As a first world problem: a new server we ordered for a client, and shipped overnight, refused to boot. Power on, yes, but perform the POST, no – not even a hint of video and no drive probing. After unhooking and reseating every single thing, from the power connectors to the memory to the CPU itself, we got nothing. We asked the vendor to overnight a new motherboard, thinking that would solve the problem. Nada. Yesterday I asked them to overnight a new CPU, since that was the one component I had no replacement for, given this was a new motherboard type we’ve never used before. Nothing. So, tonight I’ll be ordering a server based on a specification we’ve ordered before, that we know works just fine, and next week we will ship back this server, the extra motherboard, and the extra CPU. If you want to know what drives people in tech crazy, it’s problems like this. Well, that and the people who can’t keep their passwords secure, and then bitch at us when we set minimum password strength requirements that prohibit them from using “password” as their new password.
Monthly Archives: July 2012
No
No, it is not. There is one term that describes this, though: mass hysteria.
A scan a day keeps the doctor away
Maybe not every day. That could get tedious very quickly. This morning, two CT scans, with contrast – the contrast courtesy of iodine they shoot through an IV into you, which rapidly spreads and makes you feel like you’re about to piss yourself. While that’s coursing through you, they slide you back into the CT for more pictures. Lucky me, I got toe do the contrast twice: once for the chest, and once for the head and neck. Fun stuff. Even more fun is that they didn’t put the IV into the crook of my arm, but slightly below it. I now have quite the knot there, it’s already started to bruise, and it hurts. A lot. The price of going through tests to make sure no growths are lurking about anyway, I suppose.
Today was spasm day, thanks to the combination of bouncing around on the tractor yesterday, and the raising of my arms above my head while lying on the table for the CT scans. As soon as I pulled my left arm up above my head, I could feel them starting, and they haven’t let up. That, as they say, is what the drugs are for, and I gave in and took some to calm this down so I could move. No workout today, alas.
My sister arrived from Illinois in a sneak attack visit with her dogs. She’ll be staying with my other sister, so there won’t be as much worry about Einstein and his distaste for other dogs invading my space, although I have to say he was better behaved this time, and didn’t actually attack either of the visiting dogs when my sister got to the house. Maybe he’s realized that those two dogs both outweigh him by a lot and that they’re much larger than he is. Or maybe he just didn’t fee as threatened by them this time. Whatever the reason, things were just fine. I made lime and cilantro chicken for dinner, and we had fresh corn on the cob and squash baked with parm-reg. Not a bad little summer meal. Next up: seafood feast, since my sister now lives in the middle of nowhere and doesn’t get seafood as much as she would like up there.
Random note to the people who made the ourtime.com commercials that appear from time to time on my tv while I’m watching rugby or shows about stupid people (“World’s Dumbest…”): if you’re going to have people giving testimonials about meeting people through your service, it would be best if they didn’t sound like they were standing and talking in a gigantic cavern. The sound on those needs a ton of work.
Injury time out
Could it be that my right shoulder ache (through the joint and into the traps) was from yesterday’s workout? Or could it be from today’s adventure on the tractor, cutting the jungle of a yard we now have after two feet of rain from Debby strolling through the northern part of the state here? Anyone who has visited the ranch knows that this place had two kinds of “soil” when we bought the property: white sand and hardpack clay. I’ve spent quite a lot of time rehabbing the soil, but there are still areas of the clay here and there that is just like rolling along concrete. Worse, it’s terribly bumpy. All newer riding mowers/tractors have a contact under the seat. If you raise your butt out of the seat while it’s running, it will shut off as a safety feature. Today, while traveling over one particularly bad area to get some mowing done when it was a balmy 99 degrees outside, I got bounced so badly that it yanked the steering wheel – and thus my right arm – in a bad way, and also bounced me off the seat enough that it almost shut down the entire thing. In any case, both my left hip and my right shoulder have hurt like hell this afternoon and evening, which also means a workout was out of the question.
Instead, I’ve been working on business stuff and had a nap earlier to try to catch up on a bit of the sleep I lost while we had houseguests here. It’s probably better that there was no workout today, since I have scans tomorrow as followups to ensure there are no ghosts still lurking in my machine. That would be good news, and if all goes well, perhaps we’ll be able to move along to yearly scans and doctor visits instead of the every six months schedule we’re on right now. That would be a welcome thing indeed.