Focaccia

Focaccia. Such a wonderful word.

The Mrs. took our continuously misbehaving new compooter back to the store today. Our good buddy who didn't fix it right last time puttered around with it all day, then he called me at the end of the day and said, "You had a bad memory stick. I found a memory stress program that failed every single time on one of the upper banks of the second stick."

So, chalk one up for Bozzetto who diagnosed the problem as "probably bad memory" back when the compooter was brand new solely based on my description of what was happening.

When I went to pick up the compooter, Mr. Sub-genius was already gone for the night, but the other two guys there were kvetching about how they thought they got a bad batch of memory from their vendor, as mine was the fifth one they had go bad just in the last few weeks.

Oh - so when I brought it back the first time and said, "It's acting like it has bad memory," that, uh, didn't trigger any kind of "Hmmmm...."?

For the record, it is Corsair Value Series RAM. Like you care.

All I can say is that the compooter has not crashed any aps or rebooted in the few hours it has been back home. Fingers are crossed.

Mr. Sub-genius also "fixed" a problem I had with shutdown where an application wouldn't stop properly and I had to hit "OK" to kill it. Luckily, he told me he did this, and he explained that there were like 8 possible causes for the problem and said, "One was something to do with multiple users and another was this service you just needed to stop."

When I got the compooter home and started poking around, I discovered first that the stopped service was causing windows to log a system error every 20 seconds about not being able to start this service. I've become quite intimate with the Windows event log. So I had to google that and learn that if you stop this one service, you have to stop two others or you get error messages all the time. None of the services are needed, as they're part of Nero DVD burning software. The services continuously scan your hard drive for "media" files so that they can catalog everything for you and let you access it all at the touch of a button.

Just what I need.

Then, I discovered that I could no longer have two people logged in at the same time. The "fix" for the problem associated with multiple users was to disable the ability to have multiple users.

Googling that, I discovered that to enable this requires a regedit, which you may recall is what killed my last compooter. But I was brave (and under warranty), and I re-enabled multiple users in the registry.

So now I guess I'm OK. We shall see.

The deck failed final inspection today. Contractor comes back Monday to fix the problems. One thing it failed for was the steps not being deep enough, which is the one thing I was unhappy about with the design. So I'm actually happy it failed for that, as now I get better steps.

I yelled at someone at work yesterday. It needed to be done. Sometimes people are intentionally dense, and sometimes they just don't listen. Six weeks of pointing out the same error in the calculations, having everyone nod and say, "Yes, this is in error," and then coming back the next week with the calculation done a completely different way, but with the same exact error. I felt kinda bad about it today, but it seemed to have stimulated some results. If by results you mean I felt compelled to just develop the damned calculation myself rather than trying to explain to the people whose job it was to do it the right way to do it.

I yell at someone at work about once a year nowadays. It used to be a lot more often, but I get most of my yelling out of my system at my childrens.

I think tomorrow I may need "A Taste of Europe" for lunch.