Update again

Well about the motherboard failing, that wasn't it. After that post, the two hard drives linked to 1 molex plug to the power supply failed. So, in a flash of inspiration I disconnected both drives from the power supply and bingo, nothing appeared to be failing. So tonight I swapped my old but trusty Antec Truepower 480 and replaced the shitty generic 500w that this computer came with and bingo, my drives all appeared.

Next computer that I get will have a trustworthy PSU, that's for sure. Can't have enough as backup. Unlike the company that I work for, the IT department goes through PSUs like toilet paper. Once he bought 2, 1 to replace and 1 for backup, well, turns out he needed to use both when they arrived because the other PSUs were failing. Granted a PSU of good quality > $80, he bought the generic PSUs which were < $40. But the failure rate is much greater...

Yesterday I went to help a colleague move bricks. I don't know why I was so kind. The colleague is new to the company, and she and her family (and bf) lives in a newly bought place, and they are getting a retaining wall built in the back of their house. There's a tennis court and a swimming pool as well. They had 13 pallets of bricks, each brick is around 20 kg, and they've moved a bit before we helped yesterday. Well, we moved 4 pallets yesterday, leaving 7-8 pallets behind, and I have sore back. I'll probably try not to stand and sit too much tomorrow... Standing all day or sitting all day... probably standing all day is better. Getting old :P

Random pics from my phone

This week I was stuck in traffic for 1 extra hour. For about 1km. So it's around 16 meters per minute. That's 4 car lengths in a minute. It was like a car park. And there were helicopters flying too.And I had two passengers in the car too. Needless to say it wasn't fun.
However, I did rock past the point of accident. It wasn't a pretty sight.

This was at lunch some time ago.

A Kookaburra vs Magpie. Over a scrap of food.

The Magpie flew away cos he's a bit of an opportunist.

Colleagues trying to feed the Kookaburra.

Camera on the phone is a bit blurry. Oh well.

A word of warning

My bloody motherboard is failing. Since I'm the type of running a computer 24/7 it's a good indication of whether or not a motherboard is good. Or maybe I'm just unlucky.

The problem first happened a month or two ago. One (then two) of my hard drives started to stop working. I thought, great, all that stuff died. But then I moved ONE of the sata ports to another one, and they worked. Amazing. So the sata port on the motherboard was to blame.

The same thing happened again today. It's another drive this time. The newest drive in this computer. I didn't think the MTBF for hdd was less than 1 year, so I was really pissed off. So I opened up the case, and swapped a sata cable. Well, I swapped it back into the one I had swapped it out of first time (in the previous paragraph). The hard drive started the 'ticking' sound... meaning that sata port is truly stuffed. So I powered down, and swapped that cable into another 1 out of the other 3. And lo and behold, it works. So out of the 8 sata ports I have, 4 are still fine after a year, 2 have died, and 2 I haven't tried (because they were purple in color, and I think have a different speed setting?). Damn.

I don't wanna upgrade my computer till the i7 is mainstream and cheap.... Oh well.

Apart from that, nothing else to report. The world is going to crap, and well... my world isn't getting any better :P.