Viewing posts by o'wolf
The day itself wasn't very eventful, however tonight was party time at Delta Center, SLC's basketball stadium. It startet with plenty of food, some kind of soda-pop which served as a poor excuse of a beer (I think its called Budweiser here), a DDR station, an Elvis immitator which wasn't bad, some silly green-screen music video parodies and a break-dance crew. Next, a mediocre stand-up commedian. Okay, mediocre in my opionion. Maybe I just don't know enough about American family life to find his jokes funny...
The elevators in the conference center broke down yesterday.
So I'm sitting here in a hotel room in SLC, right across the street the Salt Lake Palace (the convention center) after having managed to sneak out of the Analyst's Night at Novell Brainshare... I spent the whole day having lab duty at a demo point already and was very grateful that two co-workers with more experience in talking to a non-technical audience took over for tonight.
So I got the replacement HD yesterday, it turned out that the first disk probably wasn't broken at all. But given that the blister package of the first disk was broken, the package was set on the short side of the disk onto the bottom of the cardboard box with virtually no additional protection and the disk obviously being used before, it was a good idea to send it back.
So I went to the shop yesterday and got a replacement for the defective RAM module. The salesman took the old one, disappeared for ten minutes (to check it with an analyzer) and came back growling "yes, it is _really_ broken" and gave me a different one. I went home, plugged it in, and, at last: memtest86 does not find any bit errors on this one. Instead it just crashes with an invalid operand error after 20 minutes. WTF?! I tried it again, this time it crashes after 6 minutes. Weird. Okay, maybe memtest86 doesn't work on that board properly. Booted up Linux, copyied some pictures around, and the machine crashes. Well, something is wrong here. Let me check the RAM module again, with one of the original 256 MB modules in slot one and the 1 GB module in slot two, just to find where the module is failing. What, the problem is gone? After memtest86 running without any problems for five rounds I decided that the system is stable now. No errors even after running the bit rot, um, fade test over night.
I ordered a hard disk drive the other day. It arrived yesterday and was DoA. I also bought a 1 GB RAM module of a renowned manufacturer yesterday. Well, the machine boots up, but firefox crashes after three minutes. Startet memtest86 and indeed, after only 13 minutes it found a whole address range with countless bit errors.
The traditional Sunday activity of our local furmeet is a visit to the zoo of Nuremberg. The weather wasn't good enough for photos, unfortunately, and it was extremely cold... But I was able to observe the two new wolves (from Spain, quite small even for European wolves...) very closely. In fact, I can say they have been inseparable -- for twenty minutes or so. With me standing less then two meters away. She was rather pissed off after five minutes while he had a certain "what the f... have I got myself into again?" (pun intended) look on his face.
I'm looking forward to observe the cubs one day... :-)
After spending almost EUR 1000 on car repairs due to a broken ignition, a replaced timing belt (normal maintenance) and the bi-yearly mandatory technical inspection ("TÜV") I thought "what the heck" and tried the new Mr. Wash subsidiary here in Nuremberg. In total, I spent 16 Euro. Six of these were for the car wash, which is really excellent and worth the price. The other ten for passenger compartment cleaning. I'm only half-way satisfied. While they did a really good job by cleaning the windows, the dashboard and the other plain surfaces (which takes half of the total time, half of the work and half of the technical resources), the vacuum cleaning was not very thorough. Admittedly, I had (and unfortunately still have) a some fuzz from various Folkmanis puppets and fursuits spread over the seats which takes some time to get brushed and vacuumed off -- guess why I thought "I rather pay someone for cleaning that up". However, I don't see a difference at all. Not to mention that they forgot to clean one of the rubber mats, put the others back into the car soaking wet and forgot a pen on the passenger seat... Conclusion: I'll stay with the car wash and won't take a second look at their other cleaning services. (YMMV, though)