Frustration

Not a whole lot new has happened recently. No, that's a lie. Tons of crap!

Let's start it off with last month sometime, white rice decided to blow up on me. Which I was expecting, but still wasn't too stoked about it. The worst part about it though, is I just got my new coilovers in. So the idea of going back and fixing my head gasket wasn't all to appealing. Then here comes " aby supra"! A fellow supra nerd from Vancouver had this old tired Tercel that he wasn't interested in anymore. So for fifty bucks, I picked that beast up and limped it home via traffic, highways and ferry. Keep in mind it was running on 3 cylinders, brakes were practically useless from rusted out rotors, and the rad fan didn't work. Add on top of that the fact that it was 30 degrees out with the heater blasting (need a rad fan some how!), and you get a good picture of how I felt during the drive back.

But! " aby" is a dream! (notice the space in aby, because it used to say baby )

Eric rebuilt the top end of the motor (new/lapped valves), I put on new brakes, flushed out all the old crappy fluids and this thing is a champ. I'm into it for about trefitty, and now have a reliable winter commuter WITH fenders this year.

So that's all cool and exciting, I wish school was. This semester has totally killed my learning drive. All I want to do now is play WoW and read books ... random signals is killing me I wrote a midterm last friday and got rocked, worst mark I've had since 3A! PLEH! Oh well, only 2 projects and 2 finals to go and I can be done with this crap.

Last but not least, I just got a bill from Fedex yesterday. <3 $140 in taxes/fees for shipments from the states. argh!

Apparently all it takes is either an undercooked burger or a glass of toilet water to ruin an entire week. Yup, let's start from the beginning.

It's Sunday evening and after a hard day of twistin' wrenches it is time to hit the pub for some burgers and beer. Alex, Ryan and I are out in Sooke and decide to go to some rando pub. I wasn't too interested in beer at that moment as I was planning on driving home right afterwards. So a glass of water and a bbq mushroom burger was all I ordered. The burger was pretty sloppy and wasn't all that good, and the water was ... wet. Now fast forward to Monday morning at about 2am where I wake up from my sleep because of a BRUTAL stomach ache. I knew something bad was up and was thoroughly uninterested in spewing. Anybody who knows me knows that when Chris power vomits, blood vessels in my face/eyes burst!

Ok, so well it happened and I went to bed feeling somewhat better. The next morning I wake up to Sargent Grumbles in my stomach and he decides everybody MUST go out my posterior...

Repeat this for the whole week So 5 days later and 11lbs lighter I'm just starting to feel better.

So if you're ever wondering how awesome E Coli is, just go up to Sooke and get yourself a sketch ball burger from the local greasy spoon.

Tim Hortons and its roll up the rim campaign is a crock of shit. Let me explain...

So as many of you may know, I am a loyal Timmy's customer. Every day of the week, I religiously line up for my morning coffee. Of course, you'd think somebody like me would be winning some of these roll up the rim cups...you know, based on sheer volume alone. But this is the problem, I don't win. In previous years, I was an exclusive XL drinker, and didn't have that much luck winning. I heard during last years campaign that the XL was less likely to win, but the prizes were better. So I switched to L and relished in the fruits of my finger rollings.

This year is quite different.

I have spread my efforts over all coffee sizes, from big to small, but to no avail! It is now March 23 and I have had a Tim Horton's coffee M/L/XL every SINGLE day this month (sometimes two) and have not won a single thing. Are people actually winning anything? Or are those daily winning counts above the donut display all a ruse?

I better win something in the next 7 days or feisty comes out. I may do something drastic...like go to Starbucks or something. Oh who am I kidding, I'm addicted =D

Should Windows be renamed to Windoesn't? Let us begin.

Last weekend I went over to Vancouver to meet up with fellow supra nuts, shoot the shit, and buy some computer parts. I thought it would be a good idea to finally get a new hard drive. I mean, I've got a pretty nice 10k RPM scsi drive, but it's loud. Lately, I'm all about quiet so that sleepy time is not interrupted by my computer. I was ready for the quiet setup, but was missing the HD, 92mm fan, and video card fan. If you've never heard a SCSI drive before picture this - two walnuts being ground together. It's loud! Secondly, I needed an intake fan to blow cool air over the drive to keep it cool. The fan I had was an older Coolermaster fan which is well, awful. And last but certainly the MOST annoying loud is the fan on the video card. This thing was on its way out so I figured hey, let's buy a replacement.

So I get back from Vancouver with a new 320GB Seagate SATA drive, a 92mm Antec fan, and a new 18x DVD burner. I'm stoked - I love goodies

Being an experienced computer nerd, and having dealt with SATA many many times before I knew full well that Windows is the suck. You'd think that by SP2, the ISO's would at least contain SATA drivers for some of the more common chipsets. Negative. So I booted up the Win98 box, downloaded the drivers from the ASUS website and threw it on a diskette. Ripped out that diskette drive, put it in my machine and booted up the XP setup. I get as far as "Loading driver SIL3802" or whatever when the install complains about missing a .sys file. Well I says, wtf is up with that? I take the disk drive out of the system, back into Win98 box and download a different version. Inside this zip, there are no .sys files...wtf? I go to the Silicon Image website and grab their newest version...ok .sys on their tarball. Throw it on the diskette, repeat the process and load the driver. I get to the point during the install where you select your target drives...NOTHING THERE! Oh, I'ma feisty now.

Finally I discovered that my Win98 box is fracked. It wasn't untaring all the files correctly and neglected to even mention anything of the sort. After booting a Gentoo install disk, I use links to download from the asus website, untar, mount the diskette and copy the files. Back into the XP setup and all is well.

Sorta...

Ok, so I now have a fresh install of XP on my SATA drive, but I'd like to get all my data off of my SCSI drive. Apparently neither Windoesn't nor Grub has ANY idea wtf to do about this situation. As soon as both drives are plugged in, I cannot boot from either drive. I tried running the XP recovery console, fixing the MBR...no dice. Every possible combination of BIOS settings...nope. Evnentually I just plugged the damn thing into my Linux server and copied over the network.

What a pain in the ass. And on top of it all, my new DVD burner doesn't even fit inside my Antec P150 case. The pretty little CD-ROM covers are just a bit too small for the CD try to go through...grawrrr!

Yeah, exactly. wtf?! I was half asleep this morning, munchin' down on my morning cereal when I just about slammed back a latex finger. Ok, so it wasn't a human finger - just the glove but still! G-ROSS.

I guess that's what I get for eating no-name brand cherios.

latex finger