I don’t know how long it will last, but I am going to ENJOY this for however long it does…

ASU is ranked #1 in College Baseball right now. I can’t think of a more deserving team.

Here’s the official ranking, if you’re interested.

GO DEVILS!!!

[UPDATE 04/13/2009] Yeah, it didn’t last long. They lost a two-game series to Arkansas and took 2 of 3 from Wazoo. The latest ranking]

Remember what I keep telling you all when it comes to computer reliability? I’ll refresh your collective memories: BACK UP YOUR DATA. I’ll say it again: BACK UP YOUR DATA. Remember now?

Well, I’m glad I follow my own advice (for once) and, boy, did I need it!

I’m setting up to build a new computer. Goliath is getting a bit long in tooth and, besides, it’s been a few years since I last built a computer - time to get modern, Baby!

I ordered in a shiny new 1TB disk (That’s 1000 GIG, for you normals) and was prepping to back up four old disks the machine has now to the one new disk. I shut the machine down, opened up the case and scoped out where I was going to put it for the short time it would be in there. I moved a few cables around but I disconnected nothing. Just looked around, right?

Well, seeing as I had no spare ports to plug the drive into, I decided I would have spare up one of the present drives to make room for the new one. In other words, clean my crap off of at least one of the old drives to create a hole for the newer one. So, I turned the machine back on and … nothing. It wouldn’t boot. Just as dead as if it had NO DRIVES AT ALL.

Huh? I didn’t mess with anything! I just poked around in there. I MUST have dislodged a cable, by golly. Well, self-confident me went back in there and found everything hooked up just as solid and neat as ever. All data and power cables snug, right where they should be. Hmmm.

Turned the machine on and went into SETUP and looked at the on-board RAID controller. It said it saw both disks of my RAID1 array and that they, as well as the controller, were (in BIG GREEN LETTERS) ‘Normal’. Hmmm. This is odd. The computer says everything is ‘normal’ yet it won’t boot.

I fought that bastard for two days. Never fixed it. Finally, I gave up and just decided to break the RAID1 array and boot to a single drive. (For an explanation of a RAID array, go read THIS) Go ahead, I’ll wait…

What I ended up doing was just re-installing WinDoze on one of the RAID drives (there were 2) and saving the OTHER as a spare BACKUP. There’s that word, huh? Once WinDoze was reinstalled, I just copied the data from the spare RAID disk and I’m all back where I was three days before. Other than having to reinstall most of my programs, ALL MY DATA WAS SAFE.

Without my backup, I would have been one pissed off Geek. As it was, I was just inconvenienced for a few days. Let that be a lesson to you, one more time:

BACK UP YOUR DATA BACK UP YOUR DATA BACK UP YOUR DATA

My buddy Andy has posted some pictures of his new son, Kelvin, displaying him with some everyday Geek items to give you the scale of the (tiny) guy. Genius!

Click HERE to see it!

A buddy (Tawn) wrote me an Email that one of our classmates had passed away and gave me the link to a ‘reunion-style’ website where I could see the death notice. While I was sad to hear that our classmate had died, I was even sadder to note that almost all of the links to Yuma High, the school district, the ‘Crims Web Site’ run by ’students’ and most amazing, a website supposedly run by the school districts IT department were broken, timed out or just gone forever.

What a way to run a ’school district’, people. Fuck, I’m betting that my pudgy self, along with Tawn and a couple of computer books could run most of those sites by ourselves.

So if you’re drifting through here after having seen my Email address/Web site address on that reunion site, consider yelling at me. We might could get some REAL I.T. people moving on fixing that mess they’ve created down there.

Well, that and get a Mr. G’s burrito. (FYI - their website no longer exists, either!)

[UPDATE 03/04/2009] In just a week’s time, I’ve found about a dozen of my old classmates from YUHS. One of them, Diana Colby-Brown, has reconnected with me via email. If this keeps up, I’m going to be of those old geezers at a reunion. I’ll fight it, yes I will!

I’m going to write up some of my more memorable stories for everyone to enjoy. I have two or three in mind already. The first one is up now. Check in every now and then and see if any new ones have been posted. Look above for the heading ‘My Stories’ and click it.

Enjoy!

My buddy Andy has posted some pictures of his new son, Kelvin, displaying him with some everyday Geek items to give you the scale of the (tiny) guy. Genius!

Click HERE to see it!

Amy and Andy have brought us Kelvin, their son.  He was born this morning about 10am.  

(Sorry about the mess)

He weighed in at 7.86oz and 20.5in.

Young Chuck in Montana bought a horse from a farmer for $100.00. The farmer agreed to deliver the horse the next day.

The next day he drove up and said, ‘Sorry, son, but I have some bad news - the horse died.’

Chuck replied, ‘Well then, just give me my money back.’

The farmer said, ‘Can’t do that. I went and spent it already.’

Chuck said, ‘Ok, then, just bring me the dead horse.’

The farmer asked, ‘What ya gonna do with him?

Chuck said, ‘I’m going to raffle him off.’

The farmer said, ‘You can’t raffle off a dead horse!’

Chuck said, ‘Sure I can, Watch me. I just won’t tell any body he’s dead.’

A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, ‘What happened with that dead horse?’

Chuck said, ‘I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $998.00.’

The farmer said, ‘Didn’t anyone complain?’

Chuck said, ‘Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.’

Chuck grew up and now works for the government. He was the one who figured out how to “bail us out.”

A good buddy just handed me an LED sign.  I’m sure you’ve seen them in stores and such that scroll messages across them.  This one is a BIG one!  Thirty-two letters across the screen and the letters are about 4 inches tall!  It has an RS-232 (9-pin) connector on the back to ‘program’ the sign, but I’ve not been able to get it to respond yet.  There’s a web site out there that has a little (Damn little) info on it.

Mine is a model ADT6502/32M

The original company (of course) is out of business and what few hackers out there that have written something to USE the sign are Linux folks and, since I’m not a programmer, all their hard work means little to me - dammit.

So, if you know of someone who has gotten this beast to work, point me at them!  I’d LOVE to get this running!

I just had a heinous virus hit me this week, and after struggling with all the tools I’ve told you all about, which did no good, I found MalWareBytes Anti-Malware. That little gem took it ALL away in one 20-minutes process. I wish I’d found this program a week ago. GET IT NOW:
http://www.download.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html?part=dl-10804572&subj=dl&tag=button

And I’m going to BUY that damn program as soon as I leave here.  It’s THAT GOOD.