Archive for September, 2007
Laptop is in the mail
I finally got to send it out on Saturday morning before the gym.
Friday night, I went over to Indyweb’s new location and Mike helped me back up my hard drive. It was pretty easy actually, the drive in the laptop is a SATA, so I should be able to mess around with it at home as well on my SATA hard drive enclosure.
He didn’t end up charging me anything for the 20 minutes of work. I barely had any files on the computer really, so it was an easy job. We did it pretty quick, put some on my flash, some on a CD.
Later on Friday night I hooked up my drive again to my desktop and I just went through and deleted personal files. Don’t like the idea of HP going through my DV9225 laptop to fix stuff and just browsing through whatever. The whole process is very invasive, I don’t like it at all.
Fedex told me that it didn’t matter whether I brought the box by on Friday night or Saturday morning, it wouldn’t arrive to Monday either way. So, I took that time to do the backup Friday night and went Saturday instead.
Now, 7-9 days to fix. They will probably have to replace the motherboard if video is built on. Not a small deal, glad it is under warranty. I will have to check with them Thurs-Fri to see where things are at.
More Marley, baseball and bonfires
We ran the laptop by Fedex in the morning really quick and then met Dave at the gym at 9:30.
After we were done, I said Dave could come over for breakfast if he wanted, and being a single guy, I haven’t seen him turn down the offer yet:) We stopped to pick up some groceries and a gift card at Target, and then we headed to the post office where I needed to mail out some arcade boards to get fixed.
While Sarah and Dave cooked, I ran to Blockbuster and the bank. When I got home, we all ate quickly.
Dave made some large pancakes that were supposed to be crepes, we think next time we’ll concentrate on making them crispier. We also had waffles, links, and eggs. Dave had to run out to get ready for the Vincent wedding.
Sarah and I sat down and read our 30 pages or so of Marley. Towards the end of that amount we started to get really choked up. They had started to talk about putting him down, and that was just a little too close to home after what happened to us in February. We weren’t sure if we could keep reading together out loud, so fortunately it was our quota for the day, and it was time to stop.
Sarah headed off to the Settle wedding that she got invited too, turns out the reception was right across from the street of our old apartment.
Sarah left and I mowed the back yard. Everything has been growing like crazy. This past week, wham!, fall hit. All of a sudden we have these really cool temperatures, we open up the house, I am wearing wind breakers in the morning. Temps here are like a lightswitch. It was cold in the morning when I got up and wandered around to find my breakfast.
Came inside, I had a quote to do and some website updates. The updates I couldn’t do, the website was down, so I turned on the Red Sox Yankees game and laid down. I was really cozy, it was nice to take a nap, watch the game, and watch the Red Sox whoop the Yankees 10-1. Sarah called during to see if I wanted to come to the reception, apparently it was fine. But there was no way I was moving.
Later on, Dave called from the wedding. He wanted to know what we were doing after, sounded like maybe we would all get together and go out to Wes and Kate’s for a bonfire. Sounded like fun. I had a late dinner, worked on the quote a little bit, and then we headed out.
Paula and Dave both came as well as Styf’s. It was a gorgeous night, we setup some powerful free standing lights and tossed a football around. The girls sat by the fire and talked, some about the wedding, mostly about general stuff. We had some drinks and just chilled out. Wes was really funny tonight, so we just let him do all the talking. Styf’s had to leave pretty early, they had a house guest, so it was just the six of us for most of the night, and it was pretty low key. But that was just the perfect way to end the day.
Space Invaders Deluxe works again!
I got the boards back in the game last night, powered up the game, and it worked like a champ. I was pretty pumped, played a couple of games…I wish that I was into it. It is pretty challenging, and a really cool design on the inside, but there is something about the gameplay that I don’t think I would ever play it a ton.
Here is a photo of it working.
Car & computer maintainance and reading about a dog named Marley
Busy busy day. Dropped off my car in the morning for an oil change. We got to head home about the usual time, a little after 4, picked up the car and Sarah headed home as I headed up the street to Indyweb. They were the good old boys that we shared an office space with eSystems for a while at Sherman park. Mike said he could help me out and do a backup on my laptop harddrive, and for much cheaper than Best Buy or Circuit City would do. They made me an awesome offer of $100 for 9GB of data. Man, if my laptop was my primary machine, that would be very expensive.
The whole backup took only 20 minutes. After I saw the drive out of the computer, and what Mike did, I knew that I could do it from home. I wanted to do it from home again too, we just copied my files off the drive, and I wanted to erase most of my files before I sent it off to HP. Something about having them see my personal photos didn’t thrill me, and with the possibility of the laptop being wiped out, why not right?
When I got back Sarah and I took Nokes for a walk. I found out I had until 8 pm tonight to take the laptop out in the provided express box, or just take it tomorrow morning, it would arrive at HP at the same time.
When we got back, Sarah relaxed. I had some feedback for a client I needed to get out on a project scope.
Last night we had talked with my parents about a book that we would be getting for free, a 401K financial investments kind of book. My parents had read it out loud together, and I thought that sounded like a good idea. I knew that this meant Sarah and I needed to finish reading “Marley and Me” first. We had gotten through about 170 since last December, most of that was while we were on the road over Christmas. I hadn’t felt that motivated to me, I wasn’t as captivated by the story given the subject matter as I thought I would be. But I knew Sarah wanted to read it, so I figured if we read about 35 pgs a night for four nights, we could be done.
Tonight we read 50, so we are in really good shape to be done with the book by the time the 401K book arrives in the mail.
That was about it for Sarah. She was pretty wiped out from the week, being sick, and the general frustration of her class.
I was up really late, actually. With all of the files I got from my laptop, I did a ton of file organization and needed backups that I had put off for a month. I also went ahead and disassembled my external hard drive so that I could tap into my sata drive from the laptop and clear things off there as best I could. I got things around for the morning too, there were a coupe of packages that would need to go out and a bill or two, so I got that all ready.
Putting WG4700 Series monitor in R-Type
On Sunday night I got the bug to progress with this.
I had to take a whole bunch of stuff apart in the hacked together Mr. Do! cab, so much so that I am not completely sure I could get it back together again after another month or so. I would more than likely probably forget.
I got the monitor out and the isolation transformer. I brought everything out by the R-Type, and took the nice monitor out of the R-Type. I gathered up my supplies and remembered that I didn’t have any solder wick. I was going to need to add longer wires to the Isolation Transformer and I would have to desolder the old wires. I wanted to have a new clean connection, so I would just wait until I got more wick.
On Monday I got some wick and immediately I went ahead and desoldered the old wires and cut new wires. I soldered them on, and then got to looking a little closer. I think the wire I have is probably 20 gauge, and there is a slight enough difference between these and the old wires in size that makes me think the old wires were 18 gauge.
So, I stalled again. Such a stupid simple question, but not something I know. What is the minimum wire gauge you have to use when connecting wires to the 0V and 115V connections on the isolation transformer.
I posted on the original topic I had made in the KLOV forums, and I got little reply in a day. Someone told me that it was bad to go down in gauge, completely not answering my question. I am not sure of the gauge, and not sure how to test it save putting it in the little holes in my stripping tool to see what is closest. That doesn’t seem exact.
So, back to bugging poor old Bob Roberts since he is familiar with this topic already.
He told me that 20 gauge would work, but 18 is better. So, I am going to waste what I did and put some 18 gauge on there, hopefully tonight.
The other issue with the monitor is the RGB connection. It was something pretty weird on the other game, the molex connector having wires going in every other slot, not right next to each other like you typically see with a RGB pigtail. I will have that stupid little hurdle to overcome.
Space Invaders Deluxe Boards Arrived
I was happy to find these waiting for me tonight when I got home. I emailed my potential buyer to let them know. They would like to see some photos of the machine working again….naturally. I will have to try to get those to them tonight. But either way, it doesn’t sound like we will be working out something for 2-3 more weeks.
Jr. Pac-man truck progress
The truck continues to move along, but at a little slower pace than the beginning.
The last I heard it is still in North Carolina with the disassemble project they were working on. But, there is some good news for those getting games. There will be no new stops added, so hopefully the route it has is final and we can better judge when it will arrive.
I heard Rick is going to be out of town for a week, so I figure that the truck won’t even be to his place for another week. That puts the truck at my place now somewhere around the 21st of September. I assume they are still coordinating with Rick, he has other games than mine that they want.
The time is benefiting me from a savings point, but it is hard to stay patient.
