About two weeks ago, I decided to get a new harddrive because my main one, an IBM Deskstar 130GB IDE drive, had started making a loud whirring noise and I've been having unexplainable problems with my system locking up. I thought initially that it was overheating, but after getting some new fans—including installing a new fan on my video card along with some heat sinks to the chips—I kept having the problem.
My Gigabyte GA-7VT600 1394 board supports serial ATA so I went to Fry's to get a new drive. They had an awesome deal on a Maxtor 300GB SATA internal drive (Diamond 10) for $99.00. I bought it; installed it; formatted my partitions and loaded Windows XP. It's a great drive and though I know I do not need 300GB (I really don't) at least I can better split things up for organization. So, in order to get my files from my old primary HDD, I would switch the power from my secondary 30GB games drive to the old drive and boot the OS on the old drive then transfer stuff to the new drive. I thought I had copied over everything I wanted but then realized there were a few more files and things to transer.
I went into the case and switched the power between the drives and decided to also see what kind of RAM my system has because I couldn't remember. I pulled out the stick and saw that it is DDR 400, 512 MB. I've also been considering getting more RAM since what I do when developing is have several programs running simultaneously and that seems to suck too many resources for my liking and it's slow. Anyway, when I went to put the RAM stick back in, I managed to put it in backwards :( I turned on my box and immediately smelled that horrible burning smell coming from my computer. I shut it off as fast as I could but the damage was done. I burned up some chip that I don't even know what it does. My box will come on, gets to the RAM test and then the screen goes blank. I can't get into the BIOS or anything. *sigh*
I was lamenting this predicament to a friend and he said burning up a motherboard is a sort of rite of passage. I've been putting systems together and working on computers for many years but this is my first catastrophe. I debated for about a week as to whether I wanted to buy a new mb and processor or just try to replace this one. I ended up finding a good deal for the same mb on eBay: used for $66.00. That's pretty much the cheapest option at this point and I'll have a functioning second system when I do decide to upgrade.
Update - 9 July 2006
I have my machine up and running again. I thought I was buying the same motherboard but ended up getting the one that isn't '1394' which also means it didn't have SATA on board. But I found a PCI SATA card for $11.99 from newegg.com. After yet another WinXP install, it's all good.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Friday, June 16, 2006
Blue Belt Test
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| Ready for Blue Belt Test |
This first picture is of me before the test. Master Thomas' wife took photos of everyone for the Web site first. There's not much to say except that a) I passed and b) I doubled-tested again. I am so stoked! They just decided that blue belt and above can wear black doboks.
So the other picture is of me performing the form Do-San. I was then asked to perform Won-Hyo (for the blue belt part). For breaks, I had to do a front snap kick—I've broken the black board with this kick in class. And for the blue belt portion, I had to break an orange board with a modified roundhouse kick where you hit with the ball of your foot.
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| Performing Do-San Hyung |
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Engrish
I came across a priceless example of Engrish over the weekend. It was the instructions for this photo booth type machine that makes a drawing of you called Gogh's Workshop; I saw it at the Main Event in Shenandoah, outside Houston, Texas, while waiting for the NIN concert to start. You just have to read it, although my personal favorite phrase is 'Only imagine make feel happy.'
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