Category Archives: Castle Willett

June 13, 2016 · 23:32

Pit Stop

In an auto race (Le Mans, Daytona, Indy, take your pick) it’s a matter of timing and strategy on when you take your pit stops.

While you’re in the pit getting fuel and serviced, the rest of the race is passing you by every second. But you need the fuel, and in particular you often need new tires. The new tires will make you much faster when you do get back out onto the track.

So, if you don’t need fuel but your tires are getting worn and slippery and slow, what’s the tradeoff between time lost in the pit and time gained with every lap once you’re back out on the track? That’s some tricky calculus there.

So it is with other aspects of the technology we use to get things done. In this case, computers.

I have two desktop systems, old Dell towers, which were cutting edge in their day. The one from 2006 can’t upgrade to Windows 10. The one from 2009 has upgraded to Windows 10, but crashes without warning every few days.

It was time.

Now the new system is here and it’s FAST! Since I tend to hold onto systems for a long, long time (see above) I also tend to buy them with the biggest, fastest, and best I can without starting to compete with the Pentagon. This system won’t have the same RAM as the workstations being used by NASA and SpaceX – but it has the slots to be upgraded if I find that I need that. It doesn’t have the disk capacity of a mid-sized office server – but it has enough slots in the tower, connections, and a big enough power supply so that I can add enough to make it so.

It’s fast and powerful in comparison to about 95% of the desktop systems sold today, and compared to “state of the art” from 2006? Like that proverbial Indy racer going up against a 1962 Chevy II wagon with four bald tires and rust holes in the fuel tank. (I actually owned that car, but that’s a story for another day.)

Except…

Except that it I can’t actually USE it to get my actual work done until I get it set up. I had to activate and install the operating system, then start setting up, activating, and registering all of the programs I use. Some, such as Office, are already on the system and just need activation, which still can take way too long. Others can be downloaded and you don’t realize how many little programs you have installed and use every so often until they’re not there. And some are still on a distribution CD or DVD around here somewhere, which has to be found, then installed, then activated, then customized…

Every time I just about think I’ve got my ducks in a row, I instinctively go to click on some program or find some setting that I haven’t taken care of yet. Then it’s time to stop everything and get that taken care of before I can proceed.

Shit, I haven’t installed a printer yet!

But wait, there’s more! After you get all of that done, you have to transfer your data over from the old computers! Some of it’s on Dropbox, and the new system was FAST in downloading and syncing all of the data there, but then there’s all the rest of it…

Right now I have the old 2006 system, the 2009 system, and the 2016 system all running simultaneously on the desk. (It’s a very crowded desk.) For a couple of days I was still working off of the two old systems while setting up the new one. Yesterday I finally made the big leap and swapped in the new one as the primary, while still running the two old ones. (I may actually have to keep the 2006 system running occasionally for a while, since it will be the only one without Windows 10, Win10 won’t run old versions of Quicken, and Quicken is what I use to track the CAF accounting from home.)

It’s still touch and go, and I feel like the Indy driver sitting there, ready to tear off on his new tires to go faster than ever before – but first I have to sit here in my pit stop. I know that I will be faster and better coming out the other side, but in the meantime, the transition is a bitch.

Patience. (And stubbornness!) All will be well.

In the meantime, it occurs to me that this desk might well have more computing power and disk storage space than the entire US government and military had in about 1965. So I’m trying to keep the griping to a minimum.

Trying.

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June 10, 2016 · 23:52

Welcome To The Back Burner

Busy, busy, long, long week at the office – not “audit time” busy, but not exactly kickin’ back time either.

Busy, busy weekend ahead with the hangar, The Elder Daughter visiting, an Angels game tomorrow night.

And then there’s the new computer. Oooooooh, shiny. FAST!!

But a little bit useless until I get all of my software and files installed. Since I still have things to do, I’m keeping the old systems running and then will make a transfer over – as time permits. I was sort of hoping that time would permit much closer to immediately, but the Universe didn’t give a crap what I was hoping for (yet again!) so we’ll make do with what we have.

Talk amongst yourselves, have a wonderful weekend, stay safe.

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June 9, 2016 · 22:19

Getting Ahead

Actually, a lot more head than I bargained for.

There’s a new chain of cheap inexpensive hair salons. Since I don’t require a lot of fancy styling skills, cheap is good.

Take a look at any picture of me on here or other social media sites. I keep my hair short and uniform. A “number two buzz cut, all over.” For those who actually spend money, time, and effort on their hair, buzz cuts come from one-half to eight, one-half being the shortest, eight being the longest. Apparently some people get it buzzed on the side but leave it longer on the top, so I learned long ago to say “all over.”

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Something like this, perhaps? I think not. “All over” it is.

It’s a brain dead stupid and easy haircut to give. For the record, if I could see in back to do the final trimming, I would get a set of clippers and do it myself. How could anyone mess it up?

Well, let me tell you…

This new place is fancy in that they remember how you got your hair cut last time. So my stylist gets a little slip to read, a scouting report of sorts.

“Okay,” she says, “last time you got a number one buzz cut, all over. Is that what you want this time?”

“No, last time I got a number two buzz cut, all over. That’s what I want again this time.”

“Okay, a number one buzz cut, all over. You got it.”

“Wait, stop.” I hold up two fingers. “Not a number one, a number TWO buzz cut, all over.”

“Oh, okay, a number two buzz cut, all over.”

“Right.”

So she fiddles with the little clip on guards they put on the clippers to keep it uniformly a certain distance from your head. No matter what or where, that’s how long your hair is going to be. She moves around behind me, I look in the mirror, and she starts mowing.

About the time that she got the first good swipe that went all the way to the front where I could see it, it was clear to me what she had done. I might have had my eyes widen in surprise (or I might have let out a blood-curdling scream) because she stopped.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You wanted a number two, not a number one?”

“Well, I guess NOW I want a number one!”

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Yeah, that’s really short. I guess if I ever wondered about actually just shaving it all to look like Yul Brenner or Telly Savalas, this w0uld be an excellent time for it.

As the Captain said in “Cool Hand Luke,” “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate!”

(So really, I’ll get myself a set of clippers – for the price of two haircuts I’m set for life. Even if I can’t trim up the back, how could I mess it up any worse than this?)

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Filed under Castle Willett, Freakin' Idiots!, Paul, Photography

June 8, 2016 · 23:14

Well THERE’s Your Problem – June 8th

I’ve been hearing the raccoons for the past week or two, but where normally I hear them at night, I’ve now been hearing them up on the roof during the day. Yesterday when I heard a lot of activity well before sunset, I went out with a camera on a stick to see what they were up to.

Tons of pictures of the roof – no sign of any raccoons.

But I could still hear them…

INVISIBLE RACCOONS!!

Well, no, actually. Those who have followed the raccoon adventures will recall the story of “The Night The Ceiling Dripped Blood.” Okay, that was caused by an owl, not a raccoon, but it pointed out an architectural oops for the house, which I solved with some screen.

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As Adam Savage is so fond of saying, “Well, there’s your problem!”

Time for another eviction.

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June 7, 2016 · 23:02

My Heart Is Torn

He was old, worn, beaten up, ridden hard and put away wet. We had been through so much together for so many years, but I saw that the end might be near.

When the time came, I was so quick to drop him like a hot rock. I couldn’t afford the disruption, especially with my new job, I said. I was sure that it would cost more to repair him than it was worth, I said. Even if I got the repairs done, what would break next and cost even more, I asked. Why throw good money after bad?

Oh, so many excuses, oh, so quickly given.

She was cute, stylish, brand new, and cheap. But despite the price tag, she had more neat techno wonders than he had ever dreamed of. Built-in nav, Sirius, Bluetooth. Enough audio options to sink a ship. A big, shiny touch screen right there in the dash. A sun roof!

We were an instant couple, inseparable. To work, to the hangar, down to the beach. When we had family or friends in town, we took her instead of the fancy, flashy convertible with zero leg room in the back. She was comfy.

He sat there in the driveway, gathering dust and cobwebs. Every day my new-found love and I went sailing off to our daily activities, while his tires got a little flatter, his battery got a little more discharged, and his windshield got a little more caked in dust.

Finally, I had a need, a niche that possibly he could fill. Perhaps it might be worth the effort and expense. On the one hand, I was sure that he still had the potential. His heart was strong! A little tender, loving care and he would be good for another 100,000 miles! And didn’t he deserve a chance, after all that we had been through together? This was no fate for a warrior, to be rotting away in the front yard, waiting for the final tow truck to show up and ignominiously drag him off to oblivion.

On the other hand, there were so many miles, plus insurance, registration, ongoing maintenance. So many expenses.

In the end, I took the plunge. The repairs were less than I had expected, and as soon as I get some new tires, he’ll be ready for the next adventure. Now, because I want to make sure that he’s truly fixed, he drives off to work with me every day, while she sits, sulking, in the driveway. Only on the weekends when I go off to the hangar or on a longer trip does she get the call.

I should be thrilled to be back together with my old friend, right?

He has those big, comfortable leather seats, not the thin, small cloth ones. He has that solid, smooth ride, not the jittery, bouncy one. He has that really good air conditioning that can freeze your ass off in about ten seconds, not the one that takes five minutes to get going and then can barely keep up on a hot day.  He has that comfortable feel that comes with fifteen years together.

But now it’s all wrong. It’s changed. It’s different, all out of whack.

She’s small and zippy. He’s like driving a battleship.

She can do a U-turn in front of the house without even trying hard. He rolls along with about the same momentum as a Sherman tank.

She has AM, FM, Sirius, Pandora, Spotify, Bluetooth to your phone, a half-dozen jacks to connect just about everything. He has a long-busted radio which has AM only, and if you forget and try to switch to FM, the clock goes nuts and has to be reset.

She has paddle shifters and satellite nav and a digital, multi-function display for a dashboard. He has a broken motor on the passenger side rear wing window, so it’s either permanently open or I have to disconnect it and hold it closed with duct tape.

The buttons on his steering wheel are all wrong! His power windows will only go down on their own, you have to hold the button the whole time to bring them back up! You not only have to use the key or the remote fob to open the doors, you have to put the key into the ignition and turn it instead of just pushing the button with the key in your pocket!

I know I should be more grateful, more loyal, more faithful. But I have tasted the sweet. sweet wine of youth and my heart is no longer in it for fifteen years and 188,815+ miles. I have made excuses and cheated, reveling in the thrill of the new, the fancy, the exciting.

I long for the days when I can be small and zippy all the time, not obliged to be huge and lumbering so often.

I’m having a mid-life automotive crisis.

 

 

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June 6, 2016 · 23:31

Guess Who’s Back (It’s Not The Raccoons)

(Well, okay, the raccoons are back again, but that’s not what this story is about.)

Several months ago, my trusty old blue “Mom-mobile” van had a catastrophic failure. With 188,815 miles and desperately needing four new tires to boot, it was on thin ice to begin with. When it went down (coolant temp pegged, lights & bells on the dashboard like a Christmas tree mating with a one-man band) we immediately implemented “Plan B” and bought a new car. This was not a rash decision since I had been researching cars for some time with the expectation that the day would come when we would have to move vast.

For five months the old blue bomber has sat in the driveway. I’ve driven it around the block once or twice just to make sure everything still worked, but in about that much time the temperature gauge starts rising into the red, so it wasn’t like the car repair fairies had appeared to fix it while we were sleeping.

Scrap it or keep it?

It’s still pretty mechanically sound (I think) other than the cooling system problem and needing new tires and it’s really handy to have for hauling crap around. With us working when we can to declutter, store, and get ready to downsize, having a convenient workhorse would be really useful. If I could get it working again for, say, $1,000, and get another couple of years (or more) of use out of it, that would be great!

But I don’t know what kind of damage the cooling system has, and I don’t know if I did any damage to the engine driving it home that overheated. Even if those aren’t huge problems – 188,815 miles. Jeez, just about anything could go next and make any money put into it now a complete waste.

It was a puzzlement.

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When in doubt, avoid burning bridges and see if you can gather more data for a reasonable investment in time and resources.

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Besides, we get like four tows a year with our AAA membership and haven’t used one in ages. And these guys live like a half block away, so why not let them help?

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The deciding factor was that we’ve discovered a really great local car place that does great work at reasonable prices, has always treated us well, and who I can  trust to not screw us over.

Given that it might well need a new radiator, or at least a full set of hoses, and it’s got that 188,815 miles, I’m not going to spend $3K to fix a car that’s only worth $3K to begin with. But if I could get it done for a much smaller fraction of that amount, then we’re going for it.

The first report I got was that the car repair fairies had apparently fixed it while I was sleeping… They couldn’t find a damn thing wrong with it other than the battery being dead, but it was holding a charge so I wouldn’t even need a new one there. But overheating? Not a worry.

I went through the whole story again (with feeling and four-part harmony) and asked them to check harder. I was not imagining all of those alarms and the fact that the engine was so hot I couldn’t even touch the hood to open it to look to see if it were actually glowing in the ultraviolet.

The “good news” is that they found a cause – the thermostat had welded itself stuck. The better news is that this wasn’t too expensive. The bad news is that I needed a oil change, new brakes, rotors…

But I could get all of that done for $500.

Sold!

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Now the Big Blue Max is back on the road. It’s incredibly filthy, but it’s running. I’m just using it from home to work in back, a distance I could literally walk if I needed to. (About six miles each way.) But it’s been near or above 100° every day and I’m running the air conditioning at full blast, doing my best to stress the system. If it’s going to fail, I want it to fail near to home and with as few consequences as possible.

So far, all is well. I still need to get new tires in the worst possible way, but between work and long hours on Monday through Friday, and my CAF gig and long hours on Saturday, and all of the tire places being closed on Sunday, this might be non-trivial. I’ll figure out something.

Yet… There has been a fundamental shift in my relationship with this loyal and hard working machine.

More later.

 

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June 4, 2016 · 17:44

Close But Not Yet TOO Close

Coming home from the hangar in Camarillo, as I topped the Camarillo Grade on the 101 and started down into Thousand Oaks, it was immediately clear that something was amiss.

From a good twenty miles away, a column of smoke was visible, the brown, roiling, wannabe pyrocumulus. Right in my path.

I couldn’t find anything on the news, although they were talking about several other brush fires in the area that were being attacked. Thirty acres here, something being held to twenty acres there, all “normal” for Southern California in the first weekend where it’s topping 100° every day for three or four days.

As I got closer to home I kept expecting a massive traffic jam, and apparently so did a lot of other folks. The split with the 23 Freeway was jammed and all backed up, very unusual for a Saturday afternoon. It might have been caused by an accident up ahead on the 23 – but it might also have been caused by a big percentage of the traffic on the 101 diverting off to take the 23 to the 118. (For reference.)

The question was, “Where? Where exactly?” Down in Malibu? Off of Topanga Canyon? Up north of the 101 by our place?

Getting off the freeway at my normal exit was, in retrospect, a mistake. It turns out the fire is in Calabasas, only a mile or so from that exit, and traffic was (after it was too late to wave off and stay on the freeway) gridlocked.

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With a capital “G”.

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So, no, it wasn’t dangerous taking these pictures while behind the steering wheel. We weren’t moving.

At least this wasn’t THAT close to us. While my car dashboard was saying it was 102° outside, there wasn’t a lot of wind, which can be the factor that turns a twenty-acre brush fire into a twenty thousand acre brush fire. I was patient and was finally able to turn onto Valley Circle (a left then another left to head back to the north) at which point it almost immediately got worse.

Two things. First, there was a second brush fire. Much smaller, but much closer to our house and much, much closer to a lot of homes. (For family and those who have visited, it’s west of Valley Circle behind the baseball fields, sort of in that canyon between the fields and Victory Boulevard.) There were helicopters dropping water all over it so I don’t think it will have a chance to grow much. I hope.

But secondly, there had been a major car accident with were apparently a lot of cars and a lot of injuries. Valley Circle Drive, the last of the major north-south streets at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, was closed. Completely. With all of that traffic trying to squeeze off into one tiny residential side street.

Take hundreds, if not thousands, of impatient, pissed-off, Los Angeles drivers, 99.9% of whom have never in their lives been off of a main street unless they were within a half-mile of their house, and shove them off onto a gridlocked, narrow, residential side street with no traffic control and no clue for them about how to get around the problem and back to where they want to be.

Yeah, it was that much fun.

I knew exactly where I wanted to go. I’ve run and walked all of these streets when I’ve been training for marathons. (Taking the same routes over and over is really boring – I try to explore a bit.) It was the other 999 drivers (or it might have been 666 of them)  that were in my way.

Meanwhile, when I finally did get to where I wanted to go, i.e., the next through north-south route, I found it to be gridlocked by people diverted off of Valley Circle coming from the north.

That’s about the time I noticed that my gas gauge was reading “fumes, maybe, if you’re lucky.”

I did consider finding a spot to legally park without causing any further gridlock and just walking the three miles or so home. But, 102° convinced me otherwise.

I finally broke free of the gridlock, looped around all of the traffic, came in from the other side, and made it home, even if I didn’t pass a gas station on that route. Tomorrow I may run out of gas a hundred yards from the house, but for now I am home.

There is a steady stream of helicopters going overhead, one every sixty seconds or so. It looks like they’re refilling their tanks from the Chatsworth Reservoir (about a mile north of here) and shuttling back and forth to the smaller but much closer fire behind the baseball fields, and to the big Calabasas fire that (according to the ongoing news reports) is completely out of control and growing. It looks like an awful lot of $1M+ homes didn’t do their brush clearance and may pay the price.

I’m going to go get a cold drink, find a shady spot outside, watch the helicopters, monitor the news, and maybe review and update my Bugout Lists.

(What do you mean, you don’t have a bugout list?)

Worry not, it’s close, but I don’t think it’s THAT close.

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Filed under Castle Willett, Los Angeles

June 3, 2016 · 22:04

Random Photo For June 3rd

  • Random number between 1999 and 2016 = 2013
  • Random number between 1 and 12 = 1
  • Random number between 1 and 31 (or 30 or 28 or 29) = 19

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Just my luck, the date that comes up has good subject matter – which means that I’ve already used five of the nine pictures that day. It’s okay, there was one decent one left. It was tempting to play “No Context For You!” but I decided to stick with one meme at a time.

You can’t be too careful crossing the streams like that.

It just so happens that the trash pandas are back in the last week to ten days. When we went out to see the ISS pass a few days ago we saw one sprinting (okay, well, “galumphing” might be a better term) from the neighbor’s bushes into ours. I can hear at least one of them up there now, and I spooked one the other night when I came home late.

Live and let live, that’s what I say. Until they get into the attic. Then I’m crossing the streams on their fuzzy little ring-tailed butts!

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May 3, 2016 · 22:52

Walking Companion

I’m trying to make an active effort to get out and walk in the evening on days when I’m more sedentary at work. It’s that Garmin smart watch I bought myself for Christmas that’s now watching my every step. I get gold bars and vibrating fireworks when I meet my daily goals, and sad blue bars when I don’t. The watch isn’t angry with me when I slack off, but it’s very, very disappointed.

Having now conditioned myself to be aware of this, most days if I haven’t already met my daily goal I’m at least pretty close, so a quick evening stroll to the end of the block and back will do the trick. Today however was one of the days when I was glued to the desk, so I was way short. (“Way short” in this case is about 1,800 steps, roughly a mile.) It’s a lovely evening and the weather might be turning toward the cool and rainy over the next few days (more on that later, I’m sure) so a quick trip around the block and over to the next one was in order.

It really was very calming and pleasant. 63° F with no breeze, a few high clouds but you can still see Jupiter high overhead and Arcturus rising in the southeast like the Eye of Sauron.

As I looped back past our street and headed toward the next block over to loop around there, I saw a critter crossing the street as I crossed. It was two or three hundred yards away, looked like a cat.

As I headed down the block behind ours I saw the critter loping along the sidewalk toward me and then turning to scoot down the sidewalk parallel to me on the other side of the street. It moved funny, not like a cat at all. Not really like a raccoon either, but for the size and all that’s what I assumed it was.

I kept walking down my side of the street. It kept walking down its side of the street. I kept an eye on it, starting to feel… Well, let’s say that I was starting to have a bad feeling about the situation.

I moved under a streetlight and it was in shadows. I moved off into the shadows on my sidewalk and it came into the light on its side. Cat-sized, black, arched back, sort of funny gait, huge tail sticking straight up over its back, white stripe…

Shit.

I didn’t break into a run, partly because I didn’t want to spook it, partly because I was still in my good work clothes. It was still across the street and not moving toward me, but if someone came out of their door with a dog, or we went by a yard with a dog in the backyard that spooked it, I didn’t want to be that close.

We know they’re in the neighborhood. Twice Jessie went after one and got sprayed good. We’ll often smell them somewhere in the neighborhood, and it’s not uncommon to have it so strong that your eyes are watering. On one occasion I’ve actually been a lot closer and lived to tell the tale.

But let’s not be stupid.

The skunk eventually found the yard that it was looking for and ducked through a hole in the fence. Good luck and good night – happy hunting for those grubs and bugs and whatever else it is you eat! My wrist just started vibrating and I’ve got confetti on my display, so I’ll be heading home.

Alone.

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May 1, 2016 · 23:05

Down The Silicon Rabbit Hole

I spent way too much time this week and especially today trying to untie the Gordian knot of my current computer setup. You need to fix “A,” but to do that you need to do “B,” but to do that you need to do “C,” which in turn causes a fatal problem with “D”…

What’s the old line? “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s important to remember that the original job was to drain the swamp.”

Windows 10 has been a bit of a problem on one system (A), and while it was behaving a little better after some tweaking, something still isn’t right. The other system can’t run Windows 10 at all due to old, old hardware and no compatible replacements being built any more. Which doesn’t stop Win10 from demanding permission to upgrade every time I sit down.

Then there was a viral invasion which hit my address book and started spewing virus-ridden spam (B). Given the number of systems here and how heavily they get used, I guess I’m lucky that this is only the second actual infection that I can remember. In trying to shut it down I ran into a problem with my anti-virus software, which should have prevented it in the first place.

Turns out that the anti-virus product I’ve used for years isn’t one of best on the market as it was when I switched to it long ago (C). It was great then, got lots of stellar reviews – but then its little company got bought by a company which got bought by a company which sold off just that product… Bottom line, if you go review it now, it’s “so-so” at best.

So, I’m off to find a really good virus removal tool and top of the line anti-virus program for today (D). It seems that’s Kaspersky, which got five-star reviews across the board on several sites that I trust. Downloading the virus removal tool rooted out the problem (I hope) and I started replacing the old program with Kaspersky. Which was simple and easy on the desktop that’s still running Windows 7 and the laptop that’s now Windows 10. But…

On the desktop that’s been upgraded to Windows 10, that problem with it crashing without warning (not even a Blue Screen Of Death!) has gotten much, much worse now that Kaspersky’s installed (E). In fact, every single time I try to run a full system scan, within a fifteen to twenty minutes the system will reboot.

Lots of Googling and digging deeper into the Win10 diagnostics than I ever wanted to indicates that it’s the video card driver (F). But that system is also pretty old, so there are no updated drivers, nor are there any video cards that will run on that old PCI architecture. Messing around with some suggested fixes has improved the situation to where it now crashes and reboots without warning after a half-hour or so instead of after ten minutes – but it’s still crashing and rebooting.

I then spent a couple of hours digging into the esoteric details of PCI, PCI Express, PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0, and running through the specs on half of the video cards on Newegg.com to see if anything will work (G). The answer is maybe, and the cards in question are only $70 or so, which is reasonable – but they will only support one monitor at a time. Both of the desktop systems are dual monitor setups and I’ll go nuts with just a single monitor.

The solution there is to put in two video cards to run two monitors (H). But the motherboards on both of these old desktop systems each only have one slot that I can still use for any modern video card. Back to square one.

So how old exactly are these systems? Go to the Dell Computer site and look up the original specifications (I) and manuals. One is from 2007, the other from 2009. Well THERE’s your problem!

Given how much time I’ve spent screwing around with this to keep two systems kinda sorta maybe stable and running, maybe it would be faster (and possibly even cheaper) to just look at scrapping them and getting new systems. Let’s see what Dell has (J). They have plug-and-play pre-built systems that have only marginal abilities to be upgraded or expanded, they have extremely expensive systems designed for gaming (I’m not a gamer – I’m trying to get some work done), and they have workstations. The workstations are the closest thing to what I’m looking for, but they start at about three times what I was hoping to pay.

What about Newegg (K)? Or Hewlett Packard? Or Costco? Can I get a system with a big tower configuration that I can expand (I like to be able to customize and tinker and add extra memory and hard disks) for a reasonable price and then upgrade in the future as needed? Maybe. It’s still about 50% more than I was hoping to spend, but it might work. On the other hand, you’re buying it sight unseen from an internet site, and if it’s not what I want I might be stuck.

Maybe I could go someplace where I could actually look at one and see what kind of capabilities it has (L)? Fry’s Electronics was always the go-to place for this, but they’ve gone so far downhill that I dread the very thought of stepping in the door.

So how do I get the systems I want at a price that’s not going to break the bank (M)? It’s been a few years, but I guess I could start assembling a parts list from Newegg and do a DIY system. Start checking on cases, motherboards, RAM options, CPU options, hard disks, optical disks, video cards, power supplies…

And this way lies total madness. I probably have the skill set, rusty as it might be, and I’m sure I could get it done, but the time needed would be way more than I have.

Remember the line about draining the swamp? In this case, the original job is to get my computer systems safe, stable, and functional. Right now they’re borderline and I need to fix that. But it’s NOT a good option to take on a job that could take hundreds of hours when I don’t have time to spare for breathing some days.

Yet I can’t stay where I am (N).

It’s late, I have to get up and go to work tomorrow morning. I think I’ll do the logical thing and go to bed, hoping that the computer repair and upgrade fairies will show up tonight and take care of this.

Or at least they can keep the one system from crashing and the other from spewing out spam.

That would be helpful.

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Filed under Castle Willett, Computers, Paul