Hi Ya.

This weekend has been both extremely stressful and very relaxing.

I had to get up early on Saturday to fix a server with a PCI-X riser card that had gone FUBAR. The voltage sensor on the card showed that the 5V current had gone completely off the charts and a fail safe mechanism had kicked in. For some reason “fail safe” in this context meant that the server was automatically turned off, and it was not possible to turn it back on without removing the riser card.

Excellent. My guess would be that just automatically disabling the riser card should be enough to prevent the system from a complete melt down. That said, I know very little about server hardware architecture and should probably just keep my mouth shut. Continue reading "Hi Ya."

Sunday Evening.

The weekend has been pleasantly quiet and since it’s only a few hours left of it, there is a fair chance that it will stay that way, too.

Knock, knock. I should enjoy it to the max, next week I’m back on support duty and I’ve got this bad feeling deep down in my stomach telling me it will be a very busy week.

Gine is at home visiting her mother for the last time before she leaves for Australia on the 12th of December. Even if Gine is not really living with me in the apartment, she is here pretty much all the time and not having her here for a weekend I sort of fell into limbo.

Thankfully, I’m still able to be entertained even when she’s not around. Or as Eric Cartman would have said it: “I can play with myself. I play with myself all the time.” Both Friday and Saturday evening were spent with a glass of Tia Maria (comes highly recommended) and SimCity 4. A city of about 200K citizens needs the constant attention of their mayor - even if he shows up drunk to do the job. While probably not the most social way to spend an evening, I have to point out that in my defense I have been trying to find someone to go to see the Borat movie with for the last two weekends now.

Unfortunately, all my “friends” have been “busy”.

Yesterday I met with Hans Olav who left for Tenerife today with Frida for a week of vacation. They are staying at a resort they realized was “perfect for large families” just after they booked the trip, but I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem. They know how to entertain themselves, too.

After seeing Hans Olav, I stepped by a DVD store to pick up Family Guy season five. They had two copies left, but unfortunately they were unable to find DVDs anywhere. Bummer.

Frustration, thy name is Amitech.

The Simpsons Season 8 was released on DVD in Norway yesterday. I didn’t buy it because I though I had ordered a copy from Amazon in the UK, a somewhat below-average smart move since it would have made the DVDs rather expensive because of taxes. Some investigation showed that I hadn’t bought it from Amazon after all. I think I might dream things at times.

Anyway, today after work I took the bus downtown, bought the DVDs, and then took another bus back home. I magically arrived at the bus stops, both at home and downtown, about thirty seconds before my bus, there was no queue at the store so it all went like a breeze.

Too good to be true? Yes, it was.

When I got home, I turned on my Windows Media Center and realized that there is suddenly something horribly wrong with the sound coming from the soundcard’s line out connectors. There is nothing playing on the box, the DVDs are safe in their cover, still I can hear a very distinct background noise. For no particular reason there is now a constant blur of white noise coming from the speakers.

It’s nothing wrong with my amplifier, I’ve checked that. It’s nothing wrong with my speakers, I’ve check that. I wiggled the audio cables and if they are pushed up, the sound almost disappears. But there is nothing wrong with the cables, as one might expect: I plugged a couple of headphones directly into the line out on the sound card and the white noise can be heard there, too.

It’s something wrong with my Amitech Homecenter Living 412, the worst piece of crap hardware I’ve ever bought.

Tomorrow I’m calling the store - again - hopefully it’s an easy fix. If not, I’m considering asking for a refund. Even if they fix it or not, the Amitech Homecenter Living is not a Windows Media Center box I’d recommend.

On top of this, the bloody thing is still turning itself on every now and then on what seems to be irregular intervals - except for midnight sharp.

Round Robin.

After having found and installed a well-hidden MCE update on the Microsoft site, my copy of Windows Media Center 2005 seems to be behaving a bit better. It looks like the turning-itself-on-in-the-middle-of-the-night-mystery is gradually fading away; the box didn’t turn itself on last night. With a little luck it will sleep silently through this night, too.

I read somewhere that it’s a good idea to stick to the topic through an entire entry because rambling on about nothing and everything makes it hard for the reader to stay focused.

Consider this entry a test of your attention span, because now I’m about to change the topic. I’m not worried about you, really, you’re an intelligent bunch. I’d even call you the elite of the interweb crowd. So here goes.

On Saturday I went to a downtown record slash DVD store and took advantage of their sale to get some of the DVDs I needed to get a respective collection. Of course, “respective” is a matter of opinion, but at least I got some good - also subject to opinion - releases. I even stumbled across a DVD I decided to give Klas for his birthday. So hurry up, man, invite me to your birthday party!

While we’re talking about DVDs - see, I’m not changing the topic in this paragraph - season eight of both The Simpsons and South Park are now available in the stores. At least in some countries, The Simpsons won’t be released until the 25th of October in Norway and ordering it from abroad is way too expensive because of the import taxes.

Since I started my South Park collection with the American editions - dumb, dumb, dumb - I have to keep ordering the DVDs from the US - dumb, dumb, dumb. Being a neurotic collector there is no way I’m moving to another edition…

I have issues, I know.

Thursday.

Today is a day to remember. Not only is it Udo Dirkschneider’s birthday, it’s also the day when I laid my hands on both The Complete 7th season of both The Simpsons and South Park. I don’t know about you, but I know what I’ll be watching for the next three weeks. I really don’t hope I get hooked on Family Guy, too.

I’ve been debugging the Moblog but can’t quite figure out why it’s not working. It looks like there is either something with the global PHP configuration used by my host or something with the operator’s firewall. Right now I’m hoping my host might be able to help me. In the meantime I’ve manually uploaded a picture of a limo painted by a colour blind guy. It looks a little bit like that Audi TT I saw a couple of years ago.

Tomorrow Klas passes through Oslo on his way to Trondheim, so I’ll probably meet up with him and have a couple of beers. It’s Friday, after all.