Came home this after­noon and fired up the PC. After 10 min­utes or so the noise came back. I unplugged every­thing from the back of the tower and dragged it out into the mid­dle of the floor. I got out the vac­uum cleaner and sucked up as much dust as I could out. I pulled out the CPU fan and it’s hous­ing from inside the PC and boy was it dusty. I spun the fan and it turned jerk­ily, no noise, but it didn’t rotate smoothly. I removed the 2 screws mount­ing the power sup­ply and con­tem­plated unhook­ing all the con­nec­tions to remove the unit from the tower, but decided I would wait and see if it was the CPU fan first.

I hooked up all the cables, leav­ing the CPU fan out, and fired up the PC. While I let the PC run I vac­u­umed out the fan real good, but couldn’t find any place where I might be able to lube the motor shaft. After about 15 min­utes and no noise I fig­ured that the CPU fan was indeed the cul­prit. Shut down the PC and rein­stalled the fan. I started the PC again, leav­ing the case wide open with the intent of wait­ing until the noise started and then unplug­ging the fan to con­firm that it was bad.

After 30 min­utes the noise hadn’t returned, so I but­toned the case back up. The PC will be left on tonight and we’ll see if we get woken in the mid­dle night of the night by a rum­bling fan…

This morn­ing every­thing seems bet­ter, here is last nights lame post:

With all the stud­ies that show that drink­ing a glass or two of red wine a day may be good for your health I have decided to try my own study. Reg­u­lar read­ers here know that my chole­strol is some­what on the high side and I’m work­ing with my doc­tor to try and get it in the “nor­mal” range. I don’t eat too badly (reala­tive to the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion) and I exer­cise fairly fre­quently, so I’m guess­ing a lot of my prob­lem is hered­i­tary, maybe drink­ing wine is the ticket.

Donna’s broth­ers and sis­ter are big wine drinkers, so that after the house cleared out Thanks­giv­ing week­end we were left with a cou­ple of bot­tles. Instead of the usual pour it down the sink and recy­cle the bot­tle as in years past, I resolved to drink them empty, one glass at a time, strictly for my heart you understand.

After fin­ish­ing off the left­overs, it was time to buy some wine on my own. Know­ing noth­ing about wines my first replace­ment was just another bot­tle of the same kind that was left behind, Yel­low Tail Mer­lot. Appar­ently it is from Aus­tralia because it has a cute Abo­rig­ini look­ing kan­ga­roo on the bot­tle. As a bonus, it was cheap. See­ing as that wasn’t too bad tast­ing, my next bot­tle was cho­sen for its inex­pen­sive­ness as well. I don’t remem­ber what brand it was, but I’m sure it came in a snazzy bot­tle. It cost less than the Yel­low Tail and it didn’t have that cork thing, you just screwed the top off and poured. It really didn’t taste too bad either.

With the cost fac­tor now really unim­por­tant, any­thing under $10 a bot­tle being fine, I have now started work­ing my way through the local supermarket’s wine aisle pick­ing out my bev­er­age by how I like the bottle/label design. Our lat­est stock con­sists of a Syrah from Red Bicy­clette.

The next bot­tle might be from the folks at Twin Fins win­ery. Their bot­tles have a styl­ized back end of a 50s con­vert­ible with a surf­board stick­ing out of it.

They have recently updated the voice acti­vated auto­mated pre­scrip­tion refill soft­ware at our local CVS. Before it was generic female com­puter gen­er­ated voice, but now we’ve got radio announcer guy to lead us through the but­ton push­ing process.

The best part is now when his voice says, “Please wait while I input that infor­ma­tion.” Instead of 3 sec­onds of silence we now get a com­puter sound (here is where an audio post might actu­ally be ger­mane) that sounds like some­thing that would come from Uniblab as it com­puted George Jetson’s sev­er­ance pay.

Quasi-winter has arrived. It is “cold” and windy out­side, so we’ve decided that it would be a nice day to stay inside and have for Chili for sup­per (won­der what is a good wine for accom­pa­ny­ing chili?)

Fixed the Gal­leries, the hard way. Deleted any sem­blance of the Sim­ple PHP Gallery files and pro­ceeded to try and get Gallery to work. Two attempts at uncom­press­ing the archive file (seems as winzip doesn’t work well with the tar­ball) and two attempts at upload­ing the files (seems like WS_FTP doesn’t work well with the files) and I finally got to run the instal­la­tion script. Read­ing the sup­port forum I expected trou­bles, but was dis­ap­pointed as it worked first time. I cre­ated a test direc­tory and uploaded a file. Great. Now to re-upload the 100 or so pho­tos that are already there, cut and paste their cap­tions and descrip­tions from the text file to each indi­vid­ual image, learn a new lay­out and tem­plat­ing sys­tem, so I can cus­tomize the albums to look like the rest of the site. F@%k that. Deleted every­thing I uploaded and mulled my next move. Hop­ing, against all odds, that just re-uploading the Sim­ple PHP Gallery files might work, I tried it. It’s a mir­a­cle, pho­tos again. The only log­i­cal rea­son I could think as to why it worked is the cache files for the thumb­nails was cor­rupt and regen­er­at­ing it was the fix. Note to self, delete the cache first next time the gal­leries mess up.

I also fixed the com­put­ers not talk­ing to each other thing, the easy way. I checked this set­ting once before and thought what I saw was good enough, but it wasn’t. I did two things the other day to get the com­put­ers talk­ing, one was dis­abling the DHCP and the other was dis­abling the soft­ware fire­walls. Fig­ur­ing the IP Address thing was the cause of the no inter­net access, I left DHCP on and just dis­abled the fire­walls. Viola! Note to self, check both boxes on the Net­work Neigh­bor­hood tab of Sygate Per­sonal Firewall’s option screen.

I thought I was cured. I has been almost two years years since I posted a pic­ture. Actu­ally, when I con­verted to Word­Press I deleted any of those old pic­ture posts. I haven’t been to a GAA meet­ing in at least a year and a half.

In the Jan­u­ary 25th issue of Peo­ple Mag­a­zine there was a famil­iar face look­ing out at me from the TV Picks & Pans sec­tion. There was the same pic­ture on the cover of the free TV mag­a­zine in this morning’s paper. For the next 6 weeks on PBS’s Mas­ter­piece The­ater she will be star­ring in an adap­ta­tion of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.” Jeez, “Fight the Future” was on FX this morn­ing too.

I guess now I’m going have to check and see when the next local meet­ing of Gillian Ander­son Anony­mous is.

Con­tinue read­ing Just When I Thought That I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In

Mark and I made our required visit to the Bass Pro Shop, Con­cord Mills Mall and Razzoo’s tonight after school.

We shopped BPS first. Mark had a list of things to get and wanted to get. He found the first thing on the list, but it turned out not be any cheaper than Wal­ly­world, so it wasn’t worth spend­ing for here and lug­ging back to Aiken. The sec­ond item on his list was a cer­tain kind of fish­ing rod for his father, last trip he lucked onto the lure his dad wanted right away, but this time we had to look at 98% of the 68.7 mil­lion dif­fer­ent rods for sale there before real­iz­ing the best buy was a rod/reel combo. And that was even after toss­ing out the POS reel… So he wouldn’t have to tote a fish­ing rod around the mile long loop of the mall we delayed buy­ing any­thing here until we fin­ished shopping.

To pay Mark back for mak­ing me walk all around the Bass Pro Shop look­ing up at all those fish­ing rods that I didn’t have a clue about what I was really look­ing for, I made him watch me try and buy a pair of sneak­ers. He now knows why Donna hates to shop with me. We went into nearly every one of the dozen shoe places in the Con­cord Mills Mall where the process went any­where from a quick pass through to me try­ing on 4 pairs of shoes (some­times a left and a right from 2 dif­fer­ent pairs) and then leav­ing. Halfway around we ducked into Frye’s where we shopped for DVDs and Xbox games for Mark’s son. He found a cheap game and a copy of Three Kings and I picked up the clas­sic Test Tube Babies. I found a pair I liked in my size on sale in lit­er­ally the last place we could have looked in. We then when back into the Bass Pro Shop where mark picked up the stuff he needed and we drove the 1/2 mile across the park­ing lot to dinner.

After our shop­ping excess we decided to eat that way too. We had some Rat Toes and Fried Pickle Puck­ers before we even got around to order­ing a main course. We each drank about a liter of ice cold Coke to soothe the rag­ing fires burn­ing in the taste bud forests of our tongues. Mark liked the menu so well he asked our wait­ress if he could buy one, she just said keep that one. Next time you see him ask him about his escape from the restau­rant with his prize. We both did buy legit­i­mate sou­venirs too, gen­uine Razzoo’s Brand T-shirts, osten­si­bly for our wives, but by coin­ci­dence they just hap­pen to be in our sizes.