Sumbitchin’ computer hardware . . .

Posted on October 7, 2007 by Marchbanks

Just bleedin’ wonderful.  Yesterday afternoon Gráinne, the Land of Færie’s office computer, suddenly quit and went to a black screen with a flashing cursor.  That’s never comforting to see, but I thought the problem was no more than me forgetting to turn off USB-device boot, and that she was trying to boot off the (unbootable) external hard drive.

I should get so lucky.  I yanked the external hard drive loose and hit the power button—and got a black screen with a flashing cursor.  I couldn’t even get a BIOS splash screen.  On restart, I started watching the diagnostic LEDs on the front of the case to see what was going on.  3:4 . . . 1:4 . . . 1:3:4 . . . 2:4 . . . 1:2:3: . . . “click” from somewhere inside the case and it looped:  3:4 . . . 1:4 . . . etc. etc.  Classic no-POST behavior.

Since it was a classic no-POST, I treated it to some classic no-POST troubleshooting:  clear CMOS configuration, strip the system to power supply, motherboard, and processor, hit the power switch and and see what you get.  I ought to have heard a series of beep codes and seen a 1 diagnostic LED, which is “can’t find no memory noplace!”  I got 3:4, which is the code I would expect to get when a RAM stick has gone bad.  I stuck her sole RAM stick back in, hit the power, and here we went again:  3:4 . . . 1:4 . . . etc. etc.  I grabbed Diarmaid’s RAM stick and shoved it into Gráinne as a test, since I knew his hardware to be good.  Same reaction—3:4 . . . 1:4 . . . etc. etc.

At that point, I drew the only possible conclusion:  the motherboard was so much slag.  When you strip down the system that far and it fails to register that all the memory is missing, there’s not much it can be besides the motherboard.  I phoned Auric support in Countryburg to order parts.  I think I rode the first guy I got too hard after he was silly enough to ask me if I had checked the motherboard for blown-out capacitors.  (745s do not blow out capacitors; the 270s and 280s were the ones did that).  I bit and chomped, and must have hurt his tender feelings, ’cos he put me on hold and then hung up on me.  I was a little lighter-handed with the next tech when I called back, but not very much.  I fired a ton of Empirical jargon at him in describing what I’d done, rattling off the steps for the no-POST troubleshooting tree at railway speed.  Eventually he asked, “Did you used to work for the Empire or something?” I growled back “I still do; I’m a Resolver in Auric Relationship, Circulith.”  Suddenly he was a lot more willing to listen to what I was telling him I’d done and what I wanted him to do (send me a motherboard and a processor, parts only; I doubt I’ll need the proc, but I’d rather have it than have Gráinne down for another two days if the problem isn’t the board).

After that, I pulled Ériu, Gráinne’s predecessor who was still sitting idle in the stockroom in case of just such an event, back into position and hooked her up, dropped Gráinne’s hard drive into her as a temporary second hard drive, and got the essential files—Excel and QuickBooks, mostly—moved around so the baleboosteh could work with them, instead of having to twiddle her thumbs and fret for a couple of days.  Presuming I get the parts on time, I expect I’ll be pulling out Gráinne’s guts to replace ’em Tuesday evening.

 

Harold Hurtion saw the carbon-black cream on the yardarm of the peewit.  Fnord.

Posted in Færie, Them Computin' Machines, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 1 Comment

Gah-dangit . . . Quinn’s at it again

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Marchbanks

For several months, I have been annoying everyone I met on the highway, without even wanting to.  Quinn’s combo headlight/turn switch broke on our trip to Maryland in May, and left us with no low beam headlights whatever—it was high beams or nothing, and once the sun went down, nothing wasn’t a choice either.  I’d been putting off getting the switch fixed because of all the money I had to spend getting her clutch replaced in July; after that was done, I hadn’t any money to pay for fixing the switch.

Then about August, Quinn began to develop a new trick, burning the “check engine” light at us continuously.  I had my mechanic read the computer code, and learned it meant the intake manifold runners, whatever they are, were sticking open.  This was followed, a couple of weeks ago, by a whistling noise under the hood whose quality suggested I had a leaking intake manifold vacuum line.  Then she began running god-awfully rough at idle, using a lot more gas than she should (and for a car her size, her gas mileage is NOT all that great), and either dying or refusing to advance the timing, leaving me in an excellent way to get run over when I couldn’t start up when traffic lights turned green.  It finally got bad enough that I had to give up a day’s worth of my dwindling personal leave hours, stay home today, and give Quinn over to Ron.  (This did have an unexpected benefit; it meant I could continue to work on the Land of Færie’s ongoing computer rollout problems, of which more later, perhaps.)

When I picked Quinn up this afternoon, Ron explained to me that his guy finally had to hook up a smoke generator to the air intakes to try to figure out what was going on.  At last they found an almost-invisible, almost-inaccessible vacuum hose buried under the intakes that had split and was sucking air, screwing up the vacuum that makes the intake manifold work.  However, he didn’t find this until so late in the day that he couldn’t get a new hose in time to fix it.  All he could do was to button her back up and give her to me so I could get M from school.  She appears to be no worse than she was, but she’s no better either, and almost at once pulled her “let’s choke, sputter, and die in rush-hour traffic” trick on North Lamar in front of the EMS station.  So now I have to give her back over to him on Monday or Tuesday and let him replace the hose, which will involve partly dismantling the intakes to get at the damned thing, and run up the labor bill several hours’ worth.  It’s unavoidable, but damnably costly.

The headlight/turn switch replacement cost $300, since Ron had to disarm the air bag in the steering wheel and pull the wheel to get at the switch.  I have no idea what the hose replacement is going to cost, but experience tells me it will be bleedin’ expensive.  Which means I’ll have to pay him a couple of hundred dollars every time I can until it’s all worked off, and any hope I had of catching up my bills in arrears is gone.

 

Hoodley-dum the purple refrigerator bunny trifles.  Fnord.

Posted in Cars | 2 Comments

Refreshing the silicon and electrons

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Marchbanks

It seemed like a good idea, since the Land of Færie has to be closed anyway (we’re supposed to be getting the parking lot repaved, although they must be using Invisible Paving Machines ’cos I’ve yet to see any so far), to spend today configuring and rolling out the new computers we bought earlier this month.  I convinced the baleboosteh we ought to life-cycle our current computers now, even though they’re still running quite nicely, because their warranty contracts will run out in January, and I really didn’t want to get stuck having to buy computers running Vista.  (At the time, MS was saying “OK, no fooling now, we’re really REALLY gonna stop selling XP to ANYone on January 30, 2008.”  Then about ten days ago, in the face of massive customer DO NOT WANT push-back on Vista, Mr. Bill changed the rules.  NOW he’s gonna stop selling XP Home to consumer-segment customers on January 30, 2008, but corporate clients will be allowed to go on buying computers with OEM versions of XP Professional pre-loaded until January 30, 2009, and the OS itself won’t go End-of-Life—i.e., MS quits supporting and updating it altogether—until 2014.)

However, since I didn’t know Mr. Bill was going to change the rules at the last minute, I advocated getting newer computers that still had XP loaded while we still could.  So I have these two shiny new CityBest 745 mini-towers almost ready to come on line, and the old 280s, which have both run almost without a burp since the beginning of 2005, will go do something else.  In network terms, this means that Ériu and Cernunnos will be retired, and replaced by Gráinne and Diarmaid.  (I’m writing this entry on Diarmaid, as I wait for an new application to finish updating.)

 

Thermal labels will disconnect some deal tables in the Victorian étagere.  Fnord.

Posted in Færie, Them Computin' Machines, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 4 Comments

State of health:  Indifferent

Posted on September 17, 2007 by Marchbanks

The fevers continue, seesawing up and down from below normal (98.0°) to not normal at all (101.7°).  However, after a urinalysis and a string of supplemental antibiotics over the weekend and a blood culture today, the urologist concluded:

I’ve got flu.

Or something like it, anyhow.  I have no elevated white-cell count, little bacterial flora of any kind, normal chemistry.  Nothing there would add up to any kind of procedure-related infection.  And in my last conversation with the nurse this afternoon, she ended with “well yeah, there is this flu-ish thing going round, so it’s very likely you have it.”  In which case, there’s nothing to do but push fluids, treat the fever and myalgia symptomatically with NSAIDs, and wait for the bug to get tired and go away.

 

Edward G. Robinson derives the logical Ewigkeit of some chickweed.  Fnord.

Posted in Health | 7 Comments

ZOMGTOOFULLTOOFULLOWOWOW

Posted on September 15, 2007 by Marchbanks

That’s the message my bladder has been sending me all night—and it’s lying.  I was up half a dozen times with it, and the output shouldn’t even BEGIN to be causing the discomfort it is.  Apparently I won the lottery for OAB (over-active bladder) as a post-procedure side effect, and it’s staying at least halfway in spasm much of the time, as though it were badly overfull.  Which it ain’t.  I sure hope THIS part of it gets over RSN.  The sustained-release Detrol I’m taking for it doesn’t seem to be sustaining long enough.  (Maybe I ought to switch to taking it at night rather than in the morning.)

 

A rubberized grave is rounded in the branches.  Fnord.

Posted in Health | 1 Comment

Help?

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Marchbanks

I spiked a 101.2° fever last night, and as a result (1) I didn’t go to work today after all, and (2) the doctor wants me to come out to his office for a look-over and an injection.  This is difficult, since my car has been in the shop since Wednesday and, while it’s now fixed and ready to be picked up, I don’t really think I can walk all the way to get it today.

So might someone within shouting distance of me be willing either to take me to the doctor’s office (on Jollyville Road, north of Braker), or take me to my garage so I can get my car and drive there?  If you can, please phone me at home.

ETA:  More or less sorted out.  I has a car duz not ratel, I has an injekshn of gentamicin, I has a script for ten days’ mor Levaquin, I has a fever of 100.5°.  Is it can be NSAID tiem now, plz?

Posted in Health, Minutiae | 4 Comments

“Well,” he said, “I’m back.”

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Marchbanks

The procedure yesterday was totally uneventful.  I’ll refrain from a blow-by-blow account, but a few things float to the top of memory.

I had an audience; besides the doctor, I had his office tech and a guy from Medtronics, which makes the Prostiva™ device, in to see how his machine was working out in practice.  So far as I could tell, he’s sort of a travelling account rep, that goes around checking on the machines in his territory, much as the Coke deliveryman does the machines on his route.

(Medical TMI follows)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The procedure hurt—well, it probably hurt less than if I hadn’t gotten the sedatives and anesthetics, but it still hurt.  Having a metal probe with a needle inside it pushed up my urethra wasn’t any fun, but the real Do Not Want began when the doctor had to pull my penis sideways and down, so the antenna needle would punch through the urethral wall into my prostate at the correct angle.  Then I had to hang on while he left the needle in place for two minutes at a time, five times in five locations.  At least whatever burning smell there was, was contained inside me.  I don’t care to be put right off roast pork for several years while I get over it.  (BTDT when I was a teenager.  Back then it only took a few weeks, but I was more resilient then, and anyway my sinuses were so chronically blocked that I didn’t get the full effect.)

Mercifully, that part of it only took about fifteen minutes total:  five two-minute burns, plus a few seconds each time re-positioning for the next burn.  They were done by ten o’clock, and sent me out with a week’s worth of Levaquin against infection, a month’s worth of Detrol LA against bladder spasm, and a script for a month of pyridium against painful urination.  L had me home by 10:30.  I slept a fair amount of the day, only getting up (pretty often) to try to urinate; the surgical insult caused some spasm,so I felt like I had to go even when nothing was there.  (I didn’t drink enough and dehydrated a trifle, is mostly why.)  However, by this morning, and pushing a bunch of fluids, everything is working more or less as expected.  As predicted and hoped, I didn’t need a catheter.  Really, I’m feeling well enough that I might go to work tomorrow, saving another eight hours’ sick leave against the day I might really need it.

 

You will theorize yogurt-topped cappucino.  Fnord.

Posted in Health | 8 Comments

I get burned

Posted on September 8, 2007 by Marchbanks

“First they mutilate you, then they poison you, then they burn you.”
                                            — Molly Ivins

About the time I turned forty, I started having “male trouble,” viz., prostate problems.  The gland began over-growing, making it progressively harder for me to pee—and choking down the flow enough that if I didn’t pay attention I was liable to dribble all down the front of my trousers.  That, as you might expect, was both uncomfortable and embarrassing.

The urologist I consulted gave my problem a name:  benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH for short.  BPH is a non-malignant overgrowth of the prostate gland, and is fairly common to occur in men as they age.  As with prostate cancer, if you’re male and you live long enough, you’re just about a mathematical certainty to get it.  As long as it’s not too advanced it can be controlled for a long time with medication, and that’s what I did.  A daily dose of a smooth-muscle relaxant named Cardura kept it pretty well in check, and I was able to live normally, although with somewhat more frequent stops at men’s rooms.

Then last year, I noticed that my symptoms were coming back, and concluded the Cardura was losing its effectiveness.  I mentioned this to the urologist, and she said she could switch me to Uroxatral and see how I did with it.  I was fine with that idea, until I read the product literature that came with the Uroxatral sample and found a warning in very bold type:  Do not take this medication if you are using the antifungal drugs ketoconazole (Nizoral, Xolegel) or itraconazole (Sporanox).  Which is a demonstration of why you should always read the product lit, because I’ve been taking Sporanox for two years now to treat my nasal polyps.  (Both of them put a strain on the liver, and both together are more than the liver can handle.)  I threw away the samples, called the doctor back and explained matters, and she changed the prescription at once to Flomax, which has many fewer drug interactions, and none with anything else I take.  At the same time, she said that since I’d shown a tendency to build up drug tolerance, I should begin to think about surgical reduction of the prostate, which would last much longer before regrowth might be a problem and would let me cut out the medicine altogether.  At first I had NO warmth for THAT idea; the classic operation for this condition, as for prostate cancer, was a (literally) bloody mess called trans-urethral resection of the prostate (TURP).  TURPs were just about a guarantee that you’d end up incontinent, impotent, or both, because there was almost no way to save the nerves that control the penis and bladder.  The doctor said “Oh, no, we’ve progressed far beyond that!”  She gave me a brochure about GreenLight, a photoselective vaporization of the prostate (PVP) procedure that uses a red laser to burn the overgrown tissue.  I agreed that I’d look at the idea, but in any case it couldn’t be done in 2007 because I had to get my nose fixed first.

Last week, when I went in for my annual urology checkup, I brought up the subject of surgery again.  The urologist said she could evaluate me as a candidate, although she didn’t do the actual procedure herself and would refer me to one of her practice partners if surgery seemed advisable.  She did an ultrasound exam and a cytoscopy; the ultrasound was fine but the cytoscopy hurt, even with lidocaine to numb me some.  Afterward I got a dose of Cipro against possible infection from having to go through the urethral wall to biopsy the prostate, and a pill for urethral pain and burning that had the side effect of turning my urine bright orange.  For a full day it looked like I was peeing Orange Crush.

The doctor looked at the results and said, “you know, at your age and given the size your prostate is (≅35 grams; normal is 20 grams), you’re a good candidate for another procedure called Prostiva (Trans-Urethral Needle Ablation, or TUNA), that uses RF energy to burn out tissue in the center of the prostate; it’s even less invasive than the GreenLight procedure.  We could do it as an in-office procedure as opposed to GreenLight, which would require you to stay in the hospital overnight.”  She told me side effects are rare; in a five-year study of people who had the Prostiva procedure, incontinence was reported at less than two percent, impotence in less than three percent, need to re-do the procedure was less than one percent, and improvement lasted throughout the study period.

That sounded like an even better idea, and the more so when I called the insurance company and they said “why yes, we’ll cover that at 100% since you already used up your deductible and annual out-of-pocket on getting your nose fixed; all you’ll have is the $30 co-payment for an office visit.”

So I called the urologist’s office again, and I now have an appointment to have the procedure done next Wednesday at 9:00 AM.  Barring complications, L will have me back home by afternoon.  I’ve asked for time off work through Friday, but my urologist said that I can go back to work as soon as I feel well enough.  The urologist who’s doing the procedure says he doesn’t use a catheter unless he just HAS to, which suits me fine.  I have no desire to struggle with a Foley cath and a bag, even for a few days.

 

The cross-threaded Hedy Lamarr erases some wilting I-beams in the fishpond.  Fnord.

Posted in Health | 9 Comments

The week was Teh Suck

Posted on September 4, 2007 by Marchbanks

I thought last week would never be done; it just went from bad to worse.  And most of it was to do with work stuff.

For some time now, our team has been shedding head count on purpose, as we trim down to meet the goals set for company-wide head count reduction.  Since January, we’ve gone from forty members to thirty-two twenty-four.  (Granted, we also got rid of a lot of make-work that accounted for forty percent of our total chat volume, so it mostly balanced out.  Mostly.)  However, we continued to have problems with not enough people being available to take chats after noon, with level-one techs having to wait several minutes to get a Resolver to help them.  Emails flew regularly saying “only one Resolver in chat, where are all the others scheduled to be on right now, please jump in.”

It was an open secret that our chat application had reporting problems, not logging all the traffic that was going through it.  What wasn’t obvious was how badly wrong it was, until three weeks ago I finally stood up (virtually; I was on a con-call) in an operations review with the Tulip, his counterpart in Gemini, my great-grandboss and said “now, LOOK.  I been countin’ (true; I’d been keeping a log sheet for a month) and by my count the chat client is failing to count between twenty and thirty percent of the chats I take.  I got the numbers to back me, and I’ll be happy to share them with anyone wants to see.  Presuming everyone else is seeing the same number not counted that I am, and knowing that you’re using the chats-logged number to forecast volume and scheduling, NO WONDER we got trouble!”

Well, at that point it was official:  the Emperor Had No Clothes.  All over sudden we get this panicky email from my new manager (the Tulip has gone off to be a project manager) and the manager in Gemini, telling us that for the next two-three weeks, until they could figure out what was going on and re-spin a new schedule, it would be All Chat, All the Time for everyone on the team, and here was a tick sheet we were to keep, so they could demonstrate exactly how much was being lost for everyone, not just for me.  Ever since, we’ve been ground into the dirt with All Chat, All the Time.  (And if you don’t think doing that’ll grind you into the dirt in a hurry, just you swap jobs with me for a few days.)  It hit me particularly hard because at the same time, I discovered a Major Addressing Problem with one of our big, BIG accounts that I used to work on (Company E), that had the potential to cause a myriad failed service calls, and I was being asked to participate in the “WTF do we do now??” meetings—and I couldn’t be there.

Then to add to the misery, Thursday morning I took an escalation from someone at a school district in Virginia who had fifty systems that he wanted to boot to a USB drive so he could pull down pre-made hard drive images from a server, and avoid the labor of installing ’em all by hand.  I got a copy of the software he was using, and spent all day struggling with it.  It never did work, and by two o’clock I was so frustrated and frazzled that I got careless with a copy of FDISK—and deleted all the partitions on my own workstation’s hard disk.  EVERYthing gone, beyond any hope of recovery.  That meant I got to reimage my workstation, and spend the rest of Thursday and half Friday morning configuring it to a point of minimal usability.  I lost most of my Company E files, all my Outlook archives (TG, I had the gumption to put my main mailbox on a network drive, so that survived), and most of the supporting files for the chat statistics (but not before I’d turned in the most important parts to my team lead, so the work wasn’t all in vain).  Other casualties included a hundred CDs worth of music I’d ripped to the hard drive, so I could listen to music at work without having to shlep CDs back and forth every day.  (I was probably gonna have to remove them soon anyhow, due to new IT policy.)

I sure hope this week has less suckositude to it.

 

The photograph of your aunt disambiguates some stored drywall screws.  Fnord.

Posted in Empire, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 5 Comments

Fix one thing, ya bust something else

Posted on August 4, 2007 by Marchbanks

Yesterday the baleboosteh emailed me from the Land of Færie and said “Help!  When I try to open QuickBooks it gives me an error about license properties and closes again.”  I added it to my list of Things Still to Fix, along with Install the HP Printer Drivers on the POS Terminal and Reinstall Outlook for the Remaining Mail Account.  This morning went in to see about them.

The data, so far as I can tell, is fine—we just can’t get to it.  I searched Intuit’s Web site for the error code and quickly found the page for “Could not initialize license properties.  Error 3371:  QuickBooks could not load the license data.  This may be caused by missing or damaged files.”  The cause?  “This error may be caused by removing a Norton® Product with the Norton® Removal Utility damaging the QuickBooks installation.”  Well now, isn’t that special . . . uninstalling anything Norton kills QuickBooks because uninstalling anything Norton screws up the Microsoft .NET framework.  (Which decided me:  when we life-cycle the computers later this year, I am GOING to find a different AV solution.  I’ve had enough of Symantec’s craptacular implementations.)

I followed the mercifully clear instructions from the Intuit support page on how to fix the problem, but when I got to the second part, where I’m supposed to run msiexec to invoke the QuickBooks installer, Quickbooks told me “please insert the installation CD.”  Waitaminnit . . . I thought I had already done that, and popped out the tray to check.  I had, but it appears that the Reinstallation CD (what I actually had) and the Installation CD are two different animals.  I guessed the problem was that when we bought QuickBooks 2006, we got a download version rather than the full retail version and the CD we have is only good for some other kind of installing.  This means I have to talk to Intuit support and find out What Now.

Note to business owners:  Intuit expects that no one will ever have problems with business software on the weekend, because their support and sales lines are only open from six to six Pacific on weekdays.  Only if you buy an annual support plan do you get access to a 24-7 support team.  And guess what?  Because the sales office is closed, you can’t buy a support plan on the weekend; no one is there to take the order.    Even buying a support plan online won’t work; it needs a human to process the order . . . and the humans went home on Friday afternoon.  You’re out of luck until at least Monday, and very possibly until Tuesday because they can’t get their shit together to process weekend orders before then unless you hound them, which is just what I plan to do Monday afternoon after I get away from the Empire.  I think Intuit has learned altogether too well that if you’re the only game in town *cough*Windows*cough* you can get away with all kinds of high-handed business practices.  If I tried to run a support queue the way they do, I’d be out the door.

Fortunately, the baleboosteh made the conscious decision not to flip out about this, which is good, and if we were going to have problems, August is a good time for it.  Business is slow in summer.  It’d be slower than this were it not for Utilikilt sales.  Our second shipment of fifty is supposed to arrive Tuesday, and not a minute too soon.  We have less than half a dozen left of the first order we got in July.  Because we advertise having them in stock, instead of customers having to wait up to eight weeks for the company—which still runs its production on a cottage-industry model—to make a singleton by special order, we’ve had orders placed with us from as far away as Norway!  Utilikilt’s management could learn a lot from the Empire’s supply chain and production models, if only they’d get their macrobiotic heads out of their skinny little vegetarian asses and do a few things like finding a plant that can handle good-quality, industrial-quantity production.  Oh, yeah—that’s another thing.  They’re telling us they refuse to make us kilts in anything bigger than a 44-inch waist size.  Appears they can’t grasp the idea that Texans, particularly Texans who are old enough to have the money to drop $175 to $250 on the spot for a kilt, tend to come in Large Economy Sizes.  So far the baleboosteh has failed to hammer that into their heads; she’s now looking round for a bigger hammer.  I suggested that if Utilikilt can’t get their shit together any better than that, we’d do well to cut a second wholesale deal with some of the competition, Sport Kilt or someone, to take up the slack.  The demand is out there, and there’s lots of it, but these guys are still thinking small, to their own detriment.

 

Fourteen slates repaint the styrofoam girder.  Fnord.

Posted in Færie, Them Computin' Machines, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 4 Comments