Rising Above Mediocrity
by Benjamin Geiger

Not like “time to recharge” dead, either. More like “lead plates melted together” dead.

As I was on my way home from work tonight (I wasn’t even on the clock; I just needed to use the Internet connection to set my Powerbook back up) I stopped at a Subway. When I went to leave, my car gave the clickclickclickclickclick sound characteristic of a discharged battery.

Over the next two minutes, though, the entire car went dead. No lights (exterior, interior, or idiot). No power locks. No trunk release. No alarm. Not even enough juice to activate the solenoid that releases the key from the ignition switch when the car is in park. That made things interesting for a while, while I tried to figure out how to get into the trunk when the key wouldn’t come out of the ignition.

[A side note: For some time now, my car has sometimes refused to let me take my key out of the ignition. Apparently, it doesn’t believe that the transmission is actually in Park; usually, rapidly pressing the shift release button forces it to let the key go, but sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes a well-placed blow to the bottom of the steering column would release the key. I found out today why this is so: there is, apparently, a manual release inside the steering column, and an impact could press it. There’s an access hole for that purpose, with cover, but I find it easier to slide my hand into the steering column and press the button manually.]

Here’s the weirdest part, though: I was completely unable to jumpstart the car. Even with the two batteries directly connected, it was as though the jumper cables weren’t there.

After that attempt to jumpstart the car, I called around to various tow truck companies. They wanted $100+ to take the car the ten miles back to the house, and that doesn’t even cover the actual cost of repairs. This is when I learned that my insurance policy, despite what I had been led to believe, does not have roadside assistance. They reimburse up to $50 for towing. Note again that the cost would be >$100, with the remainder coming out of pocket. And that assumes that they actually reimburse.

At that point, I had no idea what to do, so I called Dad.

He was able to leave work early and show up. On the way, we came up with a plan that would (potentially) save the repair cost. When he got there, we traveled to Wal-Mart and bought a new battery for the car. The rationale was this: if it’s the battery, yay, problem solved. If it’s anything else, at least it should get the car back to the house, where the problem can be dealt with.

We also bought an adjustable wrench. This piece of shit bent when trying to remove the first bolt holding a crossbar on. We ended up going back to the house to retrieve Dad’s tools, including a ratchet and the appropriate size wrench and socket.

It is most definitely not an easy task to take the battery out of a 2000 Grand Prix. Even after taking off the crossbar and moving or detaching all of the cables, hoses, clamps, and doohickeys (now that’s a technical term for you) in the vicinity, the battery still needs to be turned on its side in order to be removed. Installing the new one is not much easier, though in this case the new battery had a handle, which helped.

At long last, the new battery was installed and the car was running. At some point, we realized that the battery was not a no-maintenance, sealed battery, as I had thought, but rather a standard battery that requires filling.

Guess what neither of us had done since we bought the car? [In my defense, I honestly thought it was a sealed battery.]

With much trepidation we opened the access panels on the battery. The lead plates were exposed and partially melted, and there was practically no liquid inside. In retrospect, I’m surprised it didn’t explode or melt earlier.

Now, with the new battery, the car is running like a champ again. I’m still going to take it to the dealer ASAP to make sure it’s not something more serious (like an alternator problem or faulty wiring) but I think the problem is solved.

Instead of going through the trouble of finding ludwig’s cause of death, I found a suitable replacement.

The local Computer Renaissance had a pallet of used machines: Dell Optiplex GX110 models, with 500MHz CPUs and 128MB RAM each. The quoted price was $50, but the sales guy on duty sold me one for $25. (I didn’t even ask. Honest.)

Continuing with my theme of lesser-known Disney characters, I named the new server “Archimedes” after the owl in “The Sword in the Stone”.

I had a few surprises while configuring the server. Most notably, the IDE controller uses Cable Select and will not function without it. I had the system drive configured as master, and the controller wouldn’t detect it. I had to turn on Cable Select before it would work. There is no AGP expansion slot, but the integrated video uses AGP. I don’t even use X11 on the system, so a lack of decent video is hardly a detriment. And the case is either an engineering marvel or a overcomplicated piece of junk, depending on how irritated I am at it.

The system came with a PCI Sound Blaster Live! card. I removed the card, as a server doesn’t need a sound card, and intend to put it into my Wintendo.

Debian installation went off without a hitch. Even installing and configuring the additional servers I use was easy, primarily because I managed to save the /etc directory from ludwig. I’ve installed samba, dnsmasq, and cups so far without any hassle whatsoever.

All I can say is that I’m pleased with the results.

I just have no luck with fileservers.

Until a bit over two years ago, I had a machine named “sleight-of-mind”. Then one of the hard drives died. When I replaced the hard drive, the machine rose from the… er… disassembled. I took that opportunity to change naming schemes; that machine became “ludwig” (as in “von Drake”, Donald’s uncle).

A few hours ago, ludwig began giving memory paging errors and became unresponsive to input. When I shut it down hard (being unable to shut it down from the console), it refused to restart, giving no response whatsoever. After I cycled the power supply cutoff switch, the lights and fans came on for approximately two seconds before shutting themselves off.

I took the PSU from my Wintendo, baloo, and put it into ludwig. No response, so I know it’s not the PSU that failed.

I don’t know what the failure is, at this point. It could be the motherboard or it could be the CPU. I do know that the machine is ancient (it had a 350MHz K6-2), and any replacement could be equally ancient; I don’t need a quad Xeon to serve up files and run pppd. Now to find a replacement that I can actually afford…

I just started getting a large number of messages from various email servers, telling me that messages I never sent had been rejected. Upon closer inspection, it’s clear that some spammer has decided to steal my good name (my good domain name, anyway) to try to sneak by spam filters.

I didn’t send the spam. I don’t like spam. And I certainly can’t do anything about the shitheads sending the spam. So hold the hate mail, please.

I bought Straight Outta Lynwood today. Like a number of other recent releases, it’s only available as a DualDisc within the US. Of course, the first thing I did was try to load it into my Powerbook so I could view the bonus DVD content; when I tried, I got a nasty surprise: the disc will not fit into the drive.

The packaging says absolutely nothing about this being an issue. Some other manufacturers have included warnings regarding slot-loading CD drives, but Sony did not. All they included was a vacuous warning about the disc not conforming to the Red Book standard, which would have nothing to do with this problem as it claims to be perfectly compatible with the DVD standard and the drive is a DVD drive.

While this by itself would be annoying, the problems don’t stop there. When I tried the disc in my Wintendo (which has a tray-loading DVD drive), the audio suffered from skips and noise, but this could be explained by scratches on the disc. However, the scratches weren’t that bad; I’ve had DVDs that had taken much more abuse and still played flawlessly. The subtitles don’t work, either: it’s supposed to have a “karaoke” mode, where the lyrics are displayed on screen, but the subtitle track is completely blank. Flipping the disc to the CD side doesn’t work either; the drive refuses to acknowledge that a disc is loaded. (To be honest, this is something included as a warning on the package.)

First thing I’m going to do is try to return the disc to Wal-Mart; hopefully the DVD issues are limited to this particular disc. If Wal-Mart refuses to take it back, or if the replacement disc fails, I’m going to contact Sony/BMG directly and attempt to get a refund. (Wal-Mart will not give refunds for opened CDs or DVDs.)

I still want a MacBook Pro. I want it so bad.

Despite this, I’ve decided to wait until August, at least; WWDC runs from 7-11 August. There are persistent rumors of an upgrade to the MacBook Pro, including a switch to a 64 bit processor (the “Merom”). At least the Merom might match up to the G5 (which, of course, IBM could never generate in a laptop-friendly form).

(Oh, and I’m writing this in the Apple Store inside Florida Mall, typing on a 17″ MacBook Pro. I’m doing my best to keep drool off of it, but… but… I wantses one! I wantses it, my precioussss….)

Okay, I’m home and can elaborate.

Apparently, Apple tends to announce its new stuff during the WWDC. Intel has also announced that it will be releasing its new CPUs sooner than expected. This leads me to expect that they’ll announce an upgrade to the MacBook Pro line (and maybe even the MacBook) in August.

I spent some time playing with various machines at the Apple Store, and I found things I like about both lines. First and foremost, I like the case of the MacBook. It seems a lot sturdier and less likely to show wear. Also, the magnetic latch seems fairly nice; the lid closes solidly (not leaving the gap present on the Powerbook, and still present on the MacBook Pro). The biggest problems I have with the MacBook are the shared video RAM and the smaller screen resolution, though the screen resolution is not much smaller than that of my current 15″ Powerbook.

My dream machine is the 17″ MacBook Pro, but I may have to settle for a less glamorous machine for various reasons. If I could get a very large hard drive (120+ GB) in a MacBook, I’d almost be willing to live with reduced screen space, as the price differential is very significant.

In any case, I still intend to wait until August, or later if the financial end doesn’t work out. By then, I should know what options are available.

I am currently the owner of two USB thumbdrives.

I had originally purchased the first drive (a SanDisk Cruzer Mini 512MB) a few weeks ago to store various documents I needed for work (the gradebook and my timesheets, primarily) while my computer is out of commission. It was fulfilling that need suitably.

Then I lost it.

There’s more! (click here to read)

It’s Thursday night, and I finished the last exam in my undergraduate career a couple of hours ago.

Right now is when I’m supposed to have been celebrating, or at least taking a moment to relax, but thanks to the incompetence of my CMOS VLSI Design teammates, that won’t be.

There’s more! (click here to read)

My Powerbook has experienced another hardware failure. Unlike the previous failure, this isn’t one I can limp along with. (Ironically, it’s probably due to the prior failure.)

The hard drive is dying.

There’s more! (click here to read)

After my initial analysis of my Powerbook problems, I figured I’d simply add a bigger stick of RAM to the other slot.

Wrong.

I’ve tried three different 1GB sticks from two vendors (one off-brand from Newegg, two Kingston from Circuit Slum). With the off-brand RAM, the Powerbook refused to boot at all, and with the Kingston, it kernel panicked before Finder loaded.

All three sticks of RAM are well within the specs given in the Powerbook documentation. (PC2700/DDR333, CAS latency 2.5, 200-pin SODIMMs.) Either, by some coincidence, two companies and two vendors have yielded three faulty sticks of RAM, or the other slot is failing somehow.

Apparently, I have to either fix the logic board or replace the machine. To replace the logic board would cost approximately $700 USD. To buy a cheap laptop would be $6-700, and to buy a good laptop (the MacBook Pro) would be $1800 (with academic discount).

I don’t have $700—never mind $1800—and the computer is incapable of running much of what I need to run now (Virtual PC, for instance). I can’t borrow money from the school, like I did last time, because I already borrowed my entire loan allowance so I can survive this term. So I’m in a bit of a pickle.

If anyone has any suggestion (or better yet, a donation), don’t hesitate to let me know.