I had to replace the sprinkler valve in the front yard, as well – it just developed a pinhole leak in the body of the valve that would just start spraying as soon as the valve got water pressure.  It would actually flood part of the yard.  That repair is “done”, except that I haven’t been able to get home during daylight to actually turn the water back on and make sure everything works.

Then things start getting expensive.  The Mazdaspeed3 needs new brakes, and since it uses rotors roughly the size of pie plates and pads to match, that was $350 on parts alone.  And that’s with a heavy discount.  Haven’t had time to do that job yet but I should this weekend.

The big killer, though, is the kitchen.  More accurately, the refrigerator and range.  When we bought the place, it came with a stainless Frigidaire side-by-side fridge, a black dishwasher (I think it’s a Whirlpool? Honestly, I don’t remember), a stainless microwave (I think it’s another Frigidaire), and what I suspect was the original 1999 white Frigidaire range, with a coil cooktop.  Well, that fridge had already seen one compressor replacement under warranty, but I didn’t think anything of it until Saturday night when we got home and the ice coming out of the dispenser was half melted away.  Turns out it wasn’t even cold, and when you plugged it in, the compressor would buzz for a few seconds, then overheat and shut off.  Some Googling confirmed that this was a textbook compressor failure, and is apparently very common on that model.  The repair would be $600-$800, which simply isn’t worth it on a seven-year-old unit with a clearly flawed design.

So, we just let the wallet take a bit of a beating and got the Samsung 26 cubic foot french-door refrigerator. Lowes had it on sale for $1398 (they still do as of today, actually) and with a 10% coupon on top of that, it was such a nice buy that we went ahead and replaced the range too.  This time we stuck with Frigidaire, since clearly that’s the only appliance in the house that made it a full decade.  Lowes had a Frigidaire Gallery “platinum” (stainless-look, but easier to maintain) range with a glass cooktop for $698, and that same 10% coupon.

Definitely my most expensive weekend since buying the MS3, but now we’ve got an awesome fridge and a much nicer, much easier to clean range.  It’s worth it.

Oh, and on top of all of this, my desktop computer is dead.  I’ve tested every component other than the motherboard and CPU with known-good parts, and seeing as I can make it pass Memtest86+ (but not properly initialize the video card) I suspect it’s a southbridge issue.  Time to deal with an RMA with Gigabyte.

On the topic of Sprint, Kate and I had been on what’s commonly known as the old SERO plan – a Sprint Employee Referral Offer service plan.  It was awesomely cheap, $30/mo base price which included 500 anytime minutes, unlimited nights and weekends, unlimited text, and unlimited data.  Either Sprint eventually got too many customers on this bandwagon or realized that it would become too unprofitable with the newer, more data-hungry phones, so all of Sprint’s ‘desirable’ smartphones (the Samsung Instinct line, the Palm Pre / Pixi, and all Android phones) are not availble on this plan; you have to move to the newer and much less discounted EPRP plan, or stick with a Windows Mobile phone.

I went the stick-with-WM route since I’m familiar with it, and the Touch Pro 2 is a really nice piece of hardware, even if it is pricey.  But Kate’s Centro was finally at the end of its rope, and she hates WinMo (I don’t blame her) so the only option was to finally upgrade to a shared EPRP 1600 minute plan to get her a Palm Pre.  That part was actually completely painless.  To make this plan price-competitive with the old SERO plan, though, it needs to be split multiple ways, so we were going to put Kate’s sister on the plan too – she also really wants a Pre.  The first rep, who activated the Pre and converted my plan, said we could do the Transfer of Liability on the phone but it would take five days to complete.  Unfortunately, my sister-in-law wasn’t expecting the call, and they needed her to verify her own account.

A short time later, I got a hold of her, and tried to three-way call Sprint.  Either the MightyROM I have on my phone broke it or I just fail, but I couldn’t make that work, so I just told her to stay by the phone and I’d have Sprint conference her in.  I called in and, since it didn’t seem like an activation issue, I went for the “general support” section of their phone menu.  The first rep I got verified some of my info, or at least attempted to for about half a second before giving up and passing me off to another rep, claiming her computer was going too slow.  The second rep indignantly told me that I had called tech support and clearly I should have called activations. Would she transfer me?  No, she gave me a phone number, which I called…and it was sales, not activations.
So I hung up and dialed their regular menu again, and made my way back to activations.  This time I got someone who clearly just didn’t feel like doing any work… “You can’t do that on the phone” was all I could get out of her, despite the fact that both the original rep and the one who told me I needed to talk to activations had both told me it could be done, as did the Sprint store my sister-in-law had been at earlier in the day.  She just became a broken record, and having dealt with that type before, I just hung up and tried again.

I call in, navigate through the menu yet again, and get someone else in activations – who literally took all of about three minutes to get my sister-in-law on the phone, confirm both of our identities, and complete the transfer of liability.  Done, just like that, in probably less time than I had spent with the rep immediately prior who insisted I had been told wrong and that I had to go to a store.

Sprint, I love your cheap rate plans and your fast data service, and some of your reps are outstanding…but some of them are just awful.  What’s the deal?

This is what happens when the sliders on the original brakes on a 112,000 mile Camry decide to seize up and wear one pad down to the backing plate.

“It’s making a little noise…”

Fired it back up after that and was immediately greeted with it running fsck on first the boot drive (old 80GB PATA Western Digital), which passed, and then on the RAID0 scratch array (two 200GB Maxtor SATA drives) which also passed.  Of course, /dev/md0 wasn’t started properly since it was down two devices, so it couldn’t even be mounted for its overdue fsck.  Ubuntu gave me the choice to go on or to go into a root prompt…I decided to go with the root prompt.

I ran the following, which made some progress:

mdadm --assemble --force --verbose /dev/md0 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 ...

For whatever reason the drive letters assigned change around each time I reboot, so I don’t recall which ones were actually in the command.  It then tried to start the array, at which point I was greeted with quite a few console messages about how ata2 and /dev/sdb were not responding properly.  After a short time of that, it marked only that drive as failed and the array indicated 5/6 available – degraded, but working and valid data.  Ran smartctl -i /dev/sdb to find the model and serial number of the affected drive (the RAID5 has both -JS and -KS series Western Digital 500GB drives) and found the culprit, one of the original -JS drives.  Pulled it and applied for an advance RMA, which thankfully Western Digital does not charge you anything for (unlike Seagate).

I ordered a replacement -KS drive from Amazon since it was nearly half the price of the drive at Fry’s, and it was far and away the cheapest way to get it here overnight thanks to Amazon Prime.  It came in today, so I went ahead and slotted it into the server and fired it up.  All it took was fdisk -l to format the fresh drive with a single fd partition, and then adding it to the array:

mdadm /dev/md0 -A /dev/sdd1

That was probably not quite an hour ago and it’s been rebuilding automatically ever since.  Current status from /proc/mdstat:

md0 : active raid5 sdd1[6] sdi1[0] sde1[5] sdc1[4] sdg1[3] sdh1[2]

2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/5] [U_UUUU]

[=====>...............]  recovery = 28.1% (137402240/488383936) 

finish=184.1min speed=31755K/sec

md0 : active raid5 sdh1[6](F) sdd1[5] sdc1[4] sdf1[3] sdg1[2] sdi1[7](F)
      2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/4] [__UUUU]

Looks like I get a trial-by-fire of MD RAID recovery tonight, once I figure out what broke.

Not bad for an affordable motherboard (Gigabyte EP45-DS3L, $85 or so after rebate), some cheap Kingston DDR2-800 RAM, and a $30 heatsink.  Core voltage is only 1.28V – I’m not going to bother pushing it harder because at this point the RAM is already overclocked and I can’t run the RAM any slower than the current speed.  I’m happy with the speed, a 3.1GHz quad-core Core2 is quite the upgrade from my 2.5GHz dual-core Opteron.

One of these days I’ll probably slap a new video card in here (current one is getting a bit old, 7900GS) but I’m in no rush.  Probably when the next-gen midrange gets cheap.

• The truck: With gas prices down, I should be driving it a lot more and doing donuts in parking lots for no good reason.  But, it’s been sidelined since October when one of the front tires decided that it should be oblong instead of round.  Took some time to order in some Radial T/As to replace both fronts (which are at least five years old) and then some new centercaps to replace the none-too-pretty GM 4×4 caps on the wheels.  Of course, I also want to get them powdercoated, which means I need to take the wheels off, take them to a shop to have the tires dismounted and save the rears, go get the wheels powdercoated, then get the tires mounted back up and put them back on the truck.  The reality is I probably won’t have time to do that until after Christmas, because during my time off for Christmas I do plan on getting the garage organized properly, which means I have to be able to roll the truck back out.  Kinda hard to do if it’s on stands.
• The Miata: Decided it wants a slice of the ol’ budget.  Due for an oil change, and decided to pop both a headlight and a taillight.  Probably pick all of that up at Autozone tomorrow and work on it this weekend.  Getting close to time to do the timing belt and everything that entails.
• The Volvo: Passed emissions finally, at which point I stopped giving a crap about it once more.  Would love to replace it with any of a large list of cars, but due to financial and practicality constraints, the most likely candidate at this point looks like the ’06-’08 Mazda Mazdaspeed3.
• The backup box: It’s been struggling along on hardware that a friend gave to me for free years ago because it was acting up too much to use as a desktop.  The hardware has always been sketchy as long as I have used it, but good ‘enough’ for a system that only needs to be up long enough to complete a rsync job as scheduled by BackupPC.  Something has gone south, and now it won’t stay on for more than about 3 minutes.  I suspect the CPU is going (pretty sure it got overheated at one point years ago, it’s an AthlonXP) or maybe the motherboard is toast.  Either way, I needed hardware to replace it with…which meant upgrading other stuff.
• My desktop: So I need hardware for the backup, and I don’t want to buy more old hardware.  My desktop was getting a bit old, and moreso, Kate’s was getting quite old (after all I had built it on a shoestring budget when it was new two years ago).  So I’ve upgraded mine – Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, 4GB RAM, and a Gigabyte P45 board.  Threw a fresh install of Vista on it and so far, so good.  Once I get the mounting bracket for my new heatsink in, I can try overclocking it – I did try a 2.8GHz clock just for fun and while it looks stable, at full load the temperature skyrockets with the stock cooler.  Kate’s computer is getting my old dual-core Opteron 165 (overclocked from 1.8 to 2.5GHz) / ASRock  ULi motherboard / 2GB of RAM to replace her Athlon64 3000+, 1GB of RAM, and nVidia nForce board (some variant of the NF4 with onboard graphics).  That last bit is going into the backup box, though I have a sneaky feeling I might need to pick up another add-in hard drive controller.  Next step is to find time to do the upgrade on Kate’s machine.
• Work: Not bad, not bad at all.  Given the nature of the position, though, it means this time of year is really, really slow – I suspect that if the sales reps don’t get any contracts in hand by this Friday, they’re probably not going to get much of anything in before the year’s end.  Nobody wants to pull the trigger on anything important in their business this close to the holidays, especially when the economy is crap.
• Personal life: Sick.  That is, Kate has been sick seemingly non-stop for a few weeks (nothing major, just a few unrelated things and a cold that won’t die) and I finally got the cold on Friday.  I think I’m on the tail end of it but my throat is still nice and raw.

Yup, that about sums it all up right now.

Blocked punts are awesome.