revchris

I came in this morning, and my computer is showing a large mass of error messages, all related to "Dude, your D: drive is hosed."

A quick trip to DoIT for a new 1TB drive (which is going to take ~3 hours to format), and I'm back up and running.

I plugged the old drive (a 2yr old WD) and it started clicking, so it's in the fridge cooling down, and when the new drive is done formatting, I'll pull it out and see if anything is recoverable.

I left the building around 11:30 to run an errand.

On the way out, I noticed that there was a car up against the front of the building, and people standing around it talking on cell phones. I continued on, as there was a good chance that it was somebody related to the construction going on out front (two street projects, a gas main project, building construction, and a water main leak).

A few minutes later, when I came back, there were two UWPD squads and two MPD squads parked around the area, and several officers were talking to the woman in the car, which is tight against the building.

I finished what I was doing and went back out to look, as one of the UW's bike officers rode up (she recognized me, so I could wander in closer to see what's up).

The woman driving the car had borrowed it from somebody at the hospital, and it completely lost brakes coming around the curve on Johnson, so she had the presence of mind to drop the transmission into first gear and then jump the curve to use terrain to slow the car down to where it would stop. In the process, one of our trees lost some bark, and the shrubs that the contractors messed up got run over, and there appears to be a scrape of paint on the front of the building.

The officers present were looking under the hood: All the evap canisters are cut off, the battery is sitting loose under the hood (and is too big for the brackets, and has extra long wires to let it connect), the A/C compressor had been removed, and, most inportantly in this case, the master cylinder has completely fallen apart. I'm guessing that, when this is all over, somebody is going to have words with somebody else about the quality of their automotive repair skills.

The prof who is buying the new microscope just mentioned today that they've got a new problem to work on.

He needs a completely non-metallic chair with wheels for the lab, as the amount of metal in a normal office chair will deflect the beam on the new scope enough to be noticeable.

Probably we're going to end up using wood chairs with no casters, unless we get lucky.

I'm doing laundry today. I took the second load out of the washer to put it into the dryer, and what do I find in the bottom of the washer?

My 32GB Flash drive.

I can now say that, in addition to everything else Corsair says about their Flash Survivor line of drives, they're also washing machine resistant (even with both the catalyst feature - which pretreats by spinning the laundry while it continuously pumps detergent and water through them - and a second rinse selected).

A while back (we're not sure anymore exactly when), someone at work used the Department's purchasing card to buy something on eBay.

Other people would like to be able to use the purchasing card to buy things via paypal, but can't, because we don't know who used the card, so we can't have them delete it from their account, and we're guessing that whoever it was isn't with the UW anymore.

I've been on the phone (on hold, mostly) with PayPal trying to find out how to fix this. SO far, they've told me that they can't help me if I don't have the account information, and told me I should start by trying the recover email option on their website. One of the agents at PayPal said that the account is under the cardholder's name, but I'm down to guessing at what phone number was used.

I'm currently on hold again, trying to talk my way around these problems, but it's looking more and more like it's going to be easier to just cancel the card and start over.

Edit: After, in essence, two "practice" calls, I called back a third time and hit all the right buzzwords to get transferred to someone who was able to actually tell me the name of the person who set up the account (one of the professors who retired 2-3 years ago, but probably was really done by one of his students) and the email address on the account (which we still have access to), letting me then use the "lost password" tool to start the process of fixing it.

The plumbers are working their way around campus this week turning off all of the outdoor faucets, even the freeze-proof ones, because of the coming cold. I opened doors for them to turn off both of the faucets at work. One can leak without causing much trouble (it's in the back of the foundry, and there is a floor drain), but the other one's in our server room.

This always reminds me that I need to redo the back faucet some day (freeze-proof spigot and ball valve shutoff), but until something goes wrong with it, I'm not going to do anything.

I did, however, shut off and bleed down both faucets at home, just in case.

Channel 3 is currently predicting -17F Thursday night, with -40F windchill.

My plan for this afternoon now is to deliver a sawzall, a hammer drill, and a tubing bender to some grad students, give them some basic instruction in cutting, bending, and wall-mounting stainless steel tubing, and then leave.

I just got an email asking about the directions for making EnginEarings, and realized I still had the old web page for it. It might actually be the first web page I ever made, and was done using WP Internet Publisher 6.1 in 1997 (yes, I took a page I had made in WordPerfect and exported it into HTML, in a process that leaves code almost as clean as what I write now, unlike how MSWord does it)!

Somebody's been making more of them every few years, as the undergrads frequently use them as a fundraiser and take them to one of the national conferences to help offset the trip costs, and they just got a request for the original directions (which include the grain growth process, etching, and anodizing).

I just got a new USB drive because my old one finally died.

It belongs to work, and it's the drive I normally carry for updating sofware on computers.

In the process, I upgraded to a 32GB Corsair Flash Survivor drive.

The real problem with USB drives of that size is that it takes forever to put all the stuff you want onto the drive.

After 3-4 hours of file copying, I've got about 21GB of stuff on it.

Today started with the potential to be "One of Those days."

I woke up late, having apparently turned off my alarm clock and then fallen back asleep. Not very late, I was only going to be about 30 minutes later than normal to work.

Got up, got ready to go, mixed up oatmeal (oatmeal, dried fruit, brown sugar), put it in the microwave and started packing lunch. About the time my breakfast was ready, I started to smell something burnt.

Microwaved oatmeal smells just like burnt popcorn when you forget to add water before you heat it up.

Now, starting from that beginning, I'm replacing monitors and rebuilding microscopes.

We'll see how today goes from here.