There are Stars in the Southern Sky -Thursday, May 06, 2004 -4:40 am-
Well, it has been and interesting 24 hours. It started yesterday with me going to Bre's again to preform the phoenix thing with a winbox. It took the usual 5 hours and then I hung... err... laid in a pile on the floor with the girls until 3am. Walking down 9th to the car, someone a long ways behind me hollered, "Sir! Excuse me, hold up a sec!" Hearing that whatever was going on was a long way from me, I stopped and turned to see what the guy wanted. I felt my attacker just before he landed. I managed to turn to him and get my forehead into his nose or mouth. I'm not sure which, but it crunched a lot. Next, he got a knee to the groin. I'm not sure I did that on purpose. I'm thinking my legs had started to run without asking my eyes if the way was clear and he was just kind of in the way. I proceeded to run like hell, jump in the car, and race off. I'd like to claim that I was a big studly man and beat off my attacker but I just freaked out in a useful manner. The only smart thing I did was to run like hell. I have one hell of a headache and a bit of a limp today. I'm not entirely sure I wasn't struck in the hip with something because it's really stiff and sore today but there's no bruise. Today, when I told the girls what had happened as I left, one of them mentioned that the night before someone had hailed them from down the street the same way I was hailed. Being infinitely much smarter than I am, they ran like hell and skipped the getting attacked stage.
Wednesday, today, I took off because I felt I could use the time. While sitting at the server working in Photoshop, the server made an odd noise, kind of like a very short phasor burst. I looked at it, confused. Several seconds later, it happened again. I wrote it off as some random thing the sound card felt like doing. When I turned back to my work, I found that the machine had locked up. This is the point at which my recent immersion in the world of Windows played me false. My reaction to my Apple locking up, and event that has never happened to me on that computer before, was simply to reboot and figure it would fix itself. It did, or at least it seemed to. About 2 hours later I noticed that my desktop was a bit bare. Hmm... count the icons... One! ... um... did we already do one? Ahh, yes. Two hours ago the computer asked the discs to spin up for a read/write, something made an odd noise like a phasor, the computer froze, and now I'm an icon short. It makes perfect sense. I lost a hard drive. I contacted the First National Bank of Mom and secured the purchase of a new drive. When I got home (see adventure below), I took most of the machine apart and booted it again. I was able to get the failed HDD to mount and pull the data off of it. Thinking back, the innards of the server were really hot when I opened it up after the HDD failed. By the time I got home with the new one, everything was at room temperature. My HDD died the heat death. Needless to say, there have been steps taken to reduce the internal temperature of the case. As an interesting side note, even though the HDDs and the graphics card were uncomfortably hot to the touch at the time for failure, the CPU core temperature was only 37C. God bless PowerPC chips.
My final great ordeal occurred as I was trying to leave CompUSA with my new HDD. As I moved our of my parking spot, I felt a disturbance in the force. All was not right with the car. I quickly realized that the left rear wheel was behaving less as a wheel and more as a, well, skid I guess. Stop goes the car, out comes the jack, up goes the wheel. The left rear hub is frozen solid. looking under it, I see that that parking break cable is very slack. Operating on the idea that said cable should merely be loose when the brake is off and connecting that idea to the fact that the parking break only operated the rear brakes, I decide that the brake has seized in the on position. It turns out that I am right. The problem with being right is that it doesn't let the car roll. After much comparing the right hub to the left, I notice there's a difference in position in two pieces. Hoping that this is the lever that activated the parking brake, I attempt to force it to move. This lead to the idea of beating the hell out of it to get it to move. The only problems are that I do not have a hammer and that the space in which I have to beat is about two inches. Seizing upon the Multi-Function Blunt Object (a.k.a. jack handle) that Toyota has thoughtfully included at no extra cost to me, I beat the hell out of the brake. Of course, accounting for the space in which I was working, this ends up sounding like someone calling the farm hands to lunch with a large and badly tuned triangle. Thankfully when the clattering is done, the wheel spins freely. Of course, as soon as I pull into the parking lot at my apartment, I pull the damn brake on, so I'm back where I started.
Oh, and I bought pants. The 13th pair (literally) fit.
writebacks...
tiggerbone wrote
All things considered, the attack could have gone so much worse. I am glad that you were not seriously injured or killed. Please be careful.
buttercup102280 wrote
williaty wrote
Weird things when I'm around? Never! Not around me!
Glad to know you're ok, I had missed you.
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