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Dead Drive; Long Ride
Feb. 23rd, 2005 04:47 pmToday was my writing day.
Chris A. was unavailable.
As inevitably happens when those two items coincide, and to a certain extent whenever Chris is unavailable, one of the machines at Skotos crashed.
This morning I was actually woken up with the news that the TEC machine was having serious drive problems. After I blindly stumbled around the house for a while, I eventually called various staff members up and made a plan.
I'd go up the hill to the Skotos machine room to swap in a spare drive and in the meantime they'd try and recover what they could from the drive.
Three reasons I hate the ride up to the machine room:
The drive was very, very dead. "I can't find that device" dead and later "I can't spin that drive up" dead. It's now a paperweight on my desk, primarily to remind me to buy another spare.
Spare computer parts are a very, very good thing for a production environment, you see. Popping out one drive and popping in another without having to go find a correct replacement was a godsend.
That doesn't mean that the repair was easy.
As with most of the Skotos machines, this is rack-mounted, and it's one of our smaller rack-mounted machines: 1U I believe. That means that everything is packed in tighter than is humanly possible.
I opened up the machine and I just stared at it for a while, unable to believe that there was anyway to get the drives out.
I eventually figured out the right set of screws that let me pull the whole drive mounting out.
The trick? I had to unscrew (and in fact totally remove) the fricking socket which the plug goes into. I hate working with the electrical parts.
Afterward I put it back together, then I put it back together again so that I could actually access the secondary ethernet card.
I made darned sure that everything I had touched was working before I came back down the hill.
Stupid computers.
There was lunch at McDonald's and a new comic book from the new Comic Relief on my way home as a reward. Invincible, by Robert Kirkman, volume 1.
Now I'm just trying to catch up on a little bit of work for the day before I go to EndGame. I have another hour and a quarter which should let me finish everything that I need to do.
Mike Siggins, who used to run the most prominent board game magazine before he got burned out was interviewed by Tom Vasel today, here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekjournal.php3?action=viewcomments&journalid=7652
When asked what electronic resources he thought were useful, he mentioned a couple of the top board game sites, then said:
"Because I enjoy a lot of crossover titles (cards, RPG, minis, PC games, etc.) I also occasionally read websites like RPGNet, which have some timely and decent reviews - I have a lot of time for Shannon Appelcline. "
Fuck yeah. Me too.
Chris A. was unavailable.
As inevitably happens when those two items coincide, and to a certain extent whenever Chris is unavailable, one of the machines at Skotos crashed.
This morning I was actually woken up with the news that the TEC machine was having serious drive problems. After I blindly stumbled around the house for a while, I eventually called various staff members up and made a plan.
I'd go up the hill to the Skotos machine room to swap in a spare drive and in the meantime they'd try and recover what they could from the drive.
Three reasons I hate the ride up to the machine room:
- Roads of Blood. Travel along two of the main arteries of Berkeley, which is OK during late hours, but always a bit terrifying during the day. Still, you can never show fear to the drivers, or it's all over.
- The Circle of Death. I came to the conclusion today that the problem is that Europeans correctly drive arcs around circles, but dumbass Americans instead drive chords. "Oh look, I can see my exit sixty degrees around the circle, so I'll just point straight there and jam my foot on the gas." They also don't understand that if you can't exit the circle you're supposed to take another go-around, not come to a complete stop in the middle. Did I say, "dumbasses"?
- The Hill of Doom. I was a real wuss and just walked almost all of it today. I did better last time, but then this time I was still groggy from my early awakening, and hadn't thought to grab breakfast.
The drive was very, very dead. "I can't find that device" dead and later "I can't spin that drive up" dead. It's now a paperweight on my desk, primarily to remind me to buy another spare.
Spare computer parts are a very, very good thing for a production environment, you see. Popping out one drive and popping in another without having to go find a correct replacement was a godsend.
That doesn't mean that the repair was easy.
As with most of the Skotos machines, this is rack-mounted, and it's one of our smaller rack-mounted machines: 1U I believe. That means that everything is packed in tighter than is humanly possible.
I opened up the machine and I just stared at it for a while, unable to believe that there was anyway to get the drives out.
I eventually figured out the right set of screws that let me pull the whole drive mounting out.
The trick? I had to unscrew (and in fact totally remove) the fricking socket which the plug goes into. I hate working with the electrical parts.
Afterward I put it back together, then I put it back together again so that I could actually access the secondary ethernet card.
I made darned sure that everything I had touched was working before I came back down the hill.
Stupid computers.
There was lunch at McDonald's and a new comic book from the new Comic Relief on my way home as a reward. Invincible, by Robert Kirkman, volume 1.
Now I'm just trying to catch up on a little bit of work for the day before I go to EndGame. I have another hour and a quarter which should let me finish everything that I need to do.
Mike Siggins, who used to run the most prominent board game magazine before he got burned out was interviewed by Tom Vasel today, here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekjournal.php3?action=viewcomments&journalid=7652
When asked what electronic resources he thought were useful, he mentioned a couple of the top board game sites, then said:
"Because I enjoy a lot of crossover titles (cards, RPG, minis, PC games, etc.) I also occasionally read websites like RPGNet, which have some timely and decent reviews - I have a lot of time for Shannon Appelcline. "
Fuck yeah. Me too.