This thing I refer to as My Life

There seems to be some reports of people not being able to see video with the Halloween movie. I think it is because the movie was XviD instead of DivX. If you update your version of Windows Media Player by going to Microsoft's web page and searching for Windows Media Player, you will be able to see the video. If you want to install Version 11 of the Windows Media Player, just follow this link: Windows Media Player 11

I don't have software to change it into DivX...sorry!

We're back, baby! Slammed in two 200GB SATA hard drive on the OTHER RAID controller and tested it out this time! The SATA set up (a new kind of interface) is about twice as fast as the old PATA. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. It's not valuable knowledge.)

Better still, I had the opportunity to reduce the Halloween video a bit. Take a look at it over in the photo frame. It's still 6MB, but that's better than the 20MB of the original.

Reports from notebook land...

I have been a long-time fan of the RAID set up on my computers. It has saved me a couple of times and my step mother once. (For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about , it stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.) Said another way, the RAID keeps two identical copies of all of your stuff on two different hard drives. The way it is supposed to work is when one hard drive dies is the RAID hardware says something like, "Hey! One of your drives died. I'll just keep using the other drive but you should replace that dead one..Dude!"

Yes, it does say "Dude." Or, at least, it is supposed to. A few days ago, my computer start giving me the blue screen of death (locking-up) and the error was ftsata.sys. (Fasttrack SATA driver associated with my Promise RAID hardware.) I thought that maybe my motherboard was dieing. You see, with this last computer build-out, I decided to go with a brand of motherboard that I don't normally use. (I usually only build with ASUS or ABIT.) And, maybe this is what I get for straying. I reseated the drive cables just in case it was something loose. The following day, it happened two more times. Then, I busted out the hard drive health checking software made by the manufacturer and, sure enough, one of the drives was dead. However, I could not just hook up the good drive and boot. It did pass all of the tests, but there was something wrong with the boot record and I don't want to risk loosing all of the stuff on the drive by trying to rewrite the boot record. Right now, when I have the drive set up as an extra drive, I have access to all of the files.

So, what does all of this mean to you? It means that I cannot work on resizing the pumpkin video. It means that I cannot (easily) post the pictures from the Ball State football game I took ML to see at the Big House which we almost lost! How we could almost screw up a game like that, I have no idea. I also cannot take all of the chants I recorded on my phone during the game and turn them into ring-tones until the monolith is back alive. Till then, I'm glad that I recently purchased a new laptop and that I have a back-up desktop. Actually, much of this I could do on either of these computer if I spent the time to install the software. But, then I'll have to do it all again when the new drives arrive.

"But wait!" You say. "Why would you just rebuild another RAID into the same motherboard?" Well, that's because the computer actually has two RAID controllers and I was using the one I was using because my hard drives were an older style. I will get new drives that will work with the other RAID hardware and hope for the best. :) Actually, I'll test it by disconnecting one of the drives and seeing if the RAID will work like it is supposed to.

More importantly than all of that, tomorrow I will have my first Radiology residency interview at one of the local community hospitals. Next week might also see many more invitations and rejections for interviewing now that the Dean's Letter has been sent out. No pressure. No pressure at all! May the insomnia begin!