Happy Birthday, shacker!

Well, that “last thing” that micropro wanted me to try before I sent back my board didn’t get me anywhere, so I called them to arrange the cross-shipping. They are sending the replacement parts 2nd day (like my original order) which is neat. Also of note is that I should get the other RAM that I ordered (from a place other than Micropro), so I will be able to put that in the motherboard I have to see if the first stick of RAM is the culprit. EIther way, by monday, hopefully this will all be straightened out…

Tuesday night, just as I was getting ready to leave, Andres and Pedro (Pres/CEO and CTO of Rovia, respectively) called up to the office saying that they were just about to leave, but then decided to go racing at F1 Boston. I hadn’t been there before, and it sounded pretty cool, so after some hedging, I decided to go for it. Carlos and Omar came along as well, so it was like a little work stress reliever.. It took us ages to get there, mostly because of the traffic, and once we got there we had to wait 2 hours for track time, but it was quite the fun time once we were on the track.

You drive go-karts, but it is an indoor track (they actually have 2), and the track has hills, overpasses, chicanes, etc. It was pretty wild… The races are 15 minutes long, 15 laps, rolling start. It was quite a lot of fun, even though I got severely trounced… :) The first race, I simply think that my car was lame, since I had the pedal to the floor the entire time (no braking), and the second time this guy (not from Rovia) kept ‘fighting’ with me, jumping the green flag (he got penalized for that), passing me on yellows when the corner marshalls weren’t looking, spinning me when he could… It sucked a lot…. :)

All in all, it was a ton of fun, and I will go back, but not too soon… It was quite a lot of money (\$25 a race)…

I called Micro Pro to ask for an RMA for either my motherboard or ram, expecting to get the “have you tried this” runaround for an hour or so, but they ended up being way-cool about it. They asked if I had tried a few things, and I quickly explained to them what I had tried, and the guy was pretty satisfied with what I had tried… He gave me one more thing to try, but also gave me an RMA number just in case that one thing doesn’t work so I don’t have to call tech support again if it doesn’t work.

They do cross-shipment, which is cool, so when I get home I will try his suggestion and when it doesn’t work (which I don’t think it will), I will call sales and get them to ship me the replacements. While it kinda sucks that this shit just didn’t work OOTB, it is nice having tech support treat you like an intelligent human. :)

….but I know that everyone has these problems sooner or later…

All my computer gear came today, I put it all together, and nothing works…. Well, I can’t say that, more like “I can’t tell what’s broken”. When I power it up, it just beeps at me before it gets to its BIOS. Now, normally these beeps can provide you with some debug information (by the number and duration of beeps), but I get a different pattern of beeps each time I boot the machine (sometimes they are the same across boots, but not usually)… I tried the “remove as much hw as possible” approach, same deal. I even tried booting uniprocessor (one processor in the machine; tried with both processors), and no dice…

I suspect the motherboard (mostly because I doubt both processors are bad), so I am going to call the vendor tomorrow and see if they can crossship me a new one… It could be the ram as well, but luckily I ordered the mobo and ram from the same place. :) And here I was thinking I would be able to compile code and encode MP3’s wicked fast tonight..

I went to the mall to get the new star wars DVD, some blank CDs’, and I also stopped at the Cheesecake Factory for a slice to bring back here…. mmmmm…

I’m gonna get you too

I think I found a low-impact solution to the new project I have been assigned here at work… Now I just have to wait for omar to get in to talk to him about the protocol changes that are necessary…

Vision, Vision…

My aforementioned fried chicken was awesome…. I look forward to eating it cool tomorrow.. Work is going to be extraordinarily busy this week… I had a new project, with a friday deadline, dropped in my lap today… So I might be a bit less visible until then… This kinda sucks, because I had planned on taking it a bit easier this week so I would have more time after work to play with my new computer. :)

We all caught Mulholland Dr. tonight… A beautiful, beautiful film….. Confusing in the usual David Lynch sense, but certainly a wonderful movie… My head is still spinning, perhaps a better review after dawn..