January 17, 2015

 I forgot to mention the funniest thing from testing yesterday. At one point one of the third graders got a question about angle and he asked me what an “abuse angle” was. So close. Almost as funny as when a kid can't pronounce 'synonym' and asks me what a “cinnamon” is.

I had a slow start to my day but I eventually got around to doing stuff. The weather was nice so I wanted to open the garage door and start putting a clear coat on my future computer desks. I dug out my saw horses and got everything set up and then noticed that the one table top that I just unpacked today was split all the way down the middle. Good grief. I opened one back in October when I got them and made the assumption that the other one was fine. My mistake. In the emails from Ikea it said to call within 48 hours of delivery if something is wrong. Missed that mark by well over 1500 hours. However, the return policy is 90 days so I'm hoping I can take advantage of that. Rather than messing with clear coating the other table I grabbed my laptop and headed over to the old house to I could bring up my order information and call Ikea. That was a giant waste of time. After listening to their crappy muzak for over twenty minutes I said screw it. I'll try again tomorrow. Or sometime soon.

After giving up on that, I turned my attention to my new motherboard, which was sitting on the front porch when I arrived. I was expecting that it would be a bit of a process to swap out my old one and it was. The only tricky part in taking the old motherboard out was getting the water cooler off my CPU. There was a weird bracket thing that I had to loosen the screws on and then lift it up while twisting the water cooler. Putting the new motherboard in and getting everything plugged back in took a little longer. I should have paid a little more attention while I was unplugging everything. The little cables for the front panel lights and buttons were particularly a pain in the butt because the were each one or two pins big, which means they were tiny and awkward.

I eventually got it all put back together and I'd say it looked better than it did with the old motherboard. I was working on it on my desk so I moved it back down to the ground and plugged in the power cord and a monitor and turned it on. All the lights came on and the fans started swirling, which was a good sign because it meant I plugged everything in correctly, but didn't really confirm anything because they were still doing that when I turned the computer on with the old motherboard. The real test was the monitor, and it remained completely blank, other than saying no input was found. Not good. I got out the little post board checker thing I got to test my old motherboard and plugged it in. I think the code was 02 but that didn't mean anything to me. I tried switching out different cables for the monitor but that didn't work either, so I just sat there and stared at things for awhile.

It took me a little longer than I'd like to admit but I finally realized I forgot to plug in the power cables for my graphics card, which my monitor was plugged into, which would explain why it wasn't getting a signal. I plugged in the graphics card and voila, Windows appeared on my monitor. It unfortunately started in Safe Mode because I also forgot to plug in a keyboard.

A short time later, I was on my desktop's desktop and it was good to be back. I meant to download new drivers but got sidetracked when two of my hard drives weren't showing up. There was a lot more staring and again I realized I forgot to plug something in. That something being the power for those two hard drives. After plugging them in I got one of the drives to show up but not the other. I'm thinking it may be a driver issue. It is a 3TB hard drive and I'm pretty sure my motherboard can handle up to a 4TB, but maybe I need to update the drivers for that to be a thing. I'm crossing my fingers anyway. I tried moving around SATA cables, and that didn't seem to have any effect, but I didn't try all the combinations, so that is still a possibility if the driver thing doesn't work out.

Around seven o'clock I finally called it a night and headed home. I was happy with the progress I had made, even if my lower back is killing me after bending over my computer for so long. When I got home I made dinner. The tater tots ended up being dessert because I couldn't be bothered to wait for the oven to heat up.

I spent the rest of the night watching TV, reading a book, and playing Fantasy Life. I watched Byzantium, which is an interesting take on vampire movies. I also watched Slackers, which I haven't seen in years. I forgot how good it was. Jason Schwartzman is hilarious and Jaime King is really cute. I had a crush on her when I was younger and much like the movie, had completely forgotten about her existence.

Now I'm going to go to bed.