Category: Life

Driving Test and CSS

I’ve been trying to learn some CSS and HTML, and in doing so I have found why people prefer PHP and MySQL for lots of pages with consistent layout: it is easy to change something on all pages. To be sure, my theme uses CSS, but if I wanted to change the footer text, CSS would be of no help. That said, I’ve found excellent resources, and I think it may prove to be useful later on. As a less resource-intensive solution, which I’ve set up with wp-cache, is to have WordPress output saved as static pages. This gives good response time and easily edited content.

I’m taking my driving test tomorrow and I’m intimidated. I read the booklet, and I hope I pass.

Cats

It turns out that Koga (also spelled Qoga) had to go back. The person who gave us the cat apparently got the wrong one, which explains the incorrect information. When we first got Koga, he was extremely scared, and spent most of his time hiding up in the rafters of the basement. He slowly got used to it, and we noticed he could not purr correctly, sometimes stopping to gulp or make a strange wheezing cough, one of his eyes appeared watery, and he never meowed. The certificate of good health was quite wrong. At the vet, our suspicions were confirmed that Koga was male, not female as we had been told. This wasn’t a huge deal, but was still strange. They also found he had severe gingivitis, and that something was wrong with his voice box, which they would investigate later. Then blood tests came back with a strong positive for Bartonella, and we decided it had been enough and was time to give Koga back. We’re back down to four cats now. I’m sad to see Koga go, but he was challenging Wally’s authority, at which point Wally started spraying things, which was nasty. Four cats is quite enough.

Published
Categorized as Life

Cables, Infections, and More!

A few days ago I brought my desktop over from Dad’s and set it up at Mom’s, along with a switch to connect both desktops to the network. Someone accidentally bumped the switch, and the cable that brought the network connection up from the basement could not be wiggled back into working again. My hasty crimp had given out. I took my single remaining cable end, and managed to, after maybe two tries, get what seemed like a flawless crimp. Only having one end, and thus one chance at crimping to get online, was a very powerful motivating force. Upon further inspection it is not perfect, but it’s better than other crimps I’ve made. Maybe the loading bars I anticipate getting will help.

I cleaned up a machine at KI that was very badly infected. Our tools took care of the infection, but what took me a really long time to realize was that ndis.sys had been infected and deleted by the scanners. Everything was working except for networking devices, which showed up with corrupted drivers. Fresh drivers did nothing, and uninstalling the drivers did not actually seem to do so. Copying ndis.sys over from another machine fixed the problem.

My Dad sold his house, and we have now moved to Wendy’s house. At this point my room has no blinds, and my desk is in pieces. My room has the feeling of a LAN party in a metaphorical tornado – there are objects one might expect to find in a bedroom, except in strange locations and often not assembled. I hope this gets sorted out somewhat quickly.

Cats and Overheating

It seems we now have five cats. I’m looking into options for filters so my heatsinks aren’t clogged with all the cat hair. It’s far easier to brush things off a filter than blow them out from between heatsink fins. I should also renew my efforts to get our machines off the ground so they act less like vacuums. I really don’t understand the thought that went on in this decision, and in some ways doubt it occurred.

In other news, Zombie 6 started making an alternating tone, and it was only when I installed a sensor kernel module that I discovered:

$ sensors

acpitz-virtual-0

Adapter: Virtual device

temp1: +60.5°C (crit = +65.0°C

w83697hf-isa-0290

Adapter: ISA adapter

VCore: +1.74 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +0.00 V) ALARM

+3.3V: +1.52 V (min = +0.14 V, max = +2.05 V)

+5V: +4.78 V (min = +0.05 V, max = +1.72 V) ALARM

+12V: +12.16 V (min = +0.43 V, max = +0.49 V) ALARM

-12V: +2.11 V (min = -3.07 V, max = -13.59 V) ALARM

-5V: +0.33 V (min = -7.71 V, max = -7.71 V) ALARM

V5SB: +5.59 V (min = +0.22 V, max = +0.00 V) ALARM

VBat: +3.07 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +0.00 V) ALARM

fan1: 5192 RPM (min = 168750 RPM, div = 2) ALARM

fan2: 0 RPM (min = 8881 RPM, div = 2) ALARM

temp1: +33.0°C (high = +12.0°C, hyst = +16.0°C) ALARM sensor = thermistor

temp2: +60.5°C (high = +60.0°C, hyst = +55.0°C) ALARM sensor = thermistor

beep_enable:enabled

I really hope either the default rail voltage ranges are somehow wrong, that the CPU overheating was leading to strangeness, or that I’m misunderstanding something, because if those are the rails’ actual voltages, I’m surprised the machine was still running and not on fire. Ranges including 0 seem weird, I don’t know if it’s listing acceptable variance from the stated voltage, and if so it seems in some cases too wide a range for normal operation. It’s probably not seeing a rotation speed for fan 2 because if I recall correctly it’s running off molex. I should add some sort of temperature monitoring to my machines. I will probably have to reseat a heatsink in the near future. For now the machine is off and unplugged – it’s unplugged just in case the PSU is really that broken and the 5V rail might do something nasty.

Hate Gun

Behold! We made this during robotics. Click for the original. It’s somewhat messy, but still amusing.

Click through for the original.

Published
Categorized as Life

Credit Cards

I was given two Visa gift cards for christmas, and now that I’ve used them, I can’t help but feel that not only is Visa happy about the 2 cents on one of the cards I am seemingly unable to spend, but now that I’ve spent almost $50 with credit cards, I am clearer than ever on how to use them. Easy step from the gift card to the card, right? It’s disturbing.

EDIT: Not to mention it’s an inconvenient gift for shopping, much more for online than brick-and-mortar. I can spend up to $25, and I can’t spend more than that even if I add more of my own money, at least online.

Published
Categorized as Life

LAN

Two days until the LAN.

We still haven’t finished our plan:

There is no hole in the wall,

and I wonder if we’ll drill at all.

I have studying to do,

mostly Spanish, but Econ too.

Published
Categorized as Life