All About Eve

After nearly three weeks of wrangling, my new computer is finally on-line, and gosh, she’s a beaut:

I watched Pixar’s Wall-E for the first time the night before she arrived, and it blew my doors off, so at the risk of terminal geekdom, I have named her Eve. We’re currently in the “getting to know you” phase.  I was mystified, for instance, as to why she kept insisting that I had 5.1 surround sound instead of two speakers and a subwoofer. (I conjectured that she was in denial, on the grounds that anything less than Dolby THX 7.1 Surround would be an affront to her magnificence.)  Then I realized that Heart Reborn’s audio color-coding no longer applied, and I had a microphone plugged into one of the speaker jacks.  Whoops!  Sorry, love.

She ran Second Life on Ultra setting with 16x anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and a 256m draw distance, plus at least 8 avis on screen, and the frame rate only dipped below 15 fps when I did 90-degree+ camera turns.  Should be fun to see what she does with something that doesn’t require a broadband feed…

(Oh, and if you’re wondering: she’s plugged into that 4000 joule home theatre surge suppressor I mentioned in Once Bitten, part 1, which runs via extension cord to one of the correctly wired outlets!)

Utter Chaos

My new computer is on a FedEx truck and has been dispatched for delivery;  it’s out there on the highway, somewhere.  In the meantime, the Sealand Sanitation Department has unloaded a 2-ton rusty green dumpster, big enough to block half the street, in front of Flora’s house, and a crew consisting of her sons, their sons and several hired workers is busy cleaning all the crap out of the garage.  Buried under the 8-foot high pile of scrap wood, broken tools, and useless artifacts from three generations is…  a 1945 Jeep!

Year 2

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Interregnum site, or as close as makes-no-nevermind.  I didn’t send out links to the Main Index until near the end of July 2008, but I started working on it much earlier, and The Sign was the first entry I posted here in the Tales section;  Drinking the Kool Aid was written later and back-dated, since it was more of an introductory post.

And today I am…

Pretty much exactly where I was a year ago, in every way.

Bummer!

Worse Than I Thought

The outlets are testing Hot-Neutral reversed.

This place is a death trap!!

Shocking Revelation

Now that I’ve purchased a new surge suppressor to replace the old, fried one [I bought the Belkin 4000 joule "home theatre" model, if you care], I have made an unbelievable discovery:

The two outlets that all of my high-end computer equipment have been plugged into for the last six years are not grounded.

Well THAT would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?

Once Bitten: the saga of computer power supply protection [part 3]

This is the last post in a series of three.  Read the previous posts on surge suppression and power conditioning/ voltage regulation.

UNINTERRUPTIBLE POWER SUPPLIES

Arguably the final step in being able to thumb your nose at the vagaries of man and nature is the Uninterruptible Power Supply, or UPS, the point of which should self-evident from the name.   A UPS consists of a battery plus some associated circuitry;  you plug it into the wall, then you plug your computer and peripherals into it and (ideally) ignore it.  They come in three flavors: Read the rest of this entry »

Once Bitten: the saga of computer power supply protection [part 2]

This is the second post in a series of three.  Read the previous post on surge suppressors.

POWER CONDITIONING & VOLTAGE REGULATION

In theory, your wall outlet is supposed to deliver a steady, predictable source of current to the devices plugged into it, free of fluctuations.  In practice, this is not always the case, for a dozen different reasons:  the time of day, the demands on the grid, the way the wiring and appliances are set-up inside your house.  Plug your air conditioner and a lamp into the same socket and watch the lamp dim when the air-conditioner kicks in;  you’ll get the idea pretty quickly.  Any attempt to deal with straightening these sorts of fluctuations out is loosely referred to as power conditioning (or sometimes line conditioning;  in my case, and probably yours, the attempt  is going to start at the wall socket, not at the pole outside.) Read the rest of this entry »

Once Bitten: the saga of computer power supply protection [part 1]

Like most people, I occasionally find it necessary to research topics with which I have no previous familiarity, in order to address certain nagging practical questions.  (”Is the risk of drug interaction between pseudoephedrine and vicodine overstated?” “Am I endangering my life by attempting to pry this thermocoupler loose from the furnace with a sharpened spoon?”  “Will writing this e-mail get me arrested for insider trading?”  Etcetera.)  Unlike most people, however, I frequently seem to find myself in the situation of having done that research, only to wind up with another hundred questions.  Such is the case with the exciting topic of computer power supply protection, the mention of which has invariably elicited a monosyllabic and confused “Huh?” from those friends with whom I have dared to broach it.  I am setting forth what I have learned about it and related matters here, not only to straighten it out in my own head, but in the hope that it might prove useful for someone else wrestling with these same issues.  If you’re that someone, read on… Read the rest of this entry »

Time Wastes Too Fast

Maira Kalman is my hero.

The Squeaky Wheel

I’m not sure whether it had anything to do with my e-mails to Customer Service (I’m going to pretend that it did), but Dell has finished my system and shipped it.  It should arrive by 1900 Monday.

Oh, crap, now I have to decide what to do about the power supply!