Blessed by the Potato

This security light has caused us nothing but trouble. First, it was old and cycling a lot (they’re supposed to be changed every 3 years from the listed manufacturer’s lifetime rating — but they don’t burn out like incandescents, they just start cycling more, drawing more and more power, while providing less and less light), and alone was consuming about a third of our household’s electricity use. Then we had to wait months for a dry day to try to get on the roof (it was just one of those winters/springs where the roof was constantly covered in snow or rain) to change it out. When we finally borrowed a ladder (and a brave soul) to get up there, we found that the model of sodium lamp used had been discontinued. Fortunately, our landlord managed to find one for us, and we had intense orange light scaring away car thieves for about 3 days.

Now it’s dead, and I have no idea why.

The landlord took the old bulb, and I suspect she threw it out, so replacing it to see if it’s the bulb or the fixture probably isn’t going to be an option. Likewise, those high pressure sodium lamps cost over $30 (and I have no idea where she found one), so just picking up a second to test out isn’t on the table. I feel bad bugging the landlord, especially since if it’s not fixed in a week I’m going to be off in Ottawa… Ugh.

There was a big power outage last night, lasted for almost exactly an hour. I’m glad the webserver came back up — my main desktop computer was on the UPS, so I had lots of time to give it a graceful shutdown (and secretly wondered how long my old CRT would have lasted on battery power, chalking up another point for the LCD flatscreen), but the webserver was only plugged into the surge protector and went off instantly. I was afraid it would get mad at me and not automagically start Apache, but it looks like everything went off without a hitch. I didn’t even have to adjust the DNS forwarding :)

I had a dream last night that my car was stolen, again. It was exceptionally vivid and realistic. So realistic that I actually woke up believing it was true; the first thing I did when I woke up was start going through rental company listings to make sure I could get back to Toronto this weekend with my cat… then saw that my car was actually safe and sound in the parking lot. It’s a strange experience getting lost in a dreamworld like that, especially after polishing off another issue of the Sandman that week.

I’m really hating these sony vaio notebooks at the moment.

A long time ago, my dad was a loyal Dell customer, then we had 2 laptops in a row crap out in rapid succession, and we were stuck with a desktop that had weird proprietary parts and was nigh impossible to upgrade. From there, we went to Toshiba for notebooks (and bought one HP desktop for my sister, primarily because it had an attractive moulded plastic case, and I built my own desktop). They served us well: they were functional, ergonomic, stylish, and delivered decent power for the money. Then my dad was in the Sony store buying a TV or something and they sold him on a computer. It was fairly stylish, light, and extremely quiet (especially compared to my roaring Toshiba with its desktop processor) but not particularly powerful for the money. Since then he’s bought 3 more (4 total in the family now), the latest one coming pre-loaded with Vista.

That one though is just an ugly brick. It is quiet and cool, but it has no style. It’s heavy, with square corners and I find the keyboard isn’t placed quite right to be comfortable… the power brick has a pretty short set of cords, and they’re asymmetrical so that the bit between the brick and the wall isn’t long enough to keep the brick on top of a desk, if so desired. Of course, the biggest problem is that it came pre-loaded with Vista. After discussing the options with my dad, we decided reformatting to XP is the way to go for him, since he’s not very computer savvy and will have to switch to other XP systems constantly and doesn’t want to get confused (that and there’s no guarantee that all his software would work). The effort should be worthwhile since it would be easier for me to support him (I can’t help him troubleshoot an OS I don’t know) and it would save having to buy new versions of Office, Quicken, etc. There was the risk that some of the proprietary Sony stuff wouldn’t work (I figured the battery monitor and the memory stick reader in particular) but it should still basically function for what he needs.

So, after installing XP… nothing works. The ethernet, the wireless, the graphics acceleration, the sound, just nothing works. I figured Sony would have drivers on their website, but they’re Vista-only. I tried installing them anyway, but the installer says it’s for XP and instantly quits, without giving me the option of trying. To get around that, I tried grabbing the XP drivers for similar Sony laptops (same, or similar components), and in that case the installer says it’s not designed for my notebook and quits. It’s too smart for its own good! So now I’ve spent hours scouring the web and trolling forums to find out what each component is and getting 3rd party (or component manufacturer) drivers for everything. I still haven’t got the wireless working, which is pretty essential for my dad, but at least I’ve got the regular ethernet finally, so I can start the long process of patching windows.

And, of course, there’s no going back. Not only did it not come with a proper Windows Vista CD (when was the last time a computer did?), but it didn’t even come with one of those lame “restore” CDs. There was a “restore” partition on the hard drive (which always seemed like a waste to me — like constantly carrying around your restore CDs), but once I installed XP, I lost access to that partition, and don’t know why (though I suspect a weird Vista-only hard drive driver may be at fault). I’ve poured over 10 hours into this now, and have only one or two roads left to try to get the wireless working, and if that doesn’t work I guess I’m going to have to borrow (or download) a Vista disk to reinstall. Hopefully the paranoid authentication process will let me use the OEM activation code again…

Update: After spending another four hours on this (hey, my scan time went into the crapper and I was all set for an all-nighter anyway) I finally got the essentials working. The third Realtek sound driver I tried (from Realtek — none of the Sony ones worked) eventually worked. Once that worked the modem drivers worked too. I suppose I should have realized that earlier, but a software modem I guess needs some kind of audio processor. (In fact in the device manager, it even mentions the modem is attached to the sound card).

The wireless was the worst motherfucker of them all. I think my biggest problem is the exceptionally generic “LAN-Express” name Sony gave it. Everywhere I looked indicated that that name was used by Sony for various Atheros chips. I tried at least a dozen different Atheros utilities and drivers, from all over the internet (I got a wise-extractor to rip the drivers out of the other Sony packages to bypass the “too smart for its own good” factor, and tried the same trick on various HP drivers that were supposed to be for the same Atheros chips) — which was unfortunately necessary because Atheros itself doesn’t seem to have a drivers section. Finally, finally I found a site that told me the VGN-N250E doesn’t have an Atheros chip at all, but rather an Intel 3945ABG PRO/Wireless card. Bangarang, I was in (and having had to get Intel drivers before, I didn’t think their site was all that good… but now after trying for all these other drivers, I’ve got to say they’re one of the best).

There’s a lot that still doesn’t work: the keyboard controls for screen brightness don’t work; the memorystick reader doesn’t work (not a big issue, my dad never uses it), the touchpad works, but doesn’t have any of the advanced functions (the scrolling by sliding along the edges, or a way to turn it off when typing a lot or using a mouse). I think those are all compromises my dad will live with to spare him having to learn another operating system.

Wow, was that a long weekend. Scans every day, finishing off with 14 consecutive hours in the MRI suite on holiday monday. Imagine the overtime I’d get if I was actually employed!

It was getting pretty rough there, with no breaks to go eat, so I had a cooler bag with lunch and dinner. I had a cancellation right around lunch, which was kind of good in a way, since I was starting to fall behind in my schedule, and it gave me about a half hour to run to Timmy’s to stock up on donuts and get some more ice for the cooler bag. I got home last night just absolutely exhausted, and did not sleep at all well. Now I’m getting ready to go back for more scans tonight. It never stops!

About halfway into the afternoon, an orderly came by and dropped a patient (as in, an actual sick person in a wheelchair) at the door of the MRI, and ran off even though I was yelling at him (I couldn’t leave the console for another 10 minutes or so). Finally I get a chance to go up to this poor woman and ask her what she’s here for, and if I can help her (hoping that she’s not going to say “I’m here for an MRI”). She’s here for “a scan”. I ask if she knows what kind of scan, if its an emergency case, and if she knew whether they paged someone to come in and take care of her because I’m not a doctor… she says the only thing she knows is she has to get an injection. Well that, at least, tells me that nobody’s expecting me to give her an emergency MRI. I start searching the mostly lights-out nuclear medicine department for someone that might know what to do. Finally, hidden way in back around the corner in one of the treatment rooms I find one of the nuc med techs, who had been called in to help this woman and knew exactly what to do (and was also confused as to why she was dropped off at the MRI).

So, crisis averted, it was back to scanning for me. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. We have two machines networked together to run the MRI. Basically, one is supposed to be running the scans, and the images are instantly sent to the other one for backing up to CD-R and viewing. Unfortunately, the hard drive on the other one filled up sometime on Friday, and noone who knew how to properly back it up and clear it off came in, which meant a lot of intense multitasking for me to make sure I got all my stuff backed up without having to spend an extra 7 hours at the end of the day to get it done. I was worried the same would happen to the main console itself, as it topped 90% yesterday…

So, a long weekend.

It’s been a hectic time at work lately. We’re scheduling an upgrade to our MRI system sometime in the winter, and to get ready for that the hospital is going to cancel all research time to get caught up on the clinical backlog (since the upgrade is going to mean weeks to months of downtime). That, of course, is extremely painful to someone who needs research time on the magnet for their PhD. To add to the pain of it, we only found out about this plan two weeks ago, so we begged and pleaded to get at least some of the time we need to actually finish a study or two… and we did, sort of. A solid block of 31 consecutive hours on the long weekend. Whee! Sure, we could technically do about 25 subjects in that time, but realistically? Even if I did hypercaffeinate myself, it’s pretty difficult to convince someone to come in for a scan (a sober scan) in the middle of the night on the long weekend… I think we’ve got 4 or 5 people scheduled, and that was damned near miraculous (and involved a lot of begging, pleading, and favours called in). Heck, I can’t even convince my immediate family to come down (“well, maybe, if you really want to graduate this decade… and if the weather’s bad at the cottage.”).

By chance or design, Wayfare’s parents came to visit last weekend (when I had another, fairly inconvenient, smaller block of time on the scanner) and I scanned her dad. He was thrilled to get a CD with pictures of his brain on it to show the people at work, something he’ll treasure long after his hand has stopped aching. Of course, we tried to go out for lunch beforehand, but had a heck of a time with the logistics of that. Wayfare’s had her eye on the new french restaurant just a block from our place (“Red meat, red wine, etc.” is their motto). We went by at 3 pm, and they were closed until dinner time. Moving on down the street, we tried the Village Cafe, which was closed for a catering event. Some clowns walked by on the sidewalk, in full clown makeup. “It’s like we’ve passed through a vortex into a universe where restaurants are closed on saturdays and clowns walk the streets.” I suggested we try Bertoldi’s or Symposium next, but Wayfare hasn’t been impressed with Bertoldi’s the last few times we went, so we settled on TJ Baxter’s, which was close. They met us at the door and sat us down, but other than that they might as well have been closed too. The patio was mostly full, but we were the only ones sitting inside, so it wasn’t all that busy, yet we had to wait about a half hour for our food to arrive. “Perhaps we should run across the street for a quick lunch to hold us over until they get dinner ready here…”

As was reported previously, my house has been a victim of creative contracting work in the past. I’m faced with that issue again today as I try to replace a halogen potlight in the kitchen. The bulb itself is pretty standard — the only type of halogen the grocery store carried. Changing it out and getting light was no problem. However, now I find that I’m stuck with the bulb hanging by the wires out of the fixture, completely unable to get the faceplate assembly back in the ceiling. The assembly looks like it should be supported by three hooks, arranged equilaterally around the circumference. The part of the fixture in the ceiling, on the other hand, has two slots in it. I tried just getting one hook in one slot, but not only does the light hang down that way, it hangs down crooked. So I honestly have no idea how this light was up there to begin with. I’m tempted to try to take out the matching light, to see how it’s held up, but I’m so dearly afraid that it will simply be held up by pixie dust and wishful thinking, and that it will never go back in again, and I’ll be stuck having to replace two potlights (or waiting months for my landlord to do it).