Page 40 – Krunk4Ever!

January 13, 2009January 11, 2009

No Hot Water, Brrrrrr

The first day I came back from LA, I basically had to boot up my house.

Change my heater settings back to normal
Find my Roombas since it’s pretty likely that during my 3 week break, they would’ve gotten stuck somewhere
Throw away food that’s expired
Set all my clocks again (apparently there’s been 1 or more blackouts – good thing all my computers have UPS)
etc.

But I forgot one crucial thing… I was tired, so I decided to take a shower and go to sleep. Turns out I had forgotten to change my water heater settings back and it was still in vacation mode. And given the fact there were still snow outside, you could imagine how bad it was to take a shower in cold/lukewarm water. Even if I went down to turn on the water heater, it would take awhile before the water would be hot enough to use. I decided to bear with it and finish my shower.

A lesson that will be remembered.

January 12, 2009January 11, 2009

Sword Stand

So after getting my graduation gift from my co-workers: Warrior Series: Wakazashi, I’ve never got an official sword stand for it. I’ve always thought about getting one, but was just too lazy to search for one. It’s always just sat above my fireplace. 3 years later, my mom decides to get me one for Christmas.

I do have to say, it turned out pretty nice:

Along the same theme, I’ve also recently unpacked a bunch of anime figurines. I can’t believe I still have so much stuff unpacked in my storage room.

The Bleach figurines are actually new. I had to find enough to reach $50 for free shipping at RightStuf during their recently sale. The 2 Hellsing figurines came with 2 of the Hellsing DVD volumes which I purchased awhile back. I’m surprised none has fallen off the edge down into the living room yet.

January 11, 2009January 11, 2009

2008 Gasoline Statistics

So 2008 ended a week or so ago and I finally got around tallying up my last few gasoline receipts. Here’s my overall gasoline statistics for 2008 on my Honda Civic EX Coupe 2001:

Total Miles: 7456.6
Total Gallons: 264.245
Total Cost: $899.53

Average Cost Per Gallon: $3.40
Average MPG: 28.2
Average Miles Per Dollar: 8.3
Average Daily Cost: $2.46
Average Daily Mileage: 20.4

Here’s some nice pretty charts that charts the averages across the year:

2008 Gasoline Statistics

Nothing too surprising about the graphs. My MPG is pretty flat along the 28MPG line, while several charts were mostly affected by the cost of gasoline hitting over $4.00, then dropping back below $2.00.

Update: Noticed one of my graphs included stats from 2007. Fixed.

January 9, 2009

Elevator Go Boom

Our team’s always joked about we should never be all in the same elevator or an airplane, since if there’s an unfortunate event, there goes the CardSpace test team.

However, just the other day when we were going out to lunch, the elevator started to malfunction. There were 6 out of 8 of us on it. It started falling and got stuck mid-floor. We hit the alarm button and even started to call for help, when it fell another floor. Pretty scary experience. However, we started pulling the doors apart and manage to get out on the 1st floor with about 2ft to climb.

January 7, 2009

Cherry Lips

So I recently heard an old song on a TV show and really dig it: Cherry Lips by Garbage

YouTube Link

However, it wasn’t after listening to 20+ times that I realized the song was about a boy!!! According to Wikipedia:

Shirley wrote the lyrics in the song as a tribute to writer “JT LeRoy”, pseudonym of Laura Albert, with whom she has an email friendship, after reading “his” two novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. The song is loosely based on the two novels, apparently referencing the character ‘Cherry’, a cross-dressing child-prostitute from the novel Sarah.

January 5, 2009January 7, 2009

Lost Mail?

So I got back to Seattle last Tuesday (thanks to Derek from driving me home from the airport). I can’t believe work begins tomorrow.

As always, when I leave for Christmas, I always put a hold on my postal mail to have it deliver on the day I return (in this case, it was 12/30). I get home and got the notice my mail service will resume, but no mail… I’ve been gone for 2.5 weeks and was expecting a lot of mail, a few packages, and even several checks. First thing that popped into my head was, maybe the postman hid it, so I searched the outside of my house and didn’t find anything.

Since there’s been construction going on in our complex and that I just received a noticed on my door that the construction work on my unit was completed on 12/30, I began to feared the worse. SOMEONE HAD STOLEN MY MAIL… I left a post-it on my mailbox for my postman the next day and decided to ask the construction company if anyone saw my mail the following day. Unfortunately, the construction company said, they didn’t see anything, but I should call my post office to see what they had to say. I thought… why didn’t I think of that.

I called my post office and they told me that I actually had a tub of mail en route today (12/31) and that was when I had my first sigh of relief. They told me my route had a substitute and that could be the reason for the delay. I did get my tub of mail that afternoon and it was like Christmas all over again!

I got my Premera check for my new glasses ($180) and a rebate check.

Here’s a few of the things I received:

From left to right:

Goody Ouchless Elastic Hair bands – a free sample. Was actually thinking of picking up some at Rite Aid. Guess I don’t need to anymore.
Chef Spoon – free gift from Contadina
Omaha Steaks: The Great American Grilling Book – Something I signed up for at FreeBizMag
Muir Glen 2008 Reserve Tomatoes – a free gift when you join the Connoisseurs’ Club
Magic: The Gathering Decks – another freebie I signed up for

Not shown here include my new Woot shirt: Willing to endure scientific research, Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid DVD 1 (to complete the series), and some HDMI cables that were on sale (3 6′ for $10 shipped).

Here are a couple more things that I got for free, but had received right before I left:

Johnnie Walker glass – a free gift for being part of their Striding Man Society
Maker’s Mark gift wrap – As part of their ambassador program, I’ve been receiving freebies since college. There’s even supposedly a barrel with my name on it.

January 4, 2009January 4, 2009

Weird Car Stuttering Noise

For those who’ve ridden in my Honda Civic, you may have noticed that when I’m driving on bumping roads, my car would make a weird stuttering noise, as if something was loose. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure it out what was going on. Some have suggested maybe my shocks were damaged. Since it didn’t really affect my driving, I never did take it in to have it looked at. And since the noise came from the rear, as the driver, I never did have much of a chance to analyze where it came from while I was driving.

A few weeks ago when Liam came up to visit, Andrew was sitting in the back and obviously annoyed by the noise. Seattle streets tend to be hilly and bumpy. So he took some tissue paper and stuffed it between my rear windshield and my rear center stop light (not exactly sure what that’s called):

And magically and instantaneously, the stuttering noise was gone. The noise has plagued my car for years and Andrew resolved it immediately. Many others have sat in my rear seats and never did figure out where the noise was coming from, only to mention they thought it was abnormal. I guess what was happening was the fact that that there was space between my rear center stop light and my rear windshield and during bumpy roads, it would smack against each other.

I’m probably going to look for something more durable and less covering than tissue paper (probably cardboard), but it’s weird not hearing that stuttering noise now that I’m accustomed to it.

December 29, 2008December 29, 2008

Seagate FreeAgent Freezes on BIOS screen

So in the past, I’ve always had to tell my parents to start deleting stuff on the fileshare, since free space is quickly depleted mainly due to the fact it was only a 160GB drive. Most of my computers at home are ancient. I mean I can’t even watch 720p HD trailers on my desktop here.

Anyway, I thought it was time to upgrade the drive, however given that this machine is probably over 6 years old, it didn’t have SATA connectors. I figured I could probably pick up an external drive for about the same cost as a SATA PCI card + hard drive. The external drive would also be much easier to move to a different machine if mine died again.

I picked up a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.0TB External USB2.0 that was on sale at Staples. The drive’s actually quite neat. The Seagate Manager software that comes with the drive has a bunch of cool options such as telling the drive to automatically go into power-saving mode after a certain amount of inactivity. There’s also some security/encryption setting which I have yet to play with.

Anyway, everything was going fine until I needed to reboot. It just froze on the BIOS/POST screen after detecting all my hard drives. At first I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, but when it rebooted fine after I unplugged the USB drive, I started troubleshooting down that path. It was pretty ridiculous that every time I wanted to reboot, I had to unplug the drive, reboot, and replug in the drive. The boot process wouldn’t even continue if I unplug the drive and keyboard did not have any response, nor was I able to get into the BIOS setup.

After some quick searching, I found this thread: Free Agent freezes computer on restart? Turns out that it’s quite a common problem with certain motherboards that try to boot off USB drives. I don’t know what’s different about this drive since I have another external drive (using a generic external enclosure) and it’s never had problems at boot.

Anyway, I thought maybe it was due to the power-saving mode of inactivity so I disabled that, but that still didn’t help. According to the forums, there were a few things to try:

In BIOS, try to disable booting from USB
Connect drive to USB PCI card instead of motherboard’s USB ports

I search throughout my BIOS and there was no option to disable booting from USB. I even ended up disabling all USB support and my keyboard/mouse stopped working (it did boot without freezing though). This PC Chips M848A motherboard is pretty crappy and options are pretty limited. I ended up resetting the CMOS.

I was already contemplating if I should get a new CPU/motherboard combo at Fry’s or just pick up a cheap USB PCI card. I mean I’ve brought back a good PCI-E graphics card and DDR2 ram in preparation of the worse case scenario when my mom told me the scent of burning came from my computer and it stopped working (turns out the fan on my graphics card broke off and it just burnt out the GPU).

While looking at the internals, I noticed I already had a USB PCI card, which was not being utilized due to the fact a couple of the ports were dead. I guess that’s what you get from a $5 USB PCI card. I hooked up the Seagate external drive and reboot is working just fine now. No more hangs or freezes.

Update: I actually forgot to mention several things. I had tried to see if I could update my BIOS firmware, but it turns out I already had the latest (July ’04).

I didn’t actually see the mention of USB PCI card until later, and before that I was contemplating on ways to delay the start of my external drive or the USB hub that my drive was connected to.

December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas!

I wish everyone a Merry Christmas! And for those non-Christmas believers, I wish you Happy Holidays. ;p

My vacation’s half over and it’s been loads of fun so far. Met up with many old friends.

I also went snowboarding on Tuesday with Chris and Dave. Dave taught me how to carve, something I’ve been having trouble with. I’m still in the learning/practicing phase, but at least this time my first instinct isn’t to fall down immediately.

I’ll be in Las Vegas with my family the next few days, so I probably won’t be online (much?). Wish me luck!

Hope you guys are enjoying your holidays too!

December 14, 2008December 13, 2008

CDBurnerXP – Best Burning Software Ever

So Liam was over and wanted me to burn him some “videos” that I had. Should be easy, or so I thought. It turns out I didn’t actually have any data burning software installed on my computer. What is going on I thought… It’s been at least over a year since I last formatted this computer. Windows shows a creation date of April 10th, 2007 for my user folder. Has it really been that long since I’ve burnt any data. I guess that’s what happens when you have a 2.5TB file server available (currently down to only 600GB+ free).

I tried using Windows Explorer as I believed I should’ve been able to drag and drop files onto my burner and burn it via that method. Unfortunately it didn’t recognize my DVD+R as a blank writable disc.

I recall someone telling me an alternative to Nero, but I couldn’t recall what it was called. So I went and “located” my copy of Nero. The version of Nero I found was 7. That darn thing was almost 200MB, while versions 8 and 9 reach almost 1GB. I’m thinking why the heck did Nero’s burning software suite get so huge?!?! After installing Nero, for some reason, it did not recognize my DVD burner. It found my Lite-On CD burner, but I needed to burn a DVD+R. Now I’m pissed for wasting my time on Nero.

Anyway, I typed in nero won’t see dvd burner into Live Search and the first result pointed me to alternatives such as CDBurnerXP. Something clicked and I’m pretty sure that was the alternative someone had suggested to me sometime ago. Anyway, it’s freeware and it’s only a 3MB download! That alone made me much happier. All I wanted was an explorer like interface (similar to old Nero) where I can drag and drop files and then click burn.

And that’s what CDBurnerXP turned out to be. Very simple, very small, very fast. I was browsing through its options and it even has the capability of making bootable discs, something I’ve always wanted from a burning software. Now I can truly get rid of my floppy drive, which I only kept around for flashing the bios on my motherboard.