joshkelahan.com

I’ve just about had it with stupid people that complain about things that they have complete fucking control over.  I can understand complaining about things you can’t actually control, like the bit about how gas prices have doubled in less than two years, or that it has snowed 7 of the last 9 days.  But if you are the one causing the problem, how can you complain about it?  I was talking to my mom this morning who was bitching about how she spent four dollars on a quart of chocolate milk that “No one is going to drink anyway.”  Am I crazy, insane, and off my rocker here?  If no one is going to drink it, and it is too expensive, then why the fuck would you buy it?

So I got my new UPS today.  1500VA.  That’s three times as much as my old UPS.  Schweeet!!  I decided to wait a while to connect the thing up, not for any particular reason.  So I finally get around to it about 10pm.  The first problem of course is that the desk here was not designed to support anything more than the most basic of computers.  If all I had was a basic monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and a computer, I would be set.  But being a little bit of a geek, my setup is of course a little beyond that.  So I ended up having to re-run all the cables because things didn’t quite reach where I wanted to put the UPS.  After about an hour and forty-five minutes, I had everything connected and ready.  I turned the computer on, and Vista started right up.  I logged in, and suddenly Vista starts detecting new hardware….WHY?  After about 2 minutes, Vista concludes that I have 12 IDE devices.  That would be a lot of devices, no doubt, but the fun part is that my computer doesn’t actually have a single IDE controller!  So I click restart…clearly something isn’t right.  As its shutting down I get the BSOD.  This is the first BSOD I have seen in Vista.  In fact, it has been fairly reliable.  So the computer restarts and I get the “Do you want to boot into safe mode” message.  Now of course because no one has owned a PS/2 keyboard in a good 5 years, safe mode is completely worthless because it disables all of your usb devices.  So I restart again, and finally end up back at the login screen, only this time my blue-tooth keyboard has decided to drop its settings.  OMFG!!!  Now a blue-tooth mouse is fairly straight forward, works just like a wireless RF mouse, but a blue-tooth keyboard is encrypted so that a nearby person couldn’t log your keys remotely.  How do you setup this encryption you ask?  Well its very simple, but you have to LOG INTO WINDOWS FIRST!!!!!  I am very glad I didn’t throw away my last wired keyboard.  So something that should have taken 10 minutes ended up taking over two hours.  Good thing I have to get up early tomorrow.  Boooo.

In other news, I would highly recommend this UPS, especially for you energy conscious people out there.  It has a LCD display on the front, and you can see exactly how much power your gear is using at any time.  The LCD will turn off for a few seconds to save power as well.

Yawn…I’m going to bed now.

Words cannot even begin to describe my utter disappointment with the weather we have been have lately.  All winter long it has been very nice weather, relatively speaking of course.  Forties, Fifties and cloudy, you know the drill.  But then suddenly, and very much without warning, the world decided that we have become too placid in our lives and has decided to throw one winter storm after another at our doorsteps.  So far, every week this month there has been either ice, or sleet, or 8 inches of snow in the morning.  Last week there was a car accident out in front of my house because we had a half of an inch of ice.  Today, we were hit with the sleet bomb, and everything is covered in about two inches of sleet, which is expected to continue for the rest of this god-forsaking day.  But despite the weather (or maybe to spite it), I decided to come in today.  They have been saying that in addition to this sleet, it is going to freeze hard tonight, and I would rather take tomorrow off (Friday, woo!!), than today.

In other news I finally broke down and bought new speakers for my computer.  It’s been a long time coming.  The speakers I am getting rid of, I have had since I started college.  They were a nice pair of Altec Lansing speakers, one of the first speaker sets that used USB.  Of course it wasn’t true USB, and it only worked in Windows 98, but hey, they were cool.  About a year ago, the subwoofer stopped working, and that was followed quickly by the right channel.  The problem that continues to plague computer speakers, is this idea that everything has to run through the subwoofer.  Why?  All the sound cards these days have at least 5.1 surround out, why would I need to run through the sub?  So no matter how bad it sucked, I couldn’t just replace the sub, or the right speaker which had the volume controls on it.   I decided to go with the Logitech Z-2300 speaker system.  It’s a 2.1 speaker system; my computer does 8.1 out, but my feeling is that if you want surround sound on your PC, you should use a real AV receiver.   They sound good, and have a separate volume control…yay!.  The only problem, and this is not directly related to the speakers, is that I don’t have any more power outlets on my UPS.  Apparently, my old speakers I had plugged directly into the wall (huh?), but it honestly doesn’t matter because they were crap anyway (see above).   I just want to let you know that I have no intention of putting speakers on a battery backup, thats insane, no I just don’t want them to be unprotected.  I have lost way too much equipment to lightning, and power spikes, and everything else to not protect my stuff.  So, now I have a better UPS on the way.  This one has 8 outlets, and an of course the standard (in my opinion) ethernet and coaxial protections.   Honestly, I should just build a data center in my house and be done with the whole mess (just kidding.)