Downtown Durham Update

Over a year ago I wrote a blog about the work going on in downtown Durham, NC. I specifically wrote about the absurd placement of a new fire hydrant in the middle of the street. Well now I can see, sort of, why it was put where it was. It looks like the curbing was going to be extended out further so that the place where the new hydrant was to be placed would be on the sidewalk. That's all well and good except that a year has passed and these photos show how the project is going.





I'm glad I don't pay taxes in Durham, though I suspect that there's a bit of Federal money going into this downtown revitalization project.

Socks

The other day I was helping my wife do some laundry. Of course, in our house, anytime you do a load of laundry, you always find an old load left in the dryer that you have to deal with before you can get your load through the process. Well, in this case the load in the dryer was particularly interesting. It had a bunch of my kid's underwear and other such stuff. There were also a bunch of socks. Anytime you fold laundry with socks, you always have a single or two. Well in this load, there were 12 socks and only one pair in the bunch. Here's a picture.



Who knows where their partners are. Maybe they'll show up in the next load.

New Computer

I recently got yet another computer. I didn't really need it but I didn't know it at the time. Tonights blog is about what I bought and why.

When I left Lilly a few years ago and started a new company, I needed a Windows computer because I was going to sell robotics which would require a Windows computer. I'm normally a Mac kind of guy, but for this application, well, I needed Windows. So I bought a Dell Inspiron 600m. Here's a picture of one:



Over the next year or so, the company didn't make enough money so I went back to work and left the company on a low hum. In the meantime, my lovely wife developed an affection for my Dell computer. She moved it downstairs to the living room and started playing online poker and sudoku and lots of other things while watching TV. She became very attached to it. I think I wrote about how I had to go buy another computer to use. That was the Mac mentioned in a previous blog. Of course, my daughter took over the Mac, but that's another story.

Anyhow, about a month ago, the Dell went on the blink. I came home from work and my wife told me the Dell wasn't working. So I went over and booted it up and it all worked fine. "See," I said, "I must have magic hands." About that time, just as I showed it to her, it locked up. I tried to reboot but it wouldn't happen. After a couple of hours, when it had cooled down, I tried again. It booted up fine, but after a few minutes, maybe when the fan kicked in, it locked up again. So it appeared that it would work just fine after it had cooled down, but when it warmed up, kapow!

It was this juncture that I did something stupid. We booted up and took off all the files that we needed. Then I started trying to figure out what was wrong. I decided to do some sort of disc scan to see if there were any errors. Well, a disk scan takes a long time and you can't get control of the computer back until it's done. It's not hard to figure that it could never get through the disc scan without locking up. It was during the many attempts to get through the disc scan that I was finally able to see for sure that the machine locked up just when the fan came on as I'd suspected. Hmmm! I think "So maybe if it stays cool, I can get through the disc scan." It was still sort of cool outside so I took the computer out and put it on the cold cement porch and let it sit there until it got plenty cold and booted up again. It ran a lot longer but not long enough to get through the disc scan until it locked up again.

I talked to the computer guy at work and he said that it might be a memory problem. So I came home and took out one of the memory chips. And, what do you know, it ran through the disc scan and seemed to be working OK. But with only one 256 MB, it ran really slow: 1/2 hr to boot, 15 minutes to launch the mail program, forever to surf the web. This is because, windows XP consumes all the ram and everything else has to get it's memory from disc swapping. So I got a new memory chip from work and put it in the computer and it booted up and ran fast again. Cool it's fixed. Then the fan came on and it locked up. Crap.

By this time my wife had gone into severe withdraw and showing signs of depression. So I figured it was time to replace the machine. I asked my wife if she would like a new computer for Mother's Day. She looked so happy, so I ordered one. I ordered a similar machine, though, because it's been three years since I got the last one, a similar cost a bit less. Also, I didn't buy Microsoft Office again. The bad news is that this one has the new Vista operating system. It sucks. Anyhow, here's a picture of the new machine.



In the meantime, I tried to figure out how to fix the old machine. I looked on the Dell web site and sent in a problem ticket. They said it was a bad mother board which they could fix for about twice what the computer was worth. So I got to thinking, maybe the only thing wrong with the mother board is that it can't read one of the ram slots and the electrical drain that accompanies the fan coming on exacerbates the problem and causes the lockup. This doesn't have to make sense. It only suggests a possible solution. Don't use the bad slot and jack up the memory in the good slot. It so happened that Staples had a 512 DDR notebook ram dohicky on sale for $40. So I bought one and slipped it in the good slot on the Dell and, viola, back to it's old self.

So now my wife is happy again and I got a new computer that I didn't really need but at least now I can blog at the same time my wife plays Nanosweeper and my daughter plays with her iTunes playlists.

OK, enough of this. So long for now.