I am the maker of dreams

...coming true.. or something. I don't know.

Anyway, to get my good buddy Dave's little search engine fantasy to come true, I present to you: Dong and Diarrhea

I've also updated the Tweaks site more, as I seem to do on an ever so sporadic schedule. We'll see just how regular I can make it this time around. I'll probably slow down as my inbox dwindles to less coherent questions, and then I'll pick back up as my inbox overflows with people wanting answers. We'll see.

Vista Install Error 80070241

I tried to install Vista Beta 2 this weekend and ran into a little snag. Here's how to fix the Vista install error "Error Code is [80070241]"

I think that the Seagate hard drive that I mentioned in the past few posts (the lovely REFURB they sent me courtesy of my RMA) may be crapping out on me. I'm not sure, so I'll run some tests on it; but Vista run ever so crappily on my system and I should have a more than sufficient computer to do the regular things that Vista wants to do.

Specs: Athlon 64 3000+ (Not the fastest, but not terrible
nVidia GeForce 6800
1 Gig of Kingston Hyper-X RAM

So, if Vista runs crappily on that setup then I can't imagine it'll run well on the vast majority of the computers that are out today. Most consumers don't like to upgrade that often.

Yes, I did update all the drivers I could get my hands on.

What I plan on doing is imaging my old XP install back to my Seagate, installing Vista on my old-school (but at least STABLE) Western Digital 40 giger and see how it runs then. If still crappy, the it's Vista or a driver issue. If not, then it's the P.O.S. Seagate and I'm going to just send them the drive and never buy anything from them ever again. They're probably just going to start manufacturing Maxtor's garbage anyway, since Seagate bought them out.

I wonder if Seagate treats their large customers this badly.

I'ma quite ranting now. Bye.

LIFE

Well, the Seagate refurb hasn't crashed yet. Although that's not that impressive of a feat considering that it's only been in for a couple of weeks. If she lasts a few more YEARS then I'll be less peeved at them.

Aside from that there's not a lot else tech-tacular going on. My current day job (ugh) does not deal with computers in the least. This, in and of itself, is not necc. a bad thing. It's that the job doesn't pay that well that sucks, and I could've easily qualified for it fresh out of high school.

Stupid finances. (Stupid ME, really, I could've avoided this..) ;)

Inefficiency at it's very finest

Tweaks is now converted to Wordpress. As mentioned before TextPattern had way too many quirks that I just couldn't have. My traffic is taking a nose-dive right now because of the odd-ass way TxP would handle internal linking and all that. It's murdered some of my search engine results.

Anyway, the install is complete. The links that I have control over have been updated, and with any luck traffic will pick up sometime again.

The Question and Answer section should actually be a little easier to manage now because I like the way WP handles comments and all that better.

Hooray for having to do effectively the same thing twice, but luckily there was a tool to import my posts from TxP into WP. All I had to do was edit the categories and all that.

Seagate can suck my balls

Well, Seagate has managed to lose me as a customer. I bought a brand new drive some time ago when I first built my machine. Around 8 months later the drive took a dump on me, and I was forced to put in a 40 gig Western Digital hard drive I had lying around.

I RMAed the Seagate and a few weeks later was sent a REFURBISHED drive. "No biggie", I thought to myself "I'm sure it'll work fine". Wrong. The refurbished drive lasted all of two weeks before taking a dump of it's own.

I then RMAed THAT drive, and in the RMA I specified what happened and specifically told them to send me a new drive. I didn't buy a refurb from the wholesaler, I don't want a refurb from them. Well, they sent a damned refurbished drive.

I just got done Ghosting my WD to the Seagate and I suppose we'll see how long this one lasts. My theory is that this drive will last just long enough to where I get comfortable to wipe the WD and put something else on it. Just after that the Seagate will take a crap and I'll be forced to just buy something else and go through the pain of reinstalling Windows + all my apps. Luckily I backup documents and other things to DVD / one of my web servers pretty often so I shouldn't really lose too much work.

Stupid CMSes

I've changed my Home Networking site to WordPress. TextPattern had some good flexibility, and I liked the way it handled themes, but there were too many issues with it's permalinks structure and the way stuff got handled.

Throwing in ANY URL after the /category/ would return results when it DEFINITELY should have 404'ed. Ah well, the WordPress switch went fairly smoothly, and I was able to mod the templates OK (good thing I know some PHP).

I'll do the Tweaks site soon enough, after I get the kinks worked out with the much smaller networking site. I'm afraid that it's going to murder my traffic to the new posts and all that, but that's life I suppose.

Ergo-tastic!

I finally got around to installing my keyboard pull-out tray. During the move to Salt Lake City one of the slides got smacked and the screw that was into the super heavy-duty (sarcasm) particle board tore some of the wood out.

Up until now I've not bothered going and getting another peice of wood to use, even though it was only like $4 at Home Depot, or tried to repair the peice that I have.

As it turns out, repairing the peice was easy. I already had some long wood screws lying around, and some epoxy. What I did was take the epoxy, secure the bit of broken wood into the hole and then take a long wood screw and used that to attach the slider to the board.

Then it was a matter of repositioning the mounts on the desk because my layout is different now. My two monitors are at an angle from me so sitting straight facing the one edge of the desk would have sucked.

I'd attach a picture of the awesomeness if I had a digital camera handy, which I don't.