This thing I refer to as My Life

A major meltdown for us! Almost all of the snow is gone except where it was piled up by the plows. The high today was up in the 50’s and it felt quite balmy. After a relaxing morning, which is what we’ve been experiencing for the last week together, we went out shopping for groceries. I know, pretty mundane, but there’s just not that much to report these days.

We’re looking forward to a relaxing New Year’s Eve. I would like to wish all of my readers a happy New Year!

We woke up to an amazingly pretty day. (We had to get up early because ML had to go get an allergy shot.) We took a few pictures and they certainly do much better than I could describe here, so I won’t waste your time. Take a look!

Ps. Just because it’s pretty remember is also pretty damn cold! :)

As luck would have it, I had very little luck with my computer. (No, I have no idea what I meant by that.) After extensive testing and retesting of my computer, I discovered the problem isn't with the computer but a defect in the drive(s) itself. Well, at least in part. Yes, the way I initially had the drives set up was wrong, but once I corrected that, there were still problems. Ultimately, I used just a single new drive with a fresh system install and it would still hang. The most consistent failure would happen when I tried to copy 1 Gig file. So, today I returned the drives to CompUSA. Fortunately for me, I never messed up my original system drive, so I'm back up and running the way I was, but without the extra protection. The worst part was there was a hard drive sale for a different brand of drive of the same size storage for $12/ea. Oh well!

Yesterday evening, we went to go see Meet the Fockers! Well, before that ML made a wonderful dinner of meat stuffed roasted chicken with pumpkin soup and stir fried vegetables. We had a med school friend of ours over since he was home alone. We watch Meet the Parents and then went to go see Meet the Fockers. It was really good because there are a lot of jokes that carry over and I probably would not have remembered them all if I had not seen the first one again. Anyway, I (we) thought it was really good and did not seem to suffer from the sequel syndrome. I give it two thumbs up and worth the ticket price (if you can get student rates like me).

You know it is dry out when you go to take a drink of water from the fountain and as the water touches your mouth it SHOCKS your lower lip! Why would they make the lever for a water fountain out of rubber?

Ahh, my good fried David came through for me and pointed out that Fra-gee-lay was actually mistaken to be Italian, not French. I guess it has just been too long since I watched A Christmas Story. Click on the above to listen to the clip!

Looks like we might get our first real snow fall today. NPR keeps saying 4-10 inches for SE Michigan which I am guessing includes us! Truth be told, the weather folks are amazingly poor at predicting the snow fall. I think they actually double their real estimates just in case they're wrong. Or, maybe it is to get people to go out and spend money shopping for food! Which we did last night with a drive up to the Howell Super Wal-Mart. The 25 minute drive went amazingly quick as we spent most of the time discussing the fine intricacies of optimizing a PCR reaction. Yes another reason I married the person I did! (I will say that it is at least ONE scientific "thing" of which the lawyers in my family should at least have the concept: if not the ability to discuss how it is optimized.)

ML came home yesterday to find that I had been locked up in my office all day fighting with my computer. After hauling back out into the cold to get the mail, she screamed! "Your Car Talk Prize came!" The only thing that would have really made it perfect is if it said Fragile (Fra-g'ee-lee, it must be French!)across the front (and came in a wooden crate too, I suppose). Nope, just a simple envelope and I have posted all of it in the photo section!

I was being held up most of the day because I learned something very important that I do not think is obvious, but makes a world of difference. And, when my step mother reads this, she is going..., well I'm not sure what she is going to do but I suspect it will evoke some emotion in her. It did me. I'll try to make this as short and simple as possible, but it is a little techy. Built in to many Abit brand mother boards is a RAID controller with two channels. For those of you that don't know, RAID stands for Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. If you have two hard drives and establish a RAID between them, then they will be duplicates of each other and the operating system (say Windows) will only see one logical hard drive that is the size of the smallest of the two physical drives. The nice thing about a RAID is in the unfortunate event where a hard drive dies, and they do die eventually, the computer tells you which one is dead and it just continues to use the other one independently of the dead one. You, as a user, never really notice other than the message. You slap a new drive in there and reestablish the RAID without any data loss. So, I thought it was time to set that up on my computer. I had already two hard drives that were not used in a RAID and I went and purchased two more to use in the RAID. I have two channels to work with and each channel takes up to two drives. All of the math seems good there! (Except having to figure out where to put the two drives in my computer. That actually took the better part of Friday night.) The question was, where do I put the two drives that make up the RAID? The options were to put each drive as master on each channel--which made the most sense to me since the master gets preference over the slave. Or one drive as master and the other as slave and then do you have them on the same channel or different channels? I looked at the manual and a few web pages and found no information. I decided to go with my first choice of having both of the RAID drives as master. Loaded up all of the software on Saturday and the computer ran like SHIT! It would phase out for several minutes and it even locked up twice. The strangest thing was MP3 files would crackle and play SLOWLY! I had a difficult time reconciling how an MP3 would play slowly. I was really frustrated. I started thinking about Libby computer which I had successfully set up with the RAID and it ran flawlessly. I remember on her computer that I had to have both hard drives on the same channel simply because I did not have another cable! (Fortunately for her I was too cheap to go buy another cable.)

I searched the news groups a little more and did finally find a post that suggested the same thing: in a RAID one drive must be master and the other slave. I decided this made some sense because otherwise the computer would not know which one was the main drive. I had guessed that it would just pick the one on the first channel, but apparently not. So, I rearranged the drives and we're back in business. The computer has not locked up, flaked out, or played MP3's at anything other than a normal speed. Lesson learned.

That was an adventure! We scraped the car off so we could go shopping after meeting a friend for a sushi-brunch. After carefully backing the car out I went to turn onto the main drag. I (gently) applied the breaks and the ABS go off franticly as we gently skid across the road finally regaining tracking after gently pushing off the far curb. Reluctantly, I drive around the main circle of Stone Road and try to stop at the stop sign. That went a little better, only half way out into the intersection. Finally, we get to the main intersection with Stone and Hubbard (the first real road). I slowed down, but the car did not. We ended up with the car turned 90 degrees headed up hill but point in the direction of on-coming traffic. Fortunately, there was no on-coming traffic. I said to ML, that's it, we're not driving! It was total ICE. Keep in mind this is a heavy car with front wheel drive and good tires. In all of my snow driving experience, I have never seen roads like this.
I had to drive up the street a way to turn around and we made it home safely. We decided to take the bus to the restaurant and I wanted to wait at the bus stop where I could see all of these intersections. I wanted to know if it was just more.
Every car skidded into the intersection between Stone and Hubbard. Even the all wheel drive cars. This made me feel much better!
Then we saw what we knew was only a matter of time. A couple in their Toyota cautiously pulls up to that stop and after a little skidding, come to a stop (only part way into the intersection). Well, the car behind them had California plates and gal driving who obviously had no idea what she was doing. Now what was most strange is she already almost hit the same car just moments earlier at the stop where Stone intersects itself (it's a circle with a tail.) She hauled but and tried to stop as though she was on dry pavement. She managed to have the car turn by 45 degrees just to make sure it was the corner of her bumper hitting the middle of the car in front. I'm just amazed the airbag did not deploy. (No one, of course, was hurt.)
What was really funny was not a few minutes later (just behind the next bus) was the salting truck. After the bus picked us up he stopped by and asked if they needed him to call or anything and the California driver was bitching that the city waited until noon to salt the road, but that everyone was okay. After the door shut, I told the driver not to feel so badly for her. She was really driving WAY too fast.
We finally made it to sushi.come and had their Sunday brunch buffet with one of my classmates. (It was pretty good, but not as good as Sushi chalet--of course my dad will tell that the sushi is good but it is more true because the owner of the Sushi chalet used to run up and hug me hello. And there may be some truth to that.) Anyway, even after telling Mike the story he offered to drive us home assuming that the roads would be pretty clear by the time we got back, and they were. It's still a balmy 6.5F. Yummy!

Burr!!! It's cold and snowy! It's all of 6.5F outside. :(

I started rebuilding my computer Friday after my exam (which went pretty well). It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to fit two more hard drives into my case. It was surprisingly non-trivial and included staggering hard drive between my DVD drives. Weird, but it works (at least so far). Then I spent most of yesterday loading up software. Actually, I spent most of the time trying to figure out where I put the CD's I needed! But, we getting close to a complete computer again and this time a little more data secure.

Now we're getting ready to go to a sushi brunch! So I better cut this short here and leave you with this thought: burr!

In an effort to thwart off any bad-Libby-hard-drive-failing-mojo I sprung for a dual set of 80 Gig drives. The one hard drive that I had that was flaking out came back to life and has worked fine for almost a week. I've checked it with all of the hard drive software and it seems okay so I'm hoping it was just a loose wire. Still, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and set my computer's RAID into action. I decided that it would be better for me to set it up over the December break than to just waiting for a catastrophic failure during M3 when I really won't have time to fix it. (For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I will have two drives that are duplicates of each other such that if one fails the computer will report the failure but keep working normally on the single functioning drive. This is how I had set up my step-mother's computer because she is so dependent upon it and it did just bail her out a few weeks ago.)

We've had a few days of light snow and melting. Tonight it goes down to 19F so tomorrow will be a sheet of ice! Lucky us!

It's our third “snowy” day. Really it's just a light dusting, but I think it's really pretty. The roads are clear, which is good because we're supposed to go to the mall today. (This is not one of my more favorite activities.) My parents might point out that I used to love to go to the mall when I was a teenager. But that is because I was going to gaze at all of the girls there. Now I'm going to shop. :(

We just finished musculoskeletal and start dermatology which will be the last sequence of this semester. The musculoskeletal exam was much more difficult than the presented material would suggest, but that's okay as it helps get us in gear for the boards. Speaking of which, when we come back in January, we will have only three months of classes, a month off to study for step one and then we start third year. So, it's close to almost over. Hopefully I will find the will to start studying for the boards over the December break.

I cannot say that there is anything else particularly exciting going on other than studying. Oh, wait, what am I saying!? It's Hanukkah and I've been getting all sorts of cute presents from ML (which is what she usually does for me at Hanukkah). One of the was a little jewelry box so I have a place to put my wedding band and Star of David at night. (That is really not so cute I supposed.) Then she gave me a pocket wrench which will turn bolts 8-19mm or 3/8-11/16 inch. It's called a Palm Pal (which to me sounds like something else). The next night was a the Flame Thrower flashlight. It's pretty damn bright too. Although I think that my wife has an unnatural attraction to flashlights because our house is littered with the BIG Mag Lights. She has one on her side of the bed, there is one on the way down to the basement, there's one in the car, we each have little flashlights on our key rings. I have a little Mag Light she gave me for doing work on my computer and then I have a little LED light that straps to my finger. And you what? Unlike Galveston, the power really never goes off here. Well, unless it's going off for the entire North East quadrant of the country! Last night she gave me a pair of Michigan Scrubs! (I'm actually surprised that I'm just now getting a pair as that is the type of thing my dad would get me.) Tonight we'll switch to gifts from her mom for me.

As expected I had a terrible time figuring out what to get her since I did such a good job on our anniversary. It got so bad that she volunteered to just go buy some sweaters at the mall for her present. But, during Neuro, I finally had a couple of ideas which I would tell you about now but I know the minute I do she'll suddenly read the blog and she'll know. So, I'll have to tell you later. They're not as good as the necklace, but they are things she wants. I think!

There is a preprint available online for my NIH publication! I was not sure if the Journal of Molecular Biology did that, but they do. Let's make one thing clear though: I did not choose the color scheme! Marius sure does have some odd taste, but we knew that already.

Yikes!
The alarm goes off at 7a and ML gets up and goes to the bathroom. Moments later (actually it could have been hours because I fell back asleep, but it was only moments) she comes back in and says, the carpets in the bathroom are soaking wet! I jump out of bed (Superman style! or rather Middle-age-man style) to go look. Yup! She was right, the carpets were soaking wet!

With my keen intellect and deep understanding of gravity, I rushed down stairs to the hall way under the bathroom. Yup! Also wet! And, the light was dead—not a good sign!

Again, with my keen intellect and deep understanding of gravity, I rushed to the basement! Yup! Wet too! Fortunately, (and anyone that has actually seen our basement), there was just a little river that perfectly avoided all of the boxes! Using my keep intellect and deep understanding of electricity, I did not try any light switches. Especially since I was only wearing my boxers!

That is where my keen intellect pretty much stopped. I went to call the repair people here and I could not remember the leading digit to their number: something-FIXIT. It would be a clever number if I could remember the prefix! So, I call the campus operator: not open yet. So I go to look at the housing information/lease: FIXIT is the number! DUH! All five digits right there. So I call: they’re closed! But the send me to an emergency number and I report the problem.

We get everything cleaned up and out of the way. I tell ML to shower quickly before they come because they will certainly cut the water and probably the power too. We both shower and then continue cleaning. She cleans the bathroom and I’m cleaning the basement. She then shifts to the hallway and I shift to try to figure out what is causing it. The bathroom floor is oddly dry. (The carpet had about 30 lbs of water in them initially.) I was thinking it was a pipe in the wall, but it should still be leaking!

About an hour later the maintenance guy arrives and I go over the story with him showing him all of the places that got wet. To his credit, he figured it out pretty quickly: the toilet sometimes sticks and continues to run (as it did for him). The water rises fast enough that it would overflow out of the top faster than in the backup drain in the toilet (for those of you that know the mechanics of a toilet). I had thought about that too, but I usually pay close attention when I use the bathroom to make sure it stops. Then I realized that I was not the last person to use the bathroom. By the time ML was out, I was back in bed.

So, now the maintenance dude is getting the parts he needs (and going to some mandatory OSHA meeting) to return at 10:30a. He asked me to be here—good thing I don’t go to class anymore! So now I’m here.

In other news, my hard drive finally died. I was not sure which one it was (C or D) and the error did not make it obvious, but it was the second one which really doesn’t have anything important on it. At least now I know which one it is.

That all the news from Lake Woe-be-gone!

Another pleasant day without neuro. We've started our musculoskeletal sequence which is about all sorts of muscle and joint diseases like osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, gout and stuff like that. Actually, the lectures on gout have included some very cool and very old pictures of gout patients from centuries past. Today is orthopedic surgery. Yes! We learn all of orthopedic surgery in one day! Oh, no, wait. It says Intro to orthopedic surgery.

We had a light dusting of snow this morning. Not nearly as much as we had Thanksgiving day and it's mostly melted off. We have yet to have our first “real” snowfall, but it will come this month I suspect.

Right now, I am faced with a problem that will hopefully bring some solace to my step mother. My hard drive is dying so I'm (not very frantically) making a backup DVD in case it is going to be a catastrophic failure. I noticed the problem yesterday when, for the first time, the computer did not fully boot up. I hit the reset button and it came back to life. I was not sure what to make of it until it did it again today. I looked in the control panel -> administration -> event viewer -> system and sure enough there was the error! “Your hard drive is dying and you need to replace it, fool!” Well, Bill (Gates) did not use those exact words, but pretty close. I'll have to see how the surface scan looks and hope that it is just a few dropped clusters, but I suspect it is not since I just checked that week before last and the error was the drive was not responding in the appropriate amount of time. Actually, now that I think of it, I'm not all too sure which drive was giving the error. I suppose that would be an important detail to nail down!

Lots of dinner parties and socializing this week, but nothing overly interesting to report just yet!