Birthday Grattitudes

Today is one of the days of the year that I've paid less and less attention to as the years have gone by. As a kid your birthday is always exciting. I remember putting up a list of things that I wanted on the cork board in the kitchen as my birthday got closer. My birthday to me was that hope that I might be able to get the things I still wanted from Christmas that Santa hadn't delivered on. Now that I've had a few birthdays and I'm married and in our own house things aren't as exciting anymore. I usually get some cash from the relatives and that's about it. I'm not saying this to complain. It's great. I don't know what to get myself anymore either so it's just easier for everyone.

For this birthday though rather than putting up a list of things I want (lets face it that list usually goes on and on and won't ever end), I've decided that I want to write a list of things that I am grateful for.

I am grateful for my awesome wife. She pushes the limits of my comfort sometimes, but usually in a good way and helps me grow and look outside my own little world every now and then. I love that we can get goofy and laugh over nothing sometimes and that she puts up with me on my grumpy days.

I am grateful for the family that I have, and for the support that I feel from them. I remember as a little kid praying for a little brother. Not knowing anything about the difficulty my parents had just being able to get me, I didn't think anything of it when I got the brother I asked for. Watching old home videos it's a little funny to see that I was kind of a jerk sometimes, but other times I did ok (I hope). My parents always made time for us and I loved that. I loved family nights and the family parties for holidays and birthdays. I don't ever recall a time where I didn't feel loved in my family. Now that I'm married I have my wife's side of the family, and my mom remarried so there is that side of the family. I thought I had a big family before but it's nearly quadrupled in just the last few years.

I am grateful for my little "cruise" of shampoo. I know it sounds dumb but hear me out on this one. We've had this bottle of shampoo dang close to a year now. We bought a bottle of conditioner at the same time. I've used both. Once the conditioner ran out my grandma had given me another bottle of conditioner that was my grandpa's. I used that until it ran out. That shampoo bottle is still delivering even though I'm all out of conditioner. I keep thinking I need to get some more next time I go to the store, but I've forgotten the last few...oh...months or so. It's been awhile. I'm amazed that I'm still not out of shampoo. It reminds me that even though it's small Heavenly Father is still looking out for me, and is aware and loves me.

I am grateful for the job that I have. I started my first job when I was 11 (It was only for a couple of weeks but I still count it). It was probably more of a job for my parents and I just happened to get paid for it. I delivered papers in the wee hours of the morning. I've had quite a few jobs between then and now. I'm happy that I've been able to find something I enjoy doing and get paid for it.

I am also grateful for the many things and luxuries that I get to enjoy on a daily basis. Usually the problems I run into are "First World Problems" and rather pathetic and small compared to the rest of the world. I take a lot of things for granted that you don't notice or appreciate until you don't have it anymore.

I am grateful for this country that I live it. It isn't perfect and it isn't without it's problems, but it is a promised land and has many benefits that cannot be found elsewhere. On my mission there was a ward mission leader in one of the cities I served in that had a bumper sticker that said "Grateful to be an American". I have never seen another one like it. I've seen a lot of "Proud to be an American" stickers and others like it, but as far as I have seen there aren't very many that are grateful about it. Not that you have to display it on your car to be grateful but it can be seen in your attitude and the way you treat others and in many other ways.

I am grateful for the gospel. Those of us that have lived having the gospel all the time can easily take it for granted. Mostly because we don't know anything else, and haven't had to put any blood, sweat, and tears into it. Living in the "Utah Bubble" it was fairly easy for me to coast down the stream and see where it took me. It wasn't until my mission when I got out of Utah and tossed into the ocean known as Oregon that I had to row a bit and actually exercise my testimony and see what I was made of. You hear stories of people that drive for hours to get to church, or for days/weeks to get to a temple. It's a different thing entirely to SEE and experience it. I love Utah and don't foresee living anywhere else, but I think it is a wonderful thing to live outside Utah at lease once in your life so you can appreciate living here. It's not necessarily easier, I just prefer the problems here to the problems somewhere else.

This list can also go on and on, but I think I'll leave it at that for now.

A Battle of Wills

I had a little scuffle with a computer over the weekend. In the end I won the war. Here is what I sent to the people I did it for (I erased names because I don't like leaving stuff like that on the internet):

I have just succeeded in bringing to life the VISION machine. It has taken me forever to get here. I’ve used all my potions and I’m out of magic and had to venture to places unheard of. In the end I’m pretty sure I gained a level (if not two) and this thing is running in RAID1 without any further issues that I can see.

I shall tell the tale here and I’ll try to make it entertaining so it is worth the read.

Friday:

First in order to get data off the IDE drive I commandeered [Someone]’s SATA to USB device which I found out is very touchy. So I have cables running here there and everywhere. I go to boot from the USB drive to clone the bloody thing and lo and behold it won’t recognize the USB drive. I poke about in BIOS and find a setting for USB Boot and it is enabled. Well what a liar that turned out to be. I talked to [Someone] because once upon a time he had created a no USB disc for [Someone] (Which unfortunately had recently just gone missing, I’m assuming someone needed it worse than he did). [Someone] let me know the ISO was on the USB stick. Great. Now who has a blank disc? I sift through [Someone]’s cube a bit, then [Someone]’s, and finally get a brilliant idea that [Someone] might have one. I finally located a CD-RW (Thanks [Someone]) and get the thing burned. [Someone] had some blank DVD’s but of course this computer only has a CD drive. So I slam the disc into the tray and get it to boot to the disk. The disk boots and it looks different from the USB but it is manageable. I open up Ghost and there are two 40GB drives and no 250GB drive that is plugged in. So I fiddle with the stupid cables and bit and close and reopen ghost (repeat 4-5 times). I finally get the drive recognized when I realize I don’t know which flippin’ 40 gig I’m supposed to image. So I close ghost and pop the power cable off the back of the one that I know it’s NOT. This freezes everything. I gracefully pulled the power plug and jam it back into the power supply. Once it booted back up I had what I needed and let it image overnight.

Saturday:

The disk had successfully imaged. I decided that I didn’t want to have to do that again so I pulled out my trusty cloning machine and imaged the disk again so in case I really screwed something up I’d have something to fall back on rather than dealing with all that again. So after getting a backup copy I nabbed the assigned PC from [Someone]’s desk that was going to be the mew machine. I figured I’d start it up and make sure that it would boot. It did. This would be the first and last thing that would work without a hitch. I went to login and it throws a windows activation dialogue at me. Ok I’ve done that before. No NIC drivers but I’ll just use the phone. I call the number provided and there is about 20 minutes worth of no support for XP but you can still activate it blah blah blah. It finally asks if I’m activating XP. Yes. Another 20 minute dialogue on how this is going to work and how to read a pile of numbers in. I read the numbers in and it tells me it’s not good. Fine. We (used) to have XP keys all over the place. I go looking for an old sticker and completely luck out. I finally pinched the one on [Someone]’s XP machine sitting on his desk and plunk that key in and call the number AGAIN. It finally activates and I install the drivers and make sure it’ll work. Good.

Now I figure I’ll throw in that second hard drive for the RAID and we’ll be off to the races. I create the RAID and take my backup image and reimage the now mirrored hard drives. I yank out the backup drive and reboot and because it is no longer IDE it starts having boot loops for lunch. Knowing what a fun time I’m going to have with that I prod Google to tell me what to do and I find what seems like a possible solution. First I’ll need to boot in IDE though and tweak a few things. So I throw the backup drive in and as it boots go looking for another key so I don’t have to use [Someone]’s. I found one on a machine in the server room. Thinking I’m being thrifty I grab a picture of it and go back to my desk to activate this thing again. I change the key and get it activated again. I installed the drivers and reboot. I log in and it tells me that I need to activate……again? Fine. I click yes and it says windows is already activated. I click ok and it says I need to activate……You see the pattern developing here? I reimaged in case something just didn’t work correctly after a driver install. I call to activate again….this time I got a picture of the numbers given to me to activate so I could save myself hours of time from being on the phone and getting a lecture on windows XP every time. After activating multiple times with no change I again prod Google for an answer. I spend 5 HOURS trying everything I see on Google. The closest I got was pulling WPA.DBL off an XP disk and overwriting the one there. It finally let me get to the telephone activation point but didn’t ever generate an installation ID. In the meantime I’ve tried something and broken windows and reimaged at least 10+ times (registry edits, strange commands, file tweaks you name it). I asked [Someone] about it but he was just as perplexed as I was. It’s safe to say I was out of time and patience and I went home pretty bent out of shape that the stupid activation wizard was turning out to be my biggest foe. I’m sure there are ways to crack the stupid thing and run free from there but I didn’t want to risk becoming illegal or anything so I just fumed the rest of the night.

Sunday:

This morning I’d decided to again try the key from [Someone]’s machine just by some off chance that the key would make any difference. I of course have a different installation ID so I get to call in again. *sigh* I immediately get a picture once I get the magic numbers just in case I get to slam my head on the desk doing it all over again today. I activate and reboot and praise Micro friggin’ Soft it didn’t bug me at all again about activation. So I run through and install drivers and before I start breaking things again trying to get RAID working I imaged the backup to the RAID array and then went back to IDE to play with settings again. The initial idea I tried was for Windows 7 only…..go figure. So I went through about another 5 sites before I found something that look fairly doable. To try and shorten this a bit here is the magic I performed:

http://bonapartepanjaitan.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-to-change-from-ide-to-ahciraid-mode.html

I then switched to RAID and just booted the one drive and it worked to my amazement. I quickly logged in looked around and installed the Intel RAID drivers and such and then imaged to the RAID array. I yanked the single drive and booted with all my fingers crossed, arms, toes, eyes, and anything else I could think of to cross and watched as it booted. I go to log in and that blankety blank activation screen is back. Fine. I tried activate online first and never could contact a server. I’m assuming they’ve taken those down. So I went for the phone option again (of course getting a picture when I was done). It activated and after a reboot had stayed that way. I am now going to celebrate my triumph with lunch. I have defeated a mighty Wizard of activation that I do not wish to deal with ever again….or maybe I just went around it… but still I feel pretty dang good about myself considering I don’t have to feel like I spun my wheels for two days for nothing. I considered blowing the dust out but figured it was too great a risk and might allow the magic to escape so I now bestow my trophy on [Someone]’s desk.

I then stuck a sticky note on the computer and wrote "Here lies 16 hours of frustration, fatigue, and the biggest PITA I've EVER ventured to conquer." Crap like that I'd just reinstall windows any ol' day of the week and call it a day and save myself the trouble, but they didn't have the software to reinstall on this thing and it being special required....nay demanded blood, sweat, and tears. It does feel really good when you solve something that has felt impossible though. It's even better that it's over and done with.

The Battery Assault

I have quite enjoyed riding my motorcycle to work and back the past few months. It's been nice to not spend so much on gas and still get around. The other day I had come home from work and stuffed it in the garage and didn't think much else of it. I had left the key on though so overnight the battery had the chance to die on me. The next morning as I tried to fire it up I quickly realized I had left the key on all night and the battery wasn't going to do anything for me.

I'm used to older motorcycles. When a battery is dead you can roll start the thing and let the alternator do it's job and charge the battery. Also you can jump start the battery and again as the motorcycle runs it will charge the battery. Needing to get to work I attempted to roll start the beast and not being on the biggest hill in the world gave up after three attempts and half a gallon of sweat. I removed the seat and tried to locate the battery. I looked at what I thought might be the battery but in a frustrated attempted to hurry off to work I ended up stuffing it in the garage and taking the car. I figured I could figure out where the battery was and jump the thing when I got home.

After work I grabbed the jumper cables and popped the hood on my car. The battery is stuffed far enough under the seat that I couldn't clamp the lead on the battery so the best I could do was hold them there. I saw sparks and the lights came on so I knew it was getting a charge. I fired it up and the second I pulled the leads off it died. I did this several times creating sparks and smoke (The plastic around the leads were getting hot and melting).

At this point I was pretty aggravated. I pulled out the charger and hooked it up to let it charge overnight but when I plugged it in it didn't show it was pulling very many amps (again an old motorcycle will pull upwards of over 6 amps and slowly pull less and less until it's charged). When I turned the key the lights would come on and it drew some amps there. Problem was it was going to the lights and not really charging the battery. Eventually I pulled the battery all the way out and set it down to charge. It still wasn't drawing much. I started looking around on the battery and I found that for a standard charge it will pull 1.1 amps for ~5-10 hours. Alrighty then.

I let the thing charge overnight and this morning (along with our little mouse incident) I put everything back together. It fired right up without any problems. The Trips had been cleared and I had to reset the clock but other than that everything was fine. Looking around on the internet newer bikes are totally dead without the battery. You can't jump them or roll start them. No battery leaves you dead in the water. Guess I won't be leaving the lights on overnight anymore. It's nice to have a fuel injected unit and not worry about a choke, but I guess the trade off is when it's dead it's dead.

The Mouscepade

A few years ago not long after moving into our house we had noticed that we weren't the only ones living in our house. Some mice had decided it was a good idea to move in with us. They hadn't been paying us rent so we got some exterminators to give them an eviction notice for us. It seemed to work quite well. We stuffed steel wool in the holes that they had created and called it at that.

Just this last week we noticed that a hole had been chewed in a bag. We started seeing signs of the return of the rodent. This time we decided to go with a home brewed remedy. Last time we had gotten some things before the exterminator, but nothing really seemed to catch their attention. I had caught a few mice on my mission with a good old fashion wooden trap. We got a handful of those and some of the sticky variety as well. We cleaned out the floor of the pantry and set up the traps. Top tip: Caramel doesn't seem to be a big winner with the mice. I don't think it's very potent. We ran and got a small jar of peanut butter and smeared that on the wooden traps. I thought for sure that would do the trick. I didn't think the sticky ones would do much good because there really wasn't anything to lure them to them. We have had the traps set up for days without much luck. We hadn't thought about it for a day or two.

This morning when we got up and went to look in the pantry and lo and behold we had one of the little ninjas at last. It was on one of the sticky traps and it was struggling to get loose. The trap had fallen down a step or two from where we had originally placed it. In a mad struggle to escape it probably moved around enough to move the trap and get itself stuck even more. I don't know how long the poor thing had been there. Enough that it only twitched every now and again to try and get loose. My wife was getting exited wondering what to do with the poor thing and how to put it out of its misery. She wanted to let loose the hounds and let one of the dogs at it. I've seen what he does to chew toys and leaving Mouse entrails all over the house didn't seem like the best option to me. She called her parents and they suggested drowning it. That seemed better than the hammer I was considering.

I filled up a bucket of water and as I got the trap to dunk the feller in it started squeaking in it's panic. I dropped the trap it and it was floating. I think it was submerged enough that it drowned but I got a stick and submerged it to make sure. I am hoping that there is only the one. There hasn't been a lot of evidence of a lot of them. Just maybe one or two. Hopefully there aren't anymore.

R.I.P. Ninja Mouse #1

Phantom of the Motorcycle

Well I broke down and got a new motorcycle. I have been occasionally riding an old 1980 CX500 Custom for a while. My dad got it a while back and it went to my uncle and then back to me. Recently it started having a few issues, and me not being the most mechanically inclined wasn't quite sure if I should sell it or ride it for one more year. I had registered it but hadn't reinstated the insurance just yet. My wife and I walked into Honda World just to poke about. She wanted to look at four wheelers. We went in and looked around and the light of glory came out of heaven and shone forth on a Honda Shadow Phantom. I've been looking at getting one for years. I was looking at them on KSL and wasn't really looking for brand new. My wife just got a brand new car last year and I really hadn't considered anything new. The guy we talked to said that the Phantoms go really fast. They don't send a lot of them over. The main difference with the Phantom is the engine is blacked out. It was shipped in on Thursday, built on Friday, and put out on the floor that morning (Saturday). He said that it would be sold that day. The only thing in question was who would take it. I tossed it back and forth a bit. My wife encouraged me to get it.

Long story short we got it. I have never been happier with a motorcycle that I am with this one. We took it on it's maiden voyage up to Heber and back. I have taken it to work now for the past couple of days and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Gas mileage is 56 mpg and it has a 3.7 gallon tank. I can get close to 200 miles per tank and it only costs about 11 - 12 bucks to fill up. We don't have kids yet so we might as well enjoy a few things. We got a Sissy bar so my wife can ride along with me.

Before I added the Sissy Bar

Last night I sold the old CX500 Custom. It was sad to see it go but I'm glad that someone else could enjoy it.

Mika Howls for a Walk

Job Benefits

As most of you know I switched jobs a few months back. I now work for ARUP Laboratories and I love it. One of the perks of working here that I thought others would be interested to know is that every month we swap out older computers. They are usually 4-5 years old or so. I am allowed to haul these guys home if I want. I just need to sign out for them and I can take them home. They won't have a hard drive in them as we need to keep them around or destroy them according to HIPAA laws and such but if anyone would like a newer computer for the price of a hard drive (and possibly a windows license) I can get you set up. Hard drives start around $50 and Windows will be around $100. This wouldn't include anything other than the computer tower. If anyone is interested let me know and I can get something started for you.