It gets pretty dusty here in the desert. One is well advised not to wear white gloves in these here parts! It's pretty fine dust too; pulverised rock that seems to get in everywhere.
One place it gets into is the heatsinks and fan systems in our computers. Indeed, it's essential maintenance as we get into the warmer months to take them down one at a time, remove the fans and brush the dust out. It helps to use a vacuum cleaner and, as a job, it sucks!
Okay, that was a cheap joke.
It's pretty easy to clean up the CPU fan and heatsink, not so easy to get all the dust out of the Northbridge fans and, as a consequence, we don't seem to get more than a couple or three years out of a motherboard. It's no big deal though; it's the perfect excuse to upgrade to bigger/better/faster.
Well that is if it's my computer or my wife's. If it's Andrews, well, he doesn't seem to care as long as it can run World of Warcraft. I don't think he'd know a FPS measurement if it hit him on the head. This is fine with us; it means we can get away with lower end equipment for his computer.
Thus, came the disaster, from his point of view, back at the end of June. His computer started randomly hanging. Now you'll remember that I used, thirty or more years ago, to repair TV sets for a living. But let me tell you, isolating a fault in a modern computer motherboard is a few orders of magnitude more complex. Frankly, it's not worth the trouble, so we bit the bullet and bought him a new motherboard and processor.
Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. Though we only spent $140 it seemed reasonable to me that there should be some strings attached. He's 16 years old and it's surely time he learned that money doesn't just drop out of the sky. In short, he had to do something to earn the repairs. We agreed that he'd wash my car and my wife's once a month until January, for a total of 14 car washes. I thought pricing it at about $10 a car wash wasn't unreasonable.
All went well the first month, if you discount my inspecting my car after the wash and pointing out all the places he'd missed!
Second month it went okay. By the fourth month it was like pulling teeth to get him to uphold his side of the bargain. Finally, when it was down to a mere 5 car washes remaining, I threw in the towel, telling him not to bother. But I also warned him that I would reciprocate the lack of bother the next time his computer failed.
On Friday the computer shutdown with an 'overheating' warning. Unfortunately I was at the office and unable to enjoy the general consternation. But, acting under Mom's instructions, he, apparently gingerly, opened it up and brushed some of the dust out. Understand, we're talking a 16 year old boy who is apparently afraid of wielding a screwdriver! I fear I'm just not mentally equipped to understand that!
So I got home from the office to hear all about it. Of course I reminded him that he owed us 5 car washes and I wouldn't lift a finger for his computer until they were completed. And no, Andrew, 5 car washes in one day doesn't count. It's 2 a month plus the odd one.
I wasn't really surprised when he let the entire weekend go without raising a finger toward the cars; his computer seems to be running fine right now. But of course, without the regular maintenance, it will fail again soon.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Rudolph, the red nosed schmuck!
I reckon they got the last line of that revolting Christmas song wrong. Instead of going 'you'll go down in history' it should be 'the biggest schmuck in history'.
Long time readers won't be surprised to hear me repeat that I hate Christmas with a passion. Newer readers can go read what I wrote about it in Decembers 2004 and 2005.
It just amazes me how people I would consider reasonably sane at any other time of the year can so lose all sense of dignity at *this* time of year.
It reminds me of the similarly disgusting spectacle one beholds when someone fronts with their new baby. By any reasonable standard you'd have to totally disagree with the parents and assert that the newborn looks like it was beaten with the ugly stick. But not a bit of it. Instead of politely agreeing (whilst privately disagreeing) that said newborn is the most beautiful thing on the planet most people, in my experience, lose any sense of aesthetics and strive to outdo the doting parents.
The parents can be forgiven, especially the mother. She's carried this thing around for the best part of a year and faces the uphill task of cleaning up after it for at least the next two decades; can anyone blame her for striving to find some redeeming feature that will justify the effort? As for the proud fathers, they're just embarassing the way they strut about as though they'd just done something no one else in the world could ever do!
Like *that* was ever a difficult task!
And then, faced with the newborn aforesaid, most people forget that they once spoke the proud language of their forefathers (whatever that language may be) and descend to the most disgustingly silly noises imaginable. And not, sad to say, only when faced with a newborn. My wife, when dealing with her grandson of eighteen months, resorts to such subterfuges as throwing a blanket over him (good sense there!) and then exclaiming 'where's Ryan?' in a tone of voice suggesting that she really doesn't know where the poor bastard is!
Hmmmmm I sometimes have grave doubts about my wife!
But back to Rudolph. Think about it. Here we have this poor innocent (so far as we can tell from the song) red nosed reindeer being put upon in a most shameful fashion by the other reindeer on the grounds that he has a red nose! Kind of like being the red haired kid at school. Or, as I was, the kid who isn't interested in sport!
And then one foggy winters eve these exclusionist reindeer, realising that they're up the proverbial creek without a paddle, turn around and schmooze up to Rudolph. For the entire year he's been the outcast because of that damn nose but *now* they need him. Hypocrites! And Rudolph, schmuck that he is, goes along with it! I bet come the end of Boxing Day it's back to the status quo and that red nose is once again a target of ill natured abuse!
What a schmuck! I bet you can guess what I'd have said to them if I'd been Rudolph. But I don't use that kind of language in my blog!
Long time readers won't be surprised to hear me repeat that I hate Christmas with a passion. Newer readers can go read what I wrote about it in Decembers 2004 and 2005.
It just amazes me how people I would consider reasonably sane at any other time of the year can so lose all sense of dignity at *this* time of year.
It reminds me of the similarly disgusting spectacle one beholds when someone fronts with their new baby. By any reasonable standard you'd have to totally disagree with the parents and assert that the newborn looks like it was beaten with the ugly stick. But not a bit of it. Instead of politely agreeing (whilst privately disagreeing) that said newborn is the most beautiful thing on the planet most people, in my experience, lose any sense of aesthetics and strive to outdo the doting parents.
The parents can be forgiven, especially the mother. She's carried this thing around for the best part of a year and faces the uphill task of cleaning up after it for at least the next two decades; can anyone blame her for striving to find some redeeming feature that will justify the effort? As for the proud fathers, they're just embarassing the way they strut about as though they'd just done something no one else in the world could ever do!
Like *that* was ever a difficult task!
And then, faced with the newborn aforesaid, most people forget that they once spoke the proud language of their forefathers (whatever that language may be) and descend to the most disgustingly silly noises imaginable. And not, sad to say, only when faced with a newborn. My wife, when dealing with her grandson of eighteen months, resorts to such subterfuges as throwing a blanket over him (good sense there!) and then exclaiming 'where's Ryan?' in a tone of voice suggesting that she really doesn't know where the poor bastard is!
Hmmmmm I sometimes have grave doubts about my wife!
But back to Rudolph. Think about it. Here we have this poor innocent (so far as we can tell from the song) red nosed reindeer being put upon in a most shameful fashion by the other reindeer on the grounds that he has a red nose! Kind of like being the red haired kid at school. Or, as I was, the kid who isn't interested in sport!
And then one foggy winters eve these exclusionist reindeer, realising that they're up the proverbial creek without a paddle, turn around and schmooze up to Rudolph. For the entire year he's been the outcast because of that damn nose but *now* they need him. Hypocrites! And Rudolph, schmuck that he is, goes along with it! I bet come the end of Boxing Day it's back to the status quo and that red nose is once again a target of ill natured abuse!
What a schmuck! I bet you can guess what I'd have said to them if I'd been Rudolph. But I don't use that kind of language in my blog!
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