[ P H E N Y L A L A N I N E |:. ------- .:|:. Stage 3.5 .:|00000011.00000101|:. -------- ]

Saturday, May 02, 2009

post://6614627549669008837/

There's a "swine flu pandemic" on the news, but the news has been looking for a good widespread disease to report on since mad cow. Bird Flu, Swine Flu... so far 150 cases of people actually dying from it. The (straight up, no frills) flu has killed over 15,000 this year and the swine flu makes the news.

I don't have the swine flu but I do have some odd type of sickness. I've been feverish for days with all the normal feverish stuff. I then take 1 ibuprofen, 200mg, and everything goes away. Normally when I have a bad headache I need several, or any kind of pain or swelling I'm trying to do away with... but this horrible feeling sickness - only 1.

I wake up with something different every day. I'll struggle through fever sweats, shivers, and shakes one night, and then be in the bathroom for the next. I was feeling ok yesterday but worked from home just in case. No issues other then feeling slightly off which has been this entire week. This morning it was a headache at the base of my skull... and by the time I woke up it went to the top and behind my eyes.

Nicole seems to think it's dehydration so I keep drinking more and more water. I stop when my stomach starts to rumble. I can't think... brain too big in my skull, can't look at the screen... got school work I need to do, I am so far behind.

Jay's birthday outing is tonight. I had planned to get school work done durring the day, head out - have dinner. Most likely I won't even make dinner, already opted out of the crazy drink fest to follow. No shape to drink, body wants it's back.

*update 2:40 PM*
So managed to get the headache taken care of, though it took more then 1 solitary ibuprofen - had a small cup of coffee after a shower and a drive to the bank and things cleared up. I got home ready to do some school work and half the site was down. I could see what I needed to read though, so that I did. Sat outside for a while with the puppy and caught up on some of my reading.

Labels: lament, news, sick

posted @ 08:47

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Sunday, February 22, 2009

post://8133353976599970085/

I had my main system drive in RAID striping (no data protection) and sure enough one of the drives went screwy. I had a system backup that I made with Vista Ultimate so I wasn't that wary of reinstalling. I could pop in the new drive, insert the windows disk and restore, one of the bennefits of Ultimate!

It wasn't like that, not at all - in order to restore off of one of those Windows Image Backups you need to have the same drive configuration as before. My drives were different - so no go.

I finally reinstalled fresh to a new drive (no RAID on the system drive this time) then I got all the files I needed off the original RAID setup which was still limping along good enough for me to get my data. I was sure I had everything but I was about to find out otherwise.

I started up GTA and it asked me to activate. Ok I can activate, I clicked ok - nada, some error with infrastructure and all that. I realized I needed to reinstall so that got me thinking of my savegames and how I should probably go back them up in case the reinstall tried to overwrite them. I made a backup of my Rockstar Games folder in Documents but as I poked around in there I didn't see any savegame files. I also didn't see anything in the new Vista c:\Users\X3\Saved Games folder.

I did some research and realized I had lost them. I needed the files in c:\Users\X3\Local Settings\Application Data\Rockstar Games\... and since I was using XBox Live for Windows and it encrypts the savegames (to prevent people from cheating) I also needed the files in c:\Program Files(x86)\XLive
I've lost save games before and I know there are sites around that have a save at virtually every misssion in the game, but how would that work in this case?

After some more searching I found something that would let me load the save files into the reinstalled version:
HowTo for Savegame "wrapper"

Original Site

I'm going to go look for savegame collections now. If I can't reply my game with all my carefully molded relationsihips I can at least play out the missions and get the rest of the story.

Damn it!

[Update - 2/23/2009] - I found them! I'll post the link once I get home, but I've found a site with all the missions, and the link for the wrapper above works. Now I can get as close as I can to where I left off - of course the relationships, the races, the pidgeons, the stunt jumps, who knows how they did with those but I can only hope for the best and try and finish the game, albeit from someone else's skin.

Labels: games, games for windows, lament, lost data

posted @ 14:02

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Sunday, December 21, 2008

post://8937212902501074694/

This blizzard will be the death of me, I'm currently attempting to ward off back spasms with muscle relaxers and aleve. I was just getting over it too, and now I've done WAY too much shoveling. I am writing to try and keep my mind off the spasms, pain, and absence of breath I'm feeling, so I won't be hurt if you stop reading here :)

It started a week ago Thursday. I hurt my back doing nothing special - I was sitting in my office chair and turned right to grab my laptop out of the case on the ground. I didn't feel anything right away, but by the end of the day I was feeling it.

I worked Friday from home and then had Monday and Tuesday off to recuperate so I didn't think much of going to Nicole's family's Christmas Party on Sunday. I still hurt, but it wasn't bad enough to keep me home. By Monday I was feeling good. So good, in fact, that I decided I'd surprise Nicole by putting up the Christmas lights outside. Otherwise the whole day was me resting by watching TV and video games.

Alas, Tuesday was going to be another wash - holed up in bed all day so I finally got an appointment with the Chiropractor. He adjusted, it didn't feel quite as wonderful as it normally does but I figured it was due to it being out for so many days thus far.

I went to work Wednesday and Thursday with little to no issue and then this damn storm came up on Friday. I shoveled Friday night and though I hurt in the morning I needed to shovel Saturday because our damn snow blower is delayed until Tuesday. We couldn't find the one we wanted in the stores around here so we went online. Amazon got our hopes up by saying it would be delivered the next day... FedEx tracking brought us back into the reality that we'd be waiting another few days.

No sunflower means shoveling and when it's coming down about 2 to 4 inches an hour, that means shoveling several times. I did a lot the first time, though still not the whole driveway. I tried to at least keep the area around the cars and the plow deposits at the end of the driveway clear but it... just... kept... coming.

This morning I finished up the picture for our Christmas cards so we'll be sending those out tomorrow. I beat several stages of both Fallout3 and GTAIV then I watched the whole football game today, an absolute slaughter by NE in the snow. It almost feels like it's getting worse with me applying heat and not moving much. I'm wondering if I should stretch, I need to move, I'm getting a bit stir crazy.

Our driveway really needs a complete shovel, as does our front steps and sidewalk. I know the neighbors must not think much of me, but I just can't do any more shoveling. I can't move, or walk well, and shoveling will just make it worse. I wish the neighbor kids would come over and ask. I kinda thought they would after seeing me shovel. I'm weird with kids & neighbors though, never know what to say, or even what to say when they start the conversation, put the two together and I have no idea how to interact.

I had moved around enough snow previously to be able to get out with the car both earlier today and a little while ago. Nicole and I just went to go pick up the invitations after submitting them online and for food earlier today. It was really bad out there, the Subaru cut right through it, but I did emulate a plow somewhat on my exit and re-entrance.

*Whew* The spasms have finally subsided after a double dose, but along with them goes my thoughting ability. I'm too young for back problems, if this is just the start of it, I hate to see what's in store for my future. I'm working from home again tomorrow, and not sure about the rest of the week but this is crazy.

Labels: blizzard, holidays, lament, snow, status

posted @ 18:12

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Thursday, June 05, 2008

post://6948603993605328803/

I just paid $4.19 for Super using CASH. I could have paid $4.39 if I used credit. Separate cash and credit prices?? Way to go back to <1984. I was amazed, I guess they just started this tdoay and it's just weird. I understand saving $2 for 10 gallons (in my particular case) but that could ammount to 5 to 10 dollars for SUV owners, and even more for truckers.

I listen to Bubba the Love Sponge (Sirius: Howard 101) now, a lot more for the past year or so and he's just as good as Howard in many a case. They're always advocating for the truckers so I'm a bit more understanding. I just can't conceive how someone who is an owner operator could possibly be making a living - let it be known, you've at least got a break if you're paying cash for gas in Holyoke, MA... go to the Shell station by the mall.

Out of principal I paid cash. I took it out of the business. I know a lot of people are running on credit card leins right now and it's kind of scary. I am doing ok, we're cutting down on groceries, and bought our big ticket items prior to this whole crunch, so all in all we're doing ok.

I got gas at this hour because I'm headed in to work early tomorrow for a big release party - hardly what it sounds like, we're switching our phone operations so I'm going to be there bright and early in case anyone has any issues. I've been working all this week to make sure we're ok a this point and it looks like we will be but I'll be there at 5, which means waking up at 4... and I'm not really down with that, and certainly not expecting any gas stations within my 30 miles to empty radius to be open. Considering I'm still up at 10:14PM EST --- I'm probalby going to be feeling it. My plan is redbull. Claratin D and redbull.

Labels: lament, materialism, politics, work

posted @ 22:01

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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

post://8139086312421466235/

Graff.

I'm finally back online.
let me just start with the fact that Virtual Machine 2007 started this... wait... maybe MixMan DM2 started this... yeah...

I've recently gotten a bit of DJ gear. Nothing special, a turntable, then a mixer with the phono on one side and MP3 player or MiniDisk player on the other, followed by a SB Audigy FAT4L1TY. I'm really craving a way to have samples within easy reach. I have the midi keyboard but that was a bit large for what I wanted - here comes sexy DM2 (for XP). Just assign a sound to each little block, and decky decky blip blip at will.

But oh no, it doesn't work on VISTA - let alone VISTA64 - and I didn't have my XP or XP64 because my RAID 0 (<--0 is VERY important to the story!!) wasn't working because of what I thought was a bad bios on my motherboard. I figured a virtual machine might be just the ticket - I'd just run XP32 on top of VISTA64! (spoiler alert - it was my power supply - suddenly insufficient with the addition of the new soundcard I got). Lo and behold upon installing VM I was 15Gig less in my HD, USB doesn't work for VM and I was in a world of hurt in my config. My system had a layer of virtual everywhere I looked. I couldn't uninstall it right, it retained the tendrils and my network cards were kablooi due to the extra layer.

Countless hours of drivers, new drivers, wrong drivers, no drivers, anything to get it to work! Finally I put in an old PCI LAN card I had about... popped it in, popped in the cable, clicked the switch - baroooom, click. Huh? clicked the switch again - barom| click. ???? clicked the switch again and a nice ozone filled the air, pulled the plug, and lamented in the fact that my power supply had now gone kablooi.

Fast forward to a week and a half later (extra half for shipment from Puerto Rico to CA, only to re-ship to me in MA. New power supply, and finally able to get my computer up and running - set up the bios - yeah, everything's good. Put in the rest of the hardware and set up the RAID in BIOS - turned it on - BOOT DISK BLAH BLAH, INSERT SYSTEM DISK... and it did it in capitals just to smak me around.

Oye, so I tried the 3rd non-complicated-RAID disk for VISTA 64 that I had been running in all this disillusioned BIOS time. It also failed to boot. OK - so it's because I never had raid running in VISTA64? BSOD due to nvRAID driver? OK, I can understand that... disabled - same issue. DISKCRC.DLL even in safemode! GRAAA!

Finally put in the VISTA DVD and booted from it to do a repair to the system.
Repair worked! I could boot to VISTA 64, but alas, even once booted I still had no RAID - oh it showed up as a drive - 320G of space but no partitions, no drives, and no luck. Windows Update had some nvidia chipset drivers - oooh, I'll try those, nvidia raid, nvidia networking... all good stuff.

Rebooted, still no raid but I had networking. Put the computer to sleep.

Fast forward to today when I found a raid recovery program today at work - I was all ready to go... but no network?!! Try Try try... same issue I had before the whole system went kaput! ARG! FF>> 3 hours later and I've disabled nvidia onboard LAN ports (plural, 2 x gigabit) I inserted 1 x Intel PCI 100tx... and I'm online.

Never underextimate the replacement factor. I still think Vista is hoarked, I'm never getting the 15G back from the virtual machine reservation... looks like I'm in for a restore anyhow. Time to put the RAID to RAID 1 - mirroring, and buy 2 more drives for striping - where the very NONessential files will be kept. I've lost over 120 gig of music I've collected (maybe 110 is in other places - HDs, CDs, DVDs, etc) but mainly my purchased software, serials, and documents. I'm putting it all on my mac disk in the future. I'm sick of losing the stuff I pay to download. I want CDs dammit!

So now things are running (kinda) I can at least get back into the music. Nicole got me the expansion drive for my birthday so I can output to optical (which enables me to record to minidisk) and have some straight RCA ins. She also got me some real headphones, so I'm looking forward to letting loose on the deck when I'm not so hardware stressed.

So the lesson is RAID 1... RAID 0 is tempting, until you can't even restore it because it's a conglomerate mass of poo!

Labels: hardware, lament, onomonopia, technology

posted @ 20:28

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Saturday, October 27, 2007

post://1127939970114621448/

Hey look at me, I'm updating!

They cut off access to Blogger at work, so there hasn't been much as far as spur of the moment updates. I've been doing the (scrolly) links, but not even much time for that anymore. I've been getting in like 7:30-8, working through lunch, and staying till at least 5 in most cases. It's getting to be a grind as of late, especially because I'm not getting the rest I ought to be getting.

I'm just not all that quick about getting to bed because I've been enjoying the time not working. Computer business is slow too - due to my complete lack of patience when I get home. I completely dropped the printing place - I gave him 2 bills for an emergency issue that came up, reminded him twice and I haven't called him and he hasn't called me. I wouldn't mind a little bit more then the current cash flow (zip, zilch, nada) but it's nice not to have the calls at weird hours when I'm already tired.

I bet if I was better about getting rest I might not be staring at Access for hours on end not getting anywhere. I've currently got at least 3 tasks that involve going through endless sets of queries since the person who created them moved to another area. He's supposed to be around for questions - but since he never returns my calls. It's a series of about 7 different processes, each with about 12 supporting queries and tables generated from other queries - it's a massive fistfuck of logic. It's not even really something I can take the source table and work off that either as there are updates all down the line that create stats that everyone expects to see in the reports -- like anyone really reads them anyway.

OK enough complaining about work -- house stuff is on a positive.
I've got almost all the house stuff taken care of. The list was small when we bought the house: new chimney, patch up the basement walls, new dishwasher, new sliding glass door, gutters, and the driveway.

Technically the driveway could stay as is - I don't care, though it may cause issues with a snow blower. Only things left to do are the sliding glass door, driveway, wire up the gararge (they disconnected it when they removed the knob & tube wiring from the house) and maybe a new coat of paint for the house (and maybe gararge too). However, since it's been the same coat of paint since the siding went on in the 50s, I think it ought to last another couple years. Aspestos cement shingles -- durable if nothing else!

All in all things are well - everyone says we're still newlyweds because it still feels like it did before we got married. Truth be told, I'm a little afraid of what'll happen when there aren't any more projects for the house - will I start making up weird shit to do? Will we go do big elaborate trips and such?

Who knows, I think I like it that way.

Labels: house, lament, work

posted @ 22:15

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Monday, July 23, 2007

post://2940033367528615847/

So I took down my bulletin board. I guess I'm going to have to lock it up. Too many spammers, even with a image test and confirmation email. My next version will have super lock down.

I am hoping it can be a sort of mixer place where people can post items they might not necessarily put on their website. Of course it would probably be that much less effort for someone to post it on their website. I can still wish to be the cool kid...

I haven't yet posted today's links, they're on the work machine, but here's a neat little item:
Safari 3 beta for Windows
Fox News Website hole exposes 1.5 million users' personal info - and that number is coming directly out of my Wiki-hole. I don't think it's quite that high. Can FOX News really effect that many people?

Labels: lament, web

posted @ 20:26

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

post://2804805860269639768/

I'm kind of bummed. I volunteered for the Travelers Golf Tournament for the first time this year. I hadn't heard back from my "team captain" about what I'd be doing, and was also worried about it being so close to the wedding so I told them to please take me off the list. She replies back "They had you down as a laser operator".

A laser operator?? That sounds cool!!!
Too late, though. I did find this article about laser operators in golf. I would have been pointing at peoples' balls with a laser, measuring their location for input into the system.

A shame to miss such a neat opportunity, but I think my sanity is more important. It's not like I'd even be able to take the day off work because I'll be getting things ready for my 2 week absence.

Labels: lament

posted @ 07:56

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