take Olga out today to celebrate…

Finally, I can do something for Lev to payback all my troubling of his desire not to touch another piece of computer hardware for the rest of his life – his mother and her friend were leaving today, so I got a chance to give them a lift to the airport. :)

When I came back from the airport I jumped on to the restore thingy for my home server, since absense of Internet connectivity and fresh supply of email for more then two days can drive me crazy. Work stopped compensating it yesterday. So, if I decide that I will do something – I do it, and here is the machine up and running with everything working properly as it was before the upgrade. The only thing missing is my MP3s, since that requires a lot of disk space rearranging, but it will get there eventually.

Once again I want to specially thank Lev Chouvalov for his endless support during the upgrade process.

Off to have some rest now…

Daily bits

First thing in the morning, I went to the computer shop to claim the replacement of my exploded power supply. And I was lucky enough to get it. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the 520 watts model anymore, so I set with 480 watts.

Lev was kind enough to come and stop me from doing yet more stupid things like killing myself via means of electricity. Power supply successfully installed, hard disks rearranged, and most of the staff works, apart from problems related to root.root ownership of all files. I’ve decided not to touch anything for another day, so that I could go one step at a time. :)

Hardware rearrangements

Real fun day! :) After I woke up, I’ve continued with assembling of the new PC. When I was almost done, Olga came in and suggested that my home network planning and planning of hosts locations was totally wrong. After a bit of thinking I was convinced and started to redo the whole thing. Everything was going fine, until I decided to test it. :) Somehow it happened that I put 230 volts into the power supply while it was switched to operate in 110 volts mode. No surprise the damn thing exploded with a terrible sound, which caused me and Olga to go partially deaf for the rest of the day. Here goes 520 watts.

So, I call up Lev and ask him to come over, so that he could prevent me from doing lots of other stupid things. He kindly agreed, I brought him over and we started playing with the rest of the hardware. My high-tower case was now filled with 4 hard disks, CD-ROM drive, CD writer, Intel Celeron 2GHz processor and 256 megs of RAM. Surprisingly, the whole thing started to work using an old 235 watts power supply. I was extrememly glad until I started noticing lots of strange behavoir. First of all, machine state was totally different with every reboot – even /bin/hostname returned different results. Then things started to go completely insane and I’ve almost lost my mind. Imagine seeing different results from two consequtive runs of /bin/ls! /bin/df was no different.

After doing few things here and there, I found out that it’s time to restore the system from the proper copy of it on another hard disk that I had. Yet again a surprise – files were restored, but all of them were owned by root.root . Excellent! :) This was where I said – enough for today and went to the office. :)

Random bits

It’s saturday again! Trip to Kurium beach with Lev, Hazard, and Olga. Then back home for a shower, since the sea was particularly salty today. Some Pizza Mia, and then to Hazard for a movie. This time we watched Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb“, which was too real to be a comedy, but still was good. Back home to continue assembling of the new PC and general hardware rearrangement.

While building the new PC, I noticed a red sticker on top of the AGP slot on my new motherboard saying: “PLEASE USE ONLY 1.5V AGP CARDS TO AVOID PERMANENT DAMAGE TO THIS MOTHERBOARD”. That’s a bit too scary for the hardware idiot like myself, so I had to some Googling. The card I was planning to stick in was GeFORCE2 MX-200 32MB+TV. I don’t have to tell you how happy I was when I found a good explanation of wtf is 1.5V and how easy can I check the AGP card to comply right here.
Luckily, my card seems to be OK for the insertion. :)

2 Fast 2 Furious

Olga, Hazard and myself went to see “2 Fast 2 Furious“. Overall, it was a bit less then what I was expecting. They could have benefit a lot from keeping Vin Diesel, and watching fast car driving in “The Transporter“. I’d rate the whole thing as being 4-5 out of 10 and that’s all due to the crazy black guy, who was the only one trying to bring some acting to the movie.