Quite a Week
by PolarBear on January 15th, 2008
filed under Updates
Wow. Have I ever had a hectic week.
Last Tuesday we had to go to Kingston. Mama actually had doctors appointments Tues AND Wed and we could not get them changed to the same day… so rather than go twice with the whole gang (it takes about an hour to get there so we usually try and combine ALL of our tasks like grocery shopping and so on into one day when one of us has to go to the Dr. there), we took everyone Tuesday. I was able to find some younger budgies at a pet store there, so although it was not my first choice, we decided to pick one up as a new friend for our girl budgie. We picked up a few other things but the trip wiped me out. Wednesday she went back on her own (all of this of course costing a fortune in gas and leaving us very short this month) while I set about trying to tame/train this essentially wild budgie.
What an interesting personality this one has – I have had him now almost a full week, and I can’t get him to actually sit and perch on my finger. He will sit in my hand and eat, and he will take seeds from between my fingers but he won’t perch. Just trying to settle him down is tiring. I am also trying to teach him to talk, I hope it works.
Anyway, I spent Wed and Thu wiped out but did something stupid on Thursday when I was not up to it and went to the playgroup that our son goes to while the girl has Brownies. I ended up zonking out at home a couple of times after that, before going to bed for the night.
But then I got it into my stupid head that I needed to get Mama’s computer upgraded and the kids’ computer fixed on Friday when I woke up. Since we had to make room for a desk for the kid computer this also meant the living room had to be rearranged, something we had been putting off for 2 months.
At that point was when it seemed like everything started to go sideways. Nothing went simply and directly at all, but I can’t say it all went terribly wrong either because some of the hiccups were actually good things.
Instead of ripping Mama’s computer apart right away, I decided I better make sure I have all of the software and drivers I’d need to get it going again. Because we changed our bedroom around when I got a newer corner-unit desk last November, that meant sorting through the chaotic mess of piled up optical discs and such that had just been stuffed in my computer wall unit/digital darkroom area. So, I began at around 1 and pulled out stuff and began sorting into piles: Games, Windows/Linux installers, Drivers/Support software for hardware, Backups, Movies, TV Shows and so on… what a disaster.
By 9pm, I had most of what I needed and was just waiting for the little ones to get out of my hair while I backed up and stored away all of Mama’s files and settings for her computer when Mama saw a Freecycle message about someone giving away some computers. Now this was one of those rare Freecycle things: it was someone close by, and what they had was actually the exact sort of thing we needed. Before I explain, I need to fill you in in case you didn’t already know this: we used to have a good network of interoperating systems in our old apartment… you can learn about all of that by clicking here.
Since moving, we have had failure after failure and have not been able to replace the failed machines for both financial and health reasons. Things got very antsy when I discovered almost all of our systems had some kind of hardware issue that could not be solved, the laptop’s power supply cut out, and we found ourselves pretty much broke in the middle of the time of year when we are the most broke with only 2 operating computers.
The Freecycle offerings were a P3 era machine, a P2 era machine, and a bunch of miscellaneous other parts. Mama asked for just the P3 because it would be the same vintage as the server PC that was dead, exactly what we need right now. It didn’t have a hard drive or memory, but the hard drive from the server PC was the one thing I knew was still working fine and I still had some old memory around. Perfect! We had been trying to figure out how to take $100 from our very tight budget at the end of this week to buy an almost identically equipped machine, and I was agonizing about how I would be able to make it work. Problem solved – the person Freecycling it wrote back and said she could have it. By now it was 10:30pm on Friday night, but she decided to go right away to pick it up to make sure we would have it, since the Freecycle person was agreeable. She came home with not only the P3, but the P2, a bunch of various parts and smaller hard drives, and a 17 inch monitor.
So, now suddenly things look a little better, because we have a system that we can handled all the stuff that was running on Mama’s PC, and I don’t have to reinstall twice. So, I store away her backed up system, pull apart her computer (oooh the DUST!), put the new motherboard/processor/video card in and reassemble everything. Time to reinstall Windows! Well, that’s where things get stupid for the first time. I started the installation and walked away knowing it would not need anything from me for awhile. When I came back, all appeared good except – wait a second, it seems to be trying to install AGAIN. I watched it this time and the computer was locking up, rebooting and starting the same thing over and over again. After almost an hour of farting around I finally tracked the problem to the video card – my GOOD, high-powered Nvidia video card, that had been twitchy in the past but never had trouble with running Windows. Yanked it, put in the card she had on her old motherboard, and everything is perfect: except now we are down a video card for the kids PC.
Next up was to get started on the kids PC and to configure the P3 to take over the serving duties. The old kids PC had a video card so I figured I would just use that. Ha! Of COURSE it is the OLD format of AGP Pro which will not go into the slot on the newer AGP 8x board that came out of Mama’s PC. I’m screwed again. But, wait – Aha! The P3 we just got from Freecycle has a newer card (virtually identical to the one that was in Mama’s machine before), and the board has an AGP Pro slot! I can swap – and I did. So, now I have posting a kids computer AND a server computer! I installed Windoze on both and lo and behold – I made 3 functional systems in one day (it didn’t quite go as completely smoothly as I summarized, as I had to do some memory testing and swapping to get things going finally but it didn’t take too long).
Saturday I was pretty wiped out but we got things arranged so there were places for all the computers. By Saturday night we had the kids’ desk set up, Mama’s computer running, the kids computer installing updates, and the server PC doing all the work that Mama’s had been doing before. I plugged away as best I could, and on Sunday made sure everything was working and started installing missing applications software to the systems – something which is still going on now. Mama is 85% back up (she is missing certain apps she needs), the kids computer is going along fine, and the server is – well, doing what it is supposed to do.
Sunday night someone posts another Freecycle offer for something I have been desperate for: they have a recliner and a couch. They agree to us taking just the recliner and we make arrangements to get it in the morning, so now I should have a comfortable place to sit in the living room. I was too tired to get much else done but realised I had made an error in judgement: I had put a large HD in Mama’s PC that would NEVER get filled and put a smaller one on the server, which is already nearly full. I decided to swap the drives on Monday.
Monday arrives and Mama heads out to pick up the recliner, which is sitting out in the snowstorm that is going on. She brings it home and it is very damp. I do the Mull River Shuffle with the hard drive partitions, resizing and transferring Mama’s to the server after copying the server data to Mama’s. And in the middle of this?
- A 20 GB hard drive I was using as an intermediary self-destructed so I had to start the process all over
- The kids PC keyboard just up and quits – I suspect a surge of some kind as Mama had forgotten to put things on the surge protector
- I discover there is a missing bolt in the back of the new recliner causing it to cant precipitously to the left while reclining
- We ran out of milk
- The new budgie got out of his cage and hid under my desk, refusing to come out
Well, it’s now Tuesday again. The budgie? He’s slowly getting tamer, it seems, but I wish he’d calm down faster. I am going to remember to close his door until he comes when he is called like Sunbeam used to. All computers are up and running and progress is being made to making everyone happy with the software they have, and the files we have 3 and 4 copies of due to the computer failures are being pared down and centralized on the server. Last night I unstapled the back of the recliner and managed to find a bolt to temporarily hold the back straight until I can get one that is an exact fit, and today the recliner is dry(ish). The kids have a keyboard that works for now until we can get them something better and permanent when we have a little extra money (the SillyGirl wants to put SpongeBob stickers on the keyboard and I refuse to let her put them on my backup USB “emergency” keyboard).
But we’re still out of milk.
New Family Member
by PolarBear on January 8th, 2008
Since we lost Sunbeam on December 24th, things have been a little sad around here. Almost daily the girl has reminded us one way or another about our missing friend.
A few days after he died, we began looking into getting a new boy budgie. We were trying to get one from our local pet store, who brings them in quite young from a breeder, but she was not able to get in touch with him. Missing Sunbeam was making the girl AND her Dad pretty sad, especially when the boy calls every bird he sees “Sunbeam”.
We had to make an unexpected trip to Kingston today, so we decided to take a look around the pet stores. We’d looked before and they hadn’t had any young birds that looked healthy enough to me, and the healthy birds were too old to start taming with much hope of anything other than a “might sit close to you” bird. But today, I think we got lucky.
At the same pet store where we got Raindrop, our female budgie (who is notoriously cranky and not very tame), they had a mixture of birds that looked anywhere from 8-9 weeks to 6 months old. One of them was an alert, curious little Yellowface blue that appears to be male to me (only time will confirm this but I hope he is). Now, I wanted a white bird that was very different from Sunbeam but Mama really liked this one and thought he was “friendly”, and since she had been the person who had called my attention to Sunbeam a few years ago, I went along with it. He’s not especially fancy and he isn’t going to produce interesting hybrids if he and Raindrop breed, but although he is one of those “Bin-O-Budgies” parent-raised never-tamed birds who chomped down on the clerk when she took him out of the cage, it looks like he might work out OK. We got him around 1pm, and by the time we were home at 6:30pm, he was taking seeds from my fingers – not from the palm of my hand, but right from between my fingers. Assuming it is not because he is ill (which is a slight possibility in my budgie experience), he is a very personable bird.
I only hope that we can have him as tame and friendly a companion as Sunbeam. An added bonus would be if I could finally teach a budgie to say more than one word. After watching some Youtube videos of some very well-trained and talented budgies, I have some hope!
So here’s a pic of the new boy – his name is Horizon. Yeah, I know, I am never going to be able to get him to say his own name…
New Video
by PolarBear on January 2nd, 2008
filed under Home Movies, Milestones, Outings
I am sure most everyone has seen it but the boy went skating for the first time, and we have video of the whole family skating.
It’s embedded via YouTube so the quality is no great shakes, but here it is: