The Screaming Viking

I got a few years on me now…but there was a time, back in my prime…I could really lay it down…

So yeah, a buddy from Minot came to town with his girlfriend last nite. I had not partaken in the North Dakota “day’s that end in y” drinking rituals for quite some time…sooooooo we decided to tear it up. It was a pretty good time, we did some bar hopping…raised a little hell and it was all good. Probably pissed off a few people, but oh well.

There is a reason I don’t go out on week days anymore though. It seems I don’t quite snap back as quick as I used to. The first couple hours this morning were pretty rough.

All the builds I had on tap are now complete. I’ll see about getting some pictures up tonight for those that are interested in that crapola. Getting everything mounted back in the TiVo was a little troublesome. There is limited space and the wiring was all pretty short. In most cases it’s better to have too much wire and tie it off then so short you have problems routing it. What made my setup a little different then others is I picked up an additional fan and a “switch” that delays the startup of one HD. I finally hit a stroke of brilliance and got everything tucked away nice and neat. Fired it up and everything is purring. I have 274hrs max recording…rawr!

So I’m looking at the bearâ??s personnel situation…Jesus what a mess. My feeling is the deal they gave Jones not only hurt them for him…but it’s hurting them in their quest to deal Briggs. The skins are offering a trade of first round picks for Briggs. Without the Jones deal I would say jump on that because they need to move him and it puts them up to # 6…which they can either burn or possibly parlay into a couple lower round picks. But after giving away Jones…my feeling is they are getting lowballed for Briggs. I think he’s worth more….could have gotten more…but I don’t think teams feel the need to offer more, if that makes any sense at all. Given all that, hold on to Briggs, let him sit out a year and let his skills atrophy.

If things had been done accordingly…the bears should have been sitting on an extra 2nd round pick for Jones then have the option to have moved up to the 6th pick via Briggs trade and be in a position to either deal a second round and the 6th pick for that coveted #1 slot…OR possibly a 2nd rounder plus Briggs…get #1 or #2 and draft Russell or Quinn. The bears need to bring in a numbers man to run these things. Not a person with ego…just a guy who sees the players as resources and can wheel and deal for the best overall set of resources.

Lovie makes me nervous. Great leaders surround themselves with excellent people. Every bad leader I’ve ever know has been a “me first” type personality…lovie is heading in that direction.

Well, I decided that I was going to tear down the TiVo last nite and swap out them hard drives. I figured swapping out the hardware would take 20min tops; I needed to take the old drive out of the TiVo, connect it and a cd drive to boot to (naturally I have no floppy). I also needed to hook up the two drives I would be putting in the TiVo. I needed to build the replacement desktop first because it obviously takes a PC to copy the data. When I was building this last round of machines, I took extra care to make sure the cables were routed correctly, cable ties were used to make things look neat and eliminate dangling wires that could potentially get wedged in a fan or screw up the airflow. To connect all these drives…I had to cut damn near every cable tie I had in place…pull the IDE cable completely out of the machine…then connect everything while it kinda over laps (I’ve got pix of this mess I’ll put up later). OK so now I’m a tad irritated because of my own lack of foresight…but no biggie, everything is hooked up. I boot the PC BLAMO! “Slave drive on ID2 is not an IDE device”. Ta hell kind of error is that? I check jumpers and so forth, make sure the cables are connected…everything looks fine, the ide cable might have been a little loose on the main board…so I reboot, same error. I try various jumper configs on the TiVo drive and the DVD drive to no avail. I connect the TiVo drive to the other bus…recognized fine. Connect another HD to the bus giving me problems…same error. I’m slightly confused. I jump into the bios…. Now back in the day when I liked to get every little bit of performance out of a box I made some odd adjustments. At the time they didn’t seem so strange to me, but now when I’m more concerned about stability and ease of use as opposed to the extra micro second worth of speed it seems retarded. I had turned off auto detection on the 2nd ide bus and manually set the DVD drive to a specific position. This saves…oh about 2 seconds on the boot time while the auto detect runs. The down side is obviously that it causes me problems in situations like this. I rectified the issue and rebooted….boom they are all detected and she boots to a simple Linux prompt…ahhh easy enough.

The website I’m looking at gives me the command to run with no explanation of what it does…can’t say I’m a huge fan of that but I don’t want to waste time lookin around, I still needed to go get the kid and have something to eat. I run the command…BEWM! gives me the help screen..hrm, I scroll back Ahh forgot a switch. Run the command again and we are off and running… I let it run for about 15min then estimate the time it’s going to take to complete. Now I elected to run the option that will completely copy the contents of the old HD over to the new setup. There were a couple of shows on there I decided not to pull off…I didn’t want to redo my season passes and all that as well. I figured 2hrs…4 tops. It’s transferring across the IDE bus for god sake…newp the estimate comes out at 10hrs…10 freaking hours…you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m not sure where it found so much information to copy but I suppose the TiVo does fill up the HD with the “deleted items” folder that it keeps… Oh well, I wanted to redo the wiring behind the entertainment center anyway.

I let it run for about 5 hours and it was under 50% done. My revised estimate came in at about 12 hours. I checked it this morning when I got up and I don’t think she had been done for long…so 12 hours was probably pretty close. She gave me the space print out; I went from 78 hours to about 220 hours.

Tonight we reassemble, hopefully putting the drives back in will go smoothly and I can have her up and running in under an hour. I’m a little nervous about the small power supply spinning up both drives, but the mounting kit I picked up came with a switch kinda thing. It delays spinning up the second drive so the initial draw isn’t so huge on the system.

After this I’ll be done with the planned builds. I’ll take stock of what parts I’ve left and we’ll see what we can do with what’s laying around.

Proof the Apocalypse is neigh

/me does a little dance…makes a little love….get’s down tonight

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I decided to cannibalize the old server sooner then expected. I couldn’t think of a good reason to have the behemoth taking up space and the replacement server is functioning well. I rebuilt the desktop last nite, opting to go for the spare board instead of the server board and chip. There were a few reasons for this. The USB headers being in a more favorable place for the front USB connection. USB 2.0 speed was also key and finally the passive cooling for the northbridge will help keep the noise down.
It is a bit louder then the server. The fan on the video card is going to hell..so that’s causing me a problem. I’m going to trade it out for another card (same make and model) after I make a trip to the farm. I ordered a replacement fan for the chip heat sink…but it’s a 92mm and the one on there is probably a 70 or so. I’m going to have to construct some sort of necked down apparatus to fit the new fan on the heat sink. It will be worth it in the end in terms of noise reduction. I would love to go to a passive cooling solution for the video card…but I don’t think that’s terribly realistic.
I’m going to attack the TiVo tonight as well. After looking over the instructions I can’t see where there should be much of a problem. It looks like it will probably take about 2hrs or so to copy everything from the existing drive to the replacements. It could be quicker, but I would like to move over the season pass information along with the few shows that we have saved. There arenâ??t too many…but to keep faction with the woman it’s best to take the extra time. I’m adding a small and hopefully quiet fan to keep air circulating.
The people at our apartment complex have garage sales every once in awhile…I’m thinking I might go that direction with the parts. I wouldn’t even be terribly concerned with the money, but if Sam wants to help me clean out the garage and get things going she can have the few bucks that it might fetch.