I don’t know, I think I must be getting old. 34 now. I thought to myself that I’d make it to 30 before things would start to wear out and it seems I’ve been a bit right about that!

Not long after turning 30, my teeth decided they were old. Two wisdom teeth had to be removed, and a few others patched. Mind you I hadn’t seen a dentist in 20 years or more. They’re back under control now, largely due to better care and a post-meal chewing gum addiction.

I used to almost never get sick. But this last few years has seen that pattern change a bit. It used to be maybe once a year I’d fall of my perch, but lately it’s been twice or three times, and this year maybe even more!

I thought maybe I’d found an answer in Vitamin D research, but the last year seems to show little improvement. (Although perhaps that’s due to only being able to get 1000IU supplies in Australia vs 10,000 overseas.) Aah well I’ll try a little longer based on the science.

Val reckons it’s because I don’t eat enough. And it’s true I don’t often have lunch, but since I tend to have brekky around 10am while processing phone calls, I can usually get through the day unscathed. However that seems to be less so these days. I find this rather annoying – you see Ethiopians getting by on SFA but they can still put in hard yakka. Why can’t I??

Or perhaps I shouldn’t be working out in the cold and the rain building shelves in the garage at 10 at night? But why should that matter? Builders work out in the weather all the time.

Or perhaps it was that graduation party on Friday night with a room of about 30 African / Nigerian scholars, combined with the fatty sugary Chinese smorgasbord? I’m not saying these people carry diseases – but they have a different social life to myself – or indeed a social life – so perhaps they have something new for me to learn to defend myself against. They’re actually quite a friendly group – it was kinda freaky in a way as it reminded me of my high school days where we were 50% Asian. A touch sad tho because after high school they were pretty much all gone back to Honkers.

Oh well. Not to worry. I’ll get over this bug soon like all the others, and life will return to normal. I won’t notice the distortion of the 7 watt speakers in the car because I will no longer be deaf from descending into Armidale and compensating with the volume knob. I will be able to make the short distance from bedroom to bathroom in the early morning without getting paralysed by a shivering attack. I will work 12 hour days happily. I will however hear that damned annoying squeak in the under-dash fan that taunts me daily. (It looks to be a right bastard to get to.)  I will be able to get more work done again, and answer the phone calls without the Vader Voice. But I won’t please Jenni Jackson by retiring from my germ-spreading position again. .. and I won’t be able to do convincing Barry Mannilow impressions and hum the bass lines to every song. (It’ll be back to the Roger Whitakker range soon – too low for almost everything, except forementioned Barry. Not that anyone has to suffer my attempts normally…) Ill hopefully soon lose the ability to swiftly inhale more than just air – bar any small bugs that should venture too close.

Take the good with the bad eh

It wasn’t quite going to plan as he had already signed up over the phone, but the email address and password supplied would not work. Eventually it turned out that Telstra mistook an N for an M and buggered it up.

He now faces the choice of putting up with paying an extra $1 per month for the right email address or putting up a fight to get the problem rectified.

I could be wrong, but it feels to me like Armidale’s Optus coverage is getting worse over time. This customer had constant dropouts despite being more or less part of the main basin. So, if you’re on Exetel / Optus Wireless Broadband in Armidale, my apologies for signing you up to it. I thought it would stay the same or improve. If it starts to annoy you, Telstra’s probably a good bet now.

This computer is about ten years old so I thought it might be a power supply or a dead hard drive.

Once I got it back to the office, it fired up no worries – well except for being overloaded with programs that were a bit big for it.

Anyway gave it a good clean and it went home tonight.

I got a phone call later, to say that when they plugged it in, there was still no picture.

However, they soon noticed that if the looked really close they could just make out the picture.

It turns out the problem was little fingers – which had turned the screen brightness right down making it almost invisible.

But the computer was hiding. In a cupboard.

I opened the cupboard and was greeted with a lovely warm blast of air.

Unfortunately, the cupboard was made many years ago when computers were much less power demanding; and as a result it didn’t afford enough ventilation for this computer.

A new motherboard is on it’s way from Hong Kong

When you do something like this, it can be a bit hard to work out how to get back to normal, since the control panel becomes bigger than the screen meaning you can’t get to some of the buttons.

Aah well, 5 minutes later it was back to normal

If you don’t highlight all the columns before sorting in Excel, and you have an empty column in the data, Excel might ‘shuffle’ all your financial work!

It wasn’t too hard to fix fortunately since the amount column could be matched to the gst-exclusive amount in the right columns, once we worked out what had happened.

One job today was a fair drive to get to. It’s fun navigating these dirt roads, and dodging the holes

Anyway today I went to see a customer with a middle-aged Dell PC, that was refusing to let him or anyone log in. Normally this means the user profile is corrupt, but it was pretending the drive was full.

A quick check of the drive in Ubuntu showed the drive only half full.

A quick go at running system restore from ERD didn’t work – ERD crashed.

A quick go a running system restore from Safe Mode didn’t work, still couldn’t log in.

Another attempt to boot in Ubuntu failed – which is unusual and hinted at bad RAM.

Tested RAM, 10 minutes in, it comes up with one solitary bad spot.

Removed cover, removed copious dust, removed and replaced RAM. Problem gone

Dust doesn’t usually cause any more harm other than making the fans run faster than normal. However, if it gets damp – either due to our lousy weather or being too close to the kitchen – it can start to have an impact on the machine’s sanity.

Put it back together, and all is good

Lucky too – I was out of RAM for that type of computer, and thought I was going to have to come back the next day with some more parts.

While driving home tonight the car suddenly rushed up to 16+ volts. The lights were nice and bright Of course, since this might mean suicide for the electrics I whacked on high beam and the blower fan, which lowered it a bit, and dropped revs to about 1,000. I balanced it between 13 and 15 volts like this for about 3 minutes before it settled back down to normal, mostly.

It had done this a couple of times earlier this week, so I knew something was up… I ended up driving home in 1 hour 5 minutes at about 50kph, keeping the revs low in case it decided to do it again.

When I got home, I took Molly for her run on the electric bike, then put on my mechanics hat and swapped the voltage regulator with another one I bought from eBay some time ago. Then I went to the Black Mountain Roadhouse for a feed and to see if it would behave.

So far so good – the trip to Armidale tomorrow will tell me more! Hopefully I don’t end up doing 50kph all the way there, or some people might be annoyed!

Edit: 1/9 – it seems possible that the excess carbon buildup between the carbon brushes might have been the cause of the intermittent high voltage condition.

From Assorted

I tried once and failed. So i put his laptop on its side and tried again. This time it worked.

He still refuses to believe that putting it on the side made it work. However it did work

It worked because putting the computer on its side raised the modem into the air and improved the reception.

Posted by Wordmobi

But first I had to get there…

The bluebird is one of those evil cars that will happily let you leave the lights on, and having done that a few times already this year the battery is quick to die. In just ten minutes it was too low to start.;

Of course by now it was sleeting and windy so i was not really relishing installing a new battery at this time.

So, I walked over to ct electrics instead and bought a ups battery instead, since I need one of those anyway. (These are small batteries about half the size of a lunchbox.)

Armed with this battery – I didn’t tell her what I really bought it for – I returned to the car and rooted around in the boot until I could find a non-switchmode power supply of 12 volts or higher.

I then wired this power supply into the 12v auxillary line that runs from the battery to the passenger compartment, and connected the transformer to a small inverter. Then for the tricky bit – balancing a cigarette lighter plug and a metal bracket over the small battery terminals for 10 minutes while the battery received a top-up.

10 minutes later, and the car started like a charm, and I was back on my way; having avoided the embarrassment of buying a car battery in the middle of a Guyra blizzard, and worse still having to fit the damn thing in the main street

One day I will do something to stop this car from being evil. Dunno when yet.

Oh, and flat battery man got his new battery and all was well. Why is he called flat battery man? Well, I visited him a couple of years ago in the Kingswood, and got a flat battery in his driveway too.  He must be cursed!!