Monthly Archives: July 2005

Re-doing things here

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I’m re-designing this blog template layout. I’m doing it in pieces. I’ve changed the header and the sidebar, but am not done with them yet. I’m doing on the fly, and leaving what I do until I work on it and change it again.

I’m in a mood to get it historical looking, old, something or other. So I’m playing around with Photoshop and colors and photos. The current sidebar has some of my bowlby family photos … two of places in Yorkshire where they hailed from, and one of a painting of an ancestor from that family, a Grandmother in the line, actually. She is the one who is the mother and wife of those whom came to America in the 1600′s.

It’s just my style to work on something until it’s done or I am sick of it. Something like this is also how I do it, right out in the open … live. It’s easier for me to do it this way. I doen’t mind the dust being seen by visitors.

So in this re-design I am planning on cleaning up my CSS sheet and getting the templates all nice and cosy.

I also have past posts that are missing parts, photos to be exact … they are still on the other host/server which used to host this blog, and I do not have access to it as of yet. Once it comes online again, my pictures will magically appear, at least some of them, the ones that were totally hard coded to URL. That URL my blog was is still over there. I changed it to my .us URL when I split my stuff up and came to this newer host.

I hadn’t done any work on this blog for so long, not redesign at all, just moving it to here and getting the stuff I could working with what I could. Then the last month or more I was without computer to do much of anything, and I wasn’t in the mood for trying when I did have access to a computer. The bug has bitten me again though, as is seen with this post about the re-design I’m in the middle of. :)

I like my blue .png smilies … I made them … but they don’t seem to fit here anymore. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll move them to my other blog maybe, and make new ones for here when I have time.

Music Match Woes

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I’m glad to have a computer to use again. I’ve been catching up on some things I hadn’t done in awhile and now have found myself the only one up, everyone else gone to bed without totally telling me. It’s been awhile since I’ve had the computer like this, and now I’m stuck down in Frank’s “office” since it’s the only logistical place in which I can access an ethernet connection right now.

The biggest downer to this whole experience is that I have three “songs” I downloaded previously from MusicMatch in Window’s Media Player. One on my Vaio laptop and two on this desktop.

In order to listen to the songs on any computer you have to have that PC “activated” to work with Music Match’s licensing.

:rolleyes:

It’s nothing but trouble for me now. I can’t get a license for my three songs since I have messed up licensing with the upgrade of the mobo and processor, I can not deactivate my old Vaio, since I can’t get onto the computer anymore. Music Match lets you have 5 PC activated with their service. So I have two unavailable Activations which I can’t deactivate nor activate.

I sent the tech support an email through their form system, I surely hope they solve my problem, but I am not holding out hope.

I want my access to my songs back, it’s only three though, and I can get them again if I must. I don’t know though if Music Match is going to work with my new computer setup, though it’s still the same stuff, just new hardware. Even Microsoft dufeses insisted on “reactivating” my desktop computer once I logged on successfully after the upgraded hardware worked. At least it worked, whereas Music Match says “just click on one of your songs that you got from us and the license aquisition will automatically start” or “you’ll be able to activate your PC as soon as you play one of the songs you got from us” Nope. Error! Can’t … Urg.

I’m glad I only got three songs, and that I have no plans to download whole albums and never bunches of songs. Licensing is for the birds. Buy the CD’s. It’s less of a hassle. Even just for one song. I wasn’t liking the agreement in the first place, but figured “for this one song and the occasional odd song, OK, it’ll workout”. But now I see what happens when you have computers crash and never revive, and when computers crash and need new parts and come back to life but “not as they were before” and this nightmarish stuff begins. Augh!

The hot and cool of it

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With the weather being so terribly hot and humid and dangerous (sure it can get hotter, but temps in the the 80′s and 90′s to mid or high 90′s all have feels-like into the 100′s, up to 111F. or even more), Frank went to Lowes early yesterday morning and brought home 2 window air conditiners. One is over the kitchen sink, the other in our master bedroom. Within about 10 minutes of having the kitchen a/c installed and running, the air in the house dried out pretty much. Ah, relief! Coolness is now felt, but it’s not super cold. Both units are 10,000 BTU’s, and our house is tri-level, so two of them aren’t quite enough.

We are keeping the laundry room door shut and the other basement room that isn’t quite finished. They are much warmer therefore, than the rooms in the rest of the house. They do have air that is drier than outside though, they are warm, but cool compared to outside, and warm compared to the a/c free flow parts of the house. The doors have a gappy clearance at the bottom, being on concrete with no finished floor, so the air exchanges to some degree, which I do appreciate after all.

This is an easier solution for us than getting the central a/c looked at, cleaned out, rejuvenated. This will work for the rest of the summer. The units have 5-year warranties. I like them since they have no ducts hiding what’s what, or other parts in big boxes that we can’t access and haven’t a clue about.

Our old a/c system didn’t work right for the type of house we have. Our master bedroom had to be super cold for the living room to be just not quite too warm, but warmer than we wanted. We need zones, and this is closer to zones now, with the window units. Another time in the future we’ll get it all worked out. :)

It is like pea soup outside, day or night. The air is so thick. In the van, it takes 10 minutes for the a/c to do much, and I struggle to breathe at all then, and have to breate shallowly and slowly and try not to breathe much at all, it’s painful when the air is that thick and hot and just plainly not satisfactory to breathe. It’s sort of like partial suffocation for a short time here and there. Getting out of the van then, my glasses usually fog up terribly in an instant. I never remember that when it’s going to happen, it gets me every time.

Well, last year we went without a/c, had some bads days, went to Barnes and Noble a lot, but it just wasn’t this bad last year. The overall air quality is just pathetic.

Oh come ye rains and bless us with thy waters, cleanse the air, green up the blades of grass which wither under the suns cruel stare. Breathe into the air and create the life giving breath for our lungs. Lighting and rain together in unison, come to my abode, this southern land we love, and tarry awhile.

It took my day but

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We got a new PSU yesterday, and didn’t get home until later, so I didn’t try installing it until this morning.

I installed it and … nuthing changed. I spent “I have no clue how much time” re-connecting stuff and re-doing that, reading on the mobo forum when I had a chance to use Frankies laptop, and so here’s what I ended up doing, something in this process is what got my NF8-V mobo POST and start up BIOS:

Put the memory into the slots and pull them out, in and out many times. This gets the board to recognize the hardware … it’s the board that needs it, not the hardware.

Put the AGP card in and out just as the memory. This one is key, I think.

Both those things I did more than I can say. I kept going. I took the board out of the case to do all of this extra “try and make it post” work.

The new PSU is a powerful one, a good brand, according to the people that yap about it on the mobo forums. Enermax 600watt.

My old board, the NF7-S ver. 2, had a 20-pin main power connection, as well as a 12v 4-pin connection.

My old PSU provided those cables.

My new board, the NF8-V, has a 24-pin main power connection, as well as a 12v 4-pin connection. The 24-pin connection, according to the manual, isn’t necessary, you can use a 20-pin connection.

My new PSU, the Enermax, has a 24-pin cable, and it has the extra 4-pins split-off-able, and also has the 12v 4-pin cable.

The NF8-V board won’t post with all the cables plugged in. I had to take the 4-pin part off of the 24-pin cable and use it as a 20-pin for the board to post.

It was that cable dance along with the AGP and Memory slots that got the board posting.

It was a glorious moment when I heard the monitor go PING as it lit itself into action. It was very exiting when I heard the first BEEP from the board too, which came a couple of power button pushes before the monitor activation.

So then I went into BIOS and saved minimal settings to run safe. Then I added the board back into the case and screwed everything down, and connected the harddrive. I started up the computer again, it worked and recognized the hard drive.

I booted into windows, it worked, just not specific new hardware like ethernet (I didn’t re-install windows in any form or fashion, either.)

I turned of the computer then, and connected the CD-ROM and then fired it all up again, and the system recognized the CD-ROM just fine, and so I then installed the new board drivers.

I wasn’t able to get the ethernet port to work, windows didn’t recognize it. Updating the drive in Device Manager didn’t work, neither did re-installing the driver from the Nvidia disc. So I then went into Add/Remove Software un-installed anything Nvidia related.

Then I restarted, and clicked on the disc of Nvidia driver setup stuff again, and THIS time it all installed as it should have.

My mistake, if you can call it that, was in not un-installing previous drivers that were hanging out from the old board. I wasn’t trying to flawlessly install though, just trying minimalist installing … I have lost the panel as far as I know, which was from the other case I first had this copy of Windows XP Home on. That’s the place where the license sticker was, the only place I know it was on. If I wrote it down anywhere, I have no clue as to where. So to reinstall is out of the question, and a Repair install may not require a license input, but might mess up and require a clean install anyhow.

I hope I can find that old license number. It does rightfully belong to this copy of Windows I’m working on. I do have another license from my defunct Vaio GRV-550, but I have application for that on the old NF7-S board if I get that going. So I hope this copy stays good. I hope I can find a way to get that old license number back. And I hope I can find what’s wrong with that other board and get that setup as another computer, for the children.

This computer I’m on now has a good PSU and a new great Athlon 64 3000+. That’s not the fastest, but is much better than the Athlon XP 2100+, and with it, my DDR 400 memory can run! It’s Corsair PC3200 512×2. I only have single channel mode, two slots, on this board. I can have up to 2gigs of memory … which would mean I could get two 1 gig sticks, and put this matched pair on the older board, where it can run in dual-channel. :) That’s later, for sure.

My next upgrade to this computer is either a graphics card or a DVD-R/RW drive. The latter is likely the cheaper to buy and install, but it’ll want pricey discs to write to. I could then watch movies on this computer though! :) That cost nothing extra with the collection we have. A graphics card is needful, this one is a Radeon 7500, which is a 64mb card. It’s not bad, but way lesser than I really do need to have. I want to get a really good card, really good. My board is Nvidia based and that’s the type of video card I’ll get.

I really do like the Abit boards. They are friendly to the advanced user, and have good BIOS settings.

My struggles with this board were just tough since I had another computer with the same symptoms, but it was an old system that quit working, while this was really what I considered a “new system” even though many of the parts were older from that other system. A new board is not like a board that has been running, as was demonstrated with this one today. It’s the toughest board I’ve had to get going. Not that I’m super experienced, mind you, but I’ve had a few I’ve worked on in the last couple of years.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t really put the hardware in good and firm, clicking it, re-seating it, I had to go overboard by far and do it again and again, until finally the board came to fuller life and then posted. :) Before that, I was getting not one single beep out of it. It didn’t holler about no video card, or no memory. It just sat there spinning the fans and lighting up the LEDS on the board. It would just stare at me. As I read on the abit forums, this applies, it just sat there mocking me.

Simple PSU solution? No.
a Complicated put the memory and AGP cards in until that, ALONG WITH the PSU being a good one, is enough and the board beeps, burps and comes to life, along with the monitor. :)

I have many more tricks up my sleeves now, much more experience. Every hardship and trial brings understanding of another level. :wink:

Upgrades to Computer and House

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Consensus of the computer situation led us to just get a new motherboard and processor.

From what I read it’s probably the processor that died. Not for sure though. So it’s on to a new build of computer for me :)

The Athlon processor world has changed dramatically over the last few years. Our now “old” processor is an Athlon XP 2100+ … at Fry’s, where we get most of our computer stuff now that they are in the shopping area we do go to often enough, they don’t have the XP series of processor. On pricewatch.com that processor series is still available in online stores, and I’m sure it’s available elsewhere, but I came to the conclusion earlier today looking on pricewatch that we didn’t want to go with a Socket A processor necessarily.

Sempron has replaced Athlon XP … they are afordable. They run on a 400mhz bus. I didn’t like them much by looking at them. I wanted something good. The Athlon 64 series is more a multitasking processor series.

So we ended up going to Fry’s and looking at their stock and looking at their ads on products and putting 2 and 2 together came up with 5. :) We did upgrade to a board that runs an 800mhz bus, but it’s still Abit and we got a three year warranty with Fry’s on it, extra, so we could deal with them directly if it goes fritzy on us.

Fry’s was running a deal in their ad for that board and the Athlon 64 3000 (OEM) processor for less than buying them seperately.

Now I have to put it all together and make the hardware all play nice with each other. I am hoping the PSU will be good enough. If not, it’s back to Fry’s in the next few weeks, or online, to buy a different PSU. The one we have is a Vigor 500W, made by MGE company. It’s not that it’s bad, just don’t know if it’s superbly good enough for THIS new board.

The memory we got recently should work great in this board. It can run at full speed with this better processor.

So it goes down to this: Already, before, we wanted to upgrade the video card still and get a new hard drive to add to the system, and a DVD burner.

Now it’s back to square one, no new video card even :( But eventually we’ll get one. I’m left with either the old processor dead or the old motherboard dead. Whichever one it is, depends on what we’ll do.

We’ll get a cheap case and get that board running right, and find another Socket A processor to put in it, run the old stick of memory that was cheapy and made it not run right, if we get a new PSU then the one I have currently can go on that board. If it’s the board that is the trouble then we can get that fixed via Abit for fairly cheap, not having to worry about turnaround time if we have another system running.

So what this all means is we’ll be trying to get two desktops running, that old board to be a backup system in case of problems with bigger desktop. It’ll be a testing ground too, and a place for spare parts to hang out. It’s a good board, NF7-S … just that the processor isn’t as highly powered in the Socket A series. So we have a new better board in that arena and I am biting my lip awaiting the time to get going on it, it’ll have to wait until Monday.

I’m up in the middle of the night typing this. I awoke after just a little bit of sleep and can’t get back to sleep. I watched some TV, watched HGTV “reDesign” which is one I’ve seen before, but I didn’t mind re-watching it tonight/this morning since it’s one that I really liked what Kenneth Brown did, custom wall builtins, drawers to hold vinyl records in that. An eastern beach sort of theme. It’s not disimilar to what we want to do in our “dining room” just with different color scheme, to get builtins flanking the fireplace, which will hold dishes, TV, audio, books, other kitchen stuff, and more.

Next on HGTV was “design on a dime” and they did a makeover of a large kitchen for a family that used it alot, using a “tuscan” theme, and did a lot of furniture building … it fit into the theme of what we are trying to accomplish here as well, just not “tuscan” but “country, french country, arts and crafts movement”-ish.

Before all that was a “designer finals” episode which I had never seen before. It was a studen designer doing a room as a “jazz lounge” theme for a couple with a love of Jazz music, two dogs that love the bay window in the room, and they also needed it to have a desk and computer. The student designer really did a great job, and it was inspiring to me. I felt like getting up and painting and sawing and … all that.

So I eventually did get up. I hung a picture in the hall. There was a little wreath there and other hanging things under it from something that used to be there. I have a large poster in ornate frame of a Monet painting. It used to hang in our bedroom and had been sitting on top of something in there since we moved furniture around and didn’t have that space for it available anymore. I looked at it, and thought about it and got up and put it in the hall. It fits. I’ll rehang it on Monday a bit higher though. It’s inspiration to me on how to do that upstairs hallway. Light blues and creams. :) It’ll brighten the space up considerably. Hurray for that!

So my mind is racing around with many ideas tonight and I just can’t sleep. So I sit here at Frank’s laptop on the dining room table, a glass of Sweet Tea by my side, and three of the cats lounging around on the table with me.

Yeah, the cats are on our table. Can’t really keep them off. I shoo them off if it’s clean and if we are working on it with food and all that. It’s hard to keep them off it though. Cat’s go where they want to when you aren’t around anyhow. So that’s that. They love the table. So do I. :)

Speaking of the table, I made a list of all our furniture that I love and want to keep. It wasn’t very large. I wanted to see what pieces we had that are valuable to us. This table and chairs are one of the big things. We got them from Costco online some time ago, Italian made Scandinavian Pine. Not fancy, just simplistically beautiful. Thick ladderback chairs and thick farmhouse legs on the table. It’s bigger than the other tables we’ve had for eating on. It’s not expandable. I’d like one that is, but I also know how to marry other tables into the setting when need be, so it’s not crucial. I don’t have plans to replace this table, and don’t want to even do it. It could be a nice island in another kitchen someday though. :)