Tuesday January 31, 2006

90888 visits - and some rambling

Yeah, so I noticed the Sitemeter hit counter hitting the pseudo-auspicious-like number. And also remembered that I haven't said a word about "Happy Chinese New Year", beside pointing out that the Chinese are carrying out their "two billion trips" feat this year once again, just like they did last year, and so on. Okay then, Happy CNY! *grunt* - no accompanying cute doggy photos or whatever though, visit "Cute Overload" if you want some.

As for the hit counter? Doesn't mean much, it's just hits, which will include Real Live Humans (tm) as well as spammers and bots. Statcounter, on the other hand, tells me that there are usually over 100 "unique returning visitors" every week. You know who you are, the regular readers, friends, colleagues, and ... lurkers.

If you have really been keeping track, you might notice a lack of postings just around CNY eve. That's when the PC nearly successfully blew up on me leaving me PC-less for the entire 4-day break. It took 2 visits to Sim Lim Square (the local geek shopping mall), Biow's AMD64, a new 200 GB HDD, a SATA PCI controller, a plea for help on the forums, and probably all 2 decades of PC troubleshooting experience to determine that : 1. the DDR400 RAM is fine and running properly in 128-bit dual-channel mode (phew), 2. the AMD64 CPU itself is fine (phew), 3. the old 200 GB HDD is fine (phew), and 4. the SATA controller chipset on my motherboard is blown (crap) - probably from the blackout and subsequent initial power surge some months back. So now I have to use an old 40 PATA GB salvaged from an older PC lying around the house as the boot drive, and use the new, lightning-quick, Seagate 7200.9 SATA 200 GB HDD with Native Command Queuing and whatnot as ... bulk storage. Sigh.

I tell ya, SATA is troublesome. Try installing WinXP from a boot CD and you'll find you need a 3.5" floppy drive (#@!#!^$!). PC's don't even come with 3.5" drives nowadays, and they want you to insert the "driver disk" in A: - darn. HP in their wisdom decided to supply their AMD64 PC's with ordinary PATA (aka IDE) drives - should be no problems there for those with the "free" Starhub PC's.

So now I have to decide whether this is fine as it is, working as per normal from restored drive images and whatever was on the old HDD - which apparently is still working but which refuses to talk to my onboard SATA *nor* my new SATA card (weird huh) - or, do I pull out the motherboard and see if Abit honours their 2-year warranty, or do I borrow that spare Starhub AMD64 PC from my brother - further downtime re-shuffling everything around, and going back to SLS again.

Once upon a time, I could do that. There was a time when I could go back and forth as many times as it took to get things fixed right, and *just so*. Well, no longer. At least, it paid to be paranoid. I do have my *daily* drive image backups, and the digital photos are in 4 *different* locations, so they're safe enough. The constraining factor seems to be time. I don't even have time to sit back and gloat on how well my energy stocks did (re: earlier posts on "making money from peak oil").

Damn it takes enormous quantities of time to be a geek ...

(... of course, it will only take just 7 subsequent share price doublings (2^7) such that I can have all the time in the world once again ... well, one can dream, right? lol)

(2006-01-31 00:57:30 SGT) [Musings] Permalink

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