Yeah, I suppose I should probably update in here more often, though it feels like I don’t have that much to say. I suppose I can throw out an update on the crap I’m working on…
- 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.