Aug 2 - are we up or down ?

It's always the things that happen late in the day, and continue to the next, that are top of mind. In this case it's a pc problem ... now fixed (?).

Before I went on the TOT ride, the pc needed rebooting. That doesn't happen often with Linux. For some reason the screen wasn't going completely dark after the requisite period of time for power management purposes. Windows, inside its VMWare box, was going dark but the surrounding Linux wasn't. I just hadn't gotten around to rebooting ... good thing too !

So last night, before dinner, I halted Windows and rebooted Linux ... not. It seemed to have trouble syncing the quad cores, based on what I was seeing during the boot process. Successive reboots would freeze in different places out of a half-dozen.

Figuring that I had a cpu problem and that perhaps (stab in the dark) this LGA775 cpu was somehow not making good contact with its base, I opened the pc, took out the cpu fan, reset the Intel cpu and put it back together again. Well, this time I was getting halts on heat issues ... so I took it back apart, added some thermal grease, tried again. No luck. I let it sit for an hour or so ... perhaps a "cooling off period ?" ... no luck.

This morning ... no luck. I'd even tried booting from the Linux CD that I carry and it too froze. I'd gone into the BIOS a few times looking for options that would perhaps allow me to turn off SMP without finding anything. I'd toggled a couple of items in successive reboots ... nothing.

Well, as perhaps a last stab in the dark, I decided to see what Windows would do with this and since I have Windows on one of the drives, used the bios to point to that drive and voila ... it booted. Hmmm. Unhappy, but running, I took stock of where I was in backups that were easily accessible -- mid July -- not too bad. The more recent backups were only accessible from Linux, since they are not on NTFS-formatted disks. Still, two weeks is ok.

The bigger problem is that I have financial things to do -- i.e. pay bills -- before we go to France. Also, realistically, we only have six weeks here before we go to Florida for the winter -- hard to believe. Two weeks now followed by four weeks from mid September to mid October ... I could live with either the laptop or the straight Windows setup and take the pc to Florida, try swapping cpu's with the identically-configured machine there, and find, shop, fix the problem.

Back to the financial things -- the version of Quicken installed on that Windows installation is the '08 version, not my recent purchase of the 2011. I could re-download and do the upgrade, but this all takes time. There are other things that I want to do with that installation to use it ... like install Firefox, rather than use IE !

Still, things could be much worse. I needed to reboot the pc because the virus database had just been updated so I did so, and decided to take a shot at pointing back at the Linux disk ... and had yet another voila -- it booted ! There must have been some bios table that had been crapped upon that Linux wasn't handling correctly ? Windows is more brute force with some of this stuff ... ?? I did some research and there are a number of things that I could have tried at Linux boot time with additional command-line options to get it through the boot -- I'll know better the next (?) time, which is hopefully never.

So as I type this I'm bringing my backups up to date, copying from the Linux-VMWare-disk to the NTFS backup disk. What I really need to do is also bring that Windows environment up to date. It's running SP2 and is fairly well configured, but I need to get it better synched. If I'm going to be away for any period of time I should leave Sandy running with a pure Windows environment.

------

It's raining. I was going to be painting today but nope. I did get some painting (staining) done yesterday, doing about half of the front-facing upper bedrooms. That took about 1/2 gallon, so I'm figuring that it will take the entire 5 gallons on hand to do the front of the Great Room, the front of the bedrooms and den and the Jason-facing side of the house. I might get further ... perhaps the front of the kitchen. It looks like my estimate of 10 gallons to do the entire house was pretty much on point.

The reason that I have 5 gallons on hand is that Sandy went to Parry Sound yesterday. In fact, now that I think of it, she purchased 5 gallons so I have 6 on hand, less what I used yesterday. The paint guy at RONA was ordering more as Sandy was there, so I'll be able to continue the project beyond that which is absolutely necessary to accomplish this year, if I so choose.

It's slow going. The wood absorbs the stain like a sponge and it's so rough that you have to go back and forth with the brush to work the stain into the rough surface. It's easy work though and since the oil-based stain is so thin and doesn't dry too quickly, I can move along the wall in sections and not end up with vertical lines where I left off.

Hopefully the blog-tale of this staining project will not be as long dragged out as tiling the basement floor !

David was going to come up last night to help me today and tomorrow, but we talked last night and I told him to hold off. That's a good thing, given the rain. I'm going to let him handle some of the higher stuff, since he's better on ladders than me. Besides, that's what he told me to do and I always listen :).

------

We had bass and crappie for dinner last night, with garden beans and sweet potatoes. It was a wonderful meal after my three days of junk.

Now, computer running, I have to get my financial piece ready for Friday's local roads board meeting. I was happy when Windows came up because I could do that ... now there are no more excuses ! When that's done, I will send it to Erika for copying.

Onward !