Cav's Place

Was hoping there will be some little news piece I’ll be able to write a couple of paragraphs about as this week’s second post, but nothing inspired me enough, so I guess this year’s first Sunday update couldn’t be avoided anymore. Not that there’s much to say, as I’ve been spending a fair amount of time just reading A Dance with Dragons, finding myself on pace to actually finish in two weeks. Won’t be easy to maintain said pace for nine more days, but it reads easily enough and is sufficiently enjoyable and interesting to make me think I may just manage it.
Otherwise, barely poked a little more at that third Modern Times scenario, so it seems unlikely that I’ll finish it this evening, though I was thinking of getting back to playing after I’ll post this. Either way, hoping to at least have the fourth finished as well by the end of next week, even if I’ll only poke at it for minutes per day, and at least the fifth and sixth by the end of the week after that, assuming I’ll manage to finish the book early enough. No chance of finishing the entire campaign by the end of the month under these circumstances, as I was considering to try at first, but it may just be possible to finish it and the ten additional DLC scenarios by the end of March.

As for the uptime record I was mentioning, it was beaten Saturday morning and I still haven’t rebooted, so at the moment it’s at 23 days and six hours and counting. And yes, I’m taking another screenshot now that I mentioned this, just in case. The idea is still to reach at least 25 days, and probably 26, assuming no problems will appear and there are no blackouts, or at least none lasting more than the couple of minutes I’m comfortable letting my UPS shoulder the burden before shutting down the computer.

As I’m starting to write this post, the listed system uptime is just reaching 20 days, and the screenshot I have, dated October 25, 2012, indicates that the previous record was just over 21 days and 16 hours. As such, if nothing happens before then, I’ll have a new uptime record early Saturday morning, which will reach 25 days if I can get to this month’s Patch Tuesday, or even 26 if I’ll wait until the next day to apply the updates. Sure, it’ll be on another computer and another version of Windows, as I was still using Vista at that time, but it is a new uptime record on a computer I’m using and may indicate that, despite my anxiety, things are working better now than they did then… Then again, considering that said previous record was set just when the main HDD was failing, it’s not in itself necessarily a sign that everything is fine.

Otherwise, my Internet access has been mostly fine ever since the cable was completely replaced, but it worked for a week even after the first fix, so I’m still feeling very insecure. Doesn’t help that Saturday evening it was very slow for a few hours, reported speeds being even less than a tenth of what they should be, and I still got no reply to the e-mails I sent. Even asked the guy about them on Sunday, when I called because it was down again and he said there was a power outage in his area, and the reply was that he didn’t even check his e-mail but he will. Well, four more days passed and I still got nothing, though admittedly there were also no other noticeable problems, except a potential brief outage around 1 PM on Tuesday, when I saw a logged connection error in between successful connections at 12:46 PM and 1:06 PM.

Moving on, I got that chipped tooth fixed Monday morning. Only one of them since the dentist said there was too little damage elsewhere and any filling would just fall off, so I can only hope I won’t get a cavity because it’s simply left like that, and also that this one filling that was put in will stay in place despite also being very small. You really can’t notice it’s there unless you look very closely and spot a difference in texture, as otherwise the color matches that of my tooth perfectly and even if I slide my tongue on it I only feel that different texture in one spot, where the material was probably very thinly spread on the tooth. So those are some good signs, since the fillings put in by my regular dentist in recent years felt different, and also different from those first ones put in and which have mostly also stayed in place.
The awkward part was that I went there with blood under my jaw. Had cut myself shaving the previous evening and apparently some more blood flowed after I finished and thought I had stopped it, and then I didn’t wash it off when I just quickly splashed some water on my face in the morning and, being in that area, didn’t see it in the mirror either. So I did notice some odd looks, but nobody actually said anything and I only learned why after the dentist was done and handed me a mirror to see how the tooth looked, at which point I also spotted the blood. Quite weird, and I wish they’d have told me right away and asked me to wash or wipe it off before she started working, but nothing to do about it now…

Initially meant to get this first post of the week out of the way on Tuesday, but also meant to start reading A Dance with Dragons this week and post after I do so. Since I’m only posting it today, I only managed to get myself to start it last evening, though I did read the first 80 pages already. Should manage to finish it in less than three weeks, but probably not less than two, though that’d have pretty much been a given some ten to 12 years ago. Will probably mean I won’t get much further in Modern Times this month, however, but after getting past the first two scenarios I had barely poked at the third over the past few days anyway.

And yes, since the weather got warmer again and we even had over 15°C yesterday, I went for another run on Tuesday. With a reported temperature of only around 10°C and plenty of clouds, it seemed a bit chilly at first, but it was fine once I actually got going and the time was 21:43, which I’m not too happy with but is two seconds better than what I managed last time. The first intermediate time was 4:45 and the third was 16:53, but all I can say about the second is that it was around 10:20. Several people with dogs were blocking the path just as I was getting under the bridge, and after I managed to pick my way past them I forgot to look at the stopwatch just as I got out from under the bridge, which is the spot I measure this second intermediate time at, only remembering a few seconds later, when I saw 10:23.
Based on the forecast I saw at the start of the week, I was initially thinking of running again tomorrow, since I was a week behind and therefore Tuesday’s run actually counts for last week. However, seeing as now it says cloudy and a maximum of 7°C, I’ll leave it for next week, when it should probably be over 10°C again on most days and I should therefore manage to find some passable weather for two runs and catch up. This means I won’t be dropping my running shoes off to be fixed, since I still didn’t do that, but by this point I’m thinking I’ll glue that part back together myself. Shouldn’t do that, since they came with a two year warranty and only lasted in proper shape for around nine months, but it may be simpler…

Last Monday’s fix didn’t last long, since the cable was apparently also damaged past the portion which was replaced then. Still, that fix did solve the issues for the moment and it worked with no problems until shortly after 4 PM on Friday, when I noticed a brief outage that I didn’t pay particular attention to since resetting the switch sorted it out and when I checked I saw that the computer had been running for just over a week, it said seven days and a few minutes, so thought there may have been some need to send or receive some network information after that time, since I have the settings done manually. However, it’s far more likely that it was in fact a sign of things to come.
Worked fine over the weekend, but at about 3:45 PM on Monday there was another outage and resetting the switch resulted in the signal appearing intermittent again, though the periods when it was missing were about as rare as those when it briefly appeared after the blizzard. Another reset fixed it, but only until 4:15 PM, when it again required two resets of the switch to work until 4:35 PM. Then I tried to plug the cable directly into the computer and noticed that the computer didn’t see any signal, though I left it there until 5 PM, when I plugged it back through the switch. That made it work until 7 PM, after which it became increasingly harder to make it work for any length of time and I had to try everything, whether resetting the switch, unplugging and plugging back the cable in the switch, doing the same in the UPS, as it once again passes through that, or switching ports on the switch. One of these, at some point, made it work a while longer, probably because a sufficiently clear connection could be established after I did it, but it failed again after less and less time.
After 10 PM any connection only lasted mere seconds, so I gave up for a while, and when I checked again, around 11:30 PM, it worked again, after having apparently fixed itself. Also had a successful update at 11:10 PM, so was working then too. Failed again at 5:15 AM, and logs tell me it wasn’t working at 6:35 AM, but dad said it was working at 7 AM, when he woke up, and it seemed to continue to work until 10:35 AM. At 10:40 AM it failed again, but unplugging the cable from the switch and plugging it back in at noon fixed it, and it didn’t fail again until at some point between 12:20 PM and 1 PM on Wednesday.
I only actually got on the computer at 4 PM then, but attempts to fix it only offered me a few seconds the first time and a couple of minutes the second, after which it completely refused to work again, though plugging the cable directly into the computer made it see that there was a signal again, just that it wasn’t one it could use. Strangely enough, later in the evening the computer couldn’t directly see the signal at all anymore, but plugging it back through the switch gave me about 15 minutes of working Internet access around 8 PM, then initially brief but increasingly longer periods after 10 PM, allowing me to be on-line much of the time until I went to bed.
Did call the guy managing this network around 5 PM on Wednesday and, after checking to see that the other computers in this building that are in this network are on-line, he concluded that the cable must need to be completely replaced and said he’ll do that the next day, after 11 AM, also complaining about the quality of the cables used by the network I used to be in, and which he took over, and saying he already replaced four in this building. And that complaint was obviously fully justified, as the cable used after theirs were cut, a year and a bit ago, was a particularly soft and flimsy unshielded UTP cable that even the guy who worked on it complained about, repeatedly and pointedly, when he came to attach the jack. Probably meant that someone else decided what to purchase and he had to make do with what he had, despite his better judgment.
Either way, we were actually called at 10:15 AM on Thursday and told he’ll be on top of the building in ten minutes, so I rushed to quickly do something, as I had managed to kick it back to life after waking up at 10 AM and meant to get some things out of the way, in case the problem somehow won’t be solved that day. Then I untangled the cable, dad removed the window and managed to pull it back out through the wall, and then he also, with difficulty, pushed the new one in through that same hole. After that, the guy came to attach the jack and I checked that it worked and also asked why does it take so long to access my blog since I ended up in this network, since it’s quite clear that the problem isn’t with my host, as others don’t have the same issue. He didn’t have much to say about that though, only suggesting that there may be some connection issue on the way, after also telling me to add the network’s DNS, which I didn’t know existed until then, as primary and see if that changed anything. I didn’t keep that DNS there for long, however, as shortly after he left I found myself ending up on what appeared to be some highly questionable betting site, if not simply a phishing site, instead of where I wanted to go. Which, if done on purpose, is a dirty trick.
The problem now is that this new cable is also a simple unshielded UTP cable, albeit slightly thicker and maybe a little less soft than the old one, and I heard dad also offered to pay him for the trouble and he accepted the offer. Admittedly, the amount probably didn’t even cover the cable itself, even at this low quality, considering the distance, but if we were to pay for something, it should have been for something not so likely to just get damaged again soon enough. After all, we did fully pay for the first one, but that was a sturdy FTP cable, not sure if also shielded or not, and good enough to last since March or April of 2006 and until December of 2014, when it was cut, albeit with the portion where it goes over the top of the building wrapped in insulating tape earlier that year, when it started pissing on my desk. So now I wonder how long till we’ll have to go through it all over again…

As for the new dentist, after chipping my teeth when I accidentally bit into the fork, I thought to use the “opportunity” to look for someone else in the area, after having been unhappy with those I’ve been going to for some time, considering the fillings that kept falling out and the pain I was left with after the last replacement, and also that their site doesn’t seem to exist anymore. This led me to make a choice, though of course I was very uncertain about it, but dad repeated his suggestion, also made when I had previously mentioned wanting to go somewhere else, more than once, and I ended up somewhere else, though admittedly the place is only a couple of minutes away and, according to what I had found as well, they seem to do good work. The problem is that their primary target are children, which of course means they’re particularly careful but also that the environment is one I definitely don’t want to find myself in. Plus, they’re rather expensive.
Still, like I said, I ended up at this place nearby last evening, being scheduled at 7:30 PM for a free check, after which they’d tell me what should be done about the slightly chipped teeth. Only ended up being admitted around 7:55 PM, however, but everyone apologized repeatedly for the delay, and it’s probably a bad sign of how things work around here that I was so surprised they didn’t treat the situation as completely normal. Also, and somewhat as expected, the dentist was very, and I dare say even excessively, gentle and careful, also explaining everything and asking whether she can do what she wanted to do when it was only a matter of blowing some air or, after checking, smoothing the chipped bits a little, which she said she’ll do for free.
What will be paid will be a tiny filling for one of the chipped teeth, where she said the bit that snapped off is a bit more noticeable and may just be big enough for a filling to stick. The other one I knew of and one or two others she also spotted, since I’m not exactly sure which one she was working on at one point, apparently have too little damage to be much of a problem and there’d be no way for a filling that small to stay there. And there don’t seem to be any cavities or loose fillings, though she also stressed the same things my old dentist kept saying, namely that I should have my three remaining wisdom teeth removed and that there’s quite a lot of tartar. And my replies were also the same, namely that I’ll wait for the wisdom teeth to actually cause obvious problems first, and that I’m uncertain about removing the tartar… Which uncertainty turned into another decision to forget it when she mentioned how much that’d cost if done there, so when she saw my look she said it’d be better not to wait too long for it, adding that maybe it should be done at some point within the next six months.
So, yes, the prices are a problem, though perhaps I should be less concerned about it than I am since dad is paying and he picked the place. Also, the doctor did offer me a 10% discount right away, again being particularly nice about it, which was increased to 20% when I agreed to come during the morning, and this 20% discount makes the price be the same as what the place I had picked said a filling for one chipped front tooth would cost, in their reply to the e-mail I had sent. Still more expensive that the old place though, so it’ll really have to stay there for a long time to be worth it in terms of money alone… And I doubt anything would be worth staying in a place with an obvious focus on children, including a coloring table, drawings obviously made by children on one wall and something meant for pregnant women placed very visibly among the promotional materials, and where I’m obviously likely to end up waiting next to children and parents. In fact there was a child there even last evening, though only briefly.

After landing on Mars at 5:05 AM UTC on January 25, 2004, the little rover that could, Opportunity, has now started its 13th year on the red planet. In addition, with the January 2 winter solstice now behind it, conditions should improve and more power should once again be available for operations, thanks to both the increasing amount of sunlight and the somewhat reduced need for heating. And this is coming after managing to keep busy all through the middle of winter, thanks to the way it was positioned and the dust cleaning events that took place.
Of course, problems do accumulate, by far the most notable having to do with the flash memory, which in spite of all the team’s attempts remains unusable. There were some more tests done even recently, but nothing seems to work and the hope that the worst problems were limited to bank seven and isolating it would allow the rover to continue using the remaining space in relatively good conditions most of the time seems to have been proven false. Still, while it obviously limits what can be done, operating in RAM-only mode doesn’t seem to generate any problems in itself at this time and it allows Opportunity to continue analyzing its surroundings and add even more to the large amount of useful and intriguing information it has already delivered.

Since this post was mainly meant to mark the moment, I guess I’ll end it here, but not before apologizing for it being over a day late. I guess it’s better late than never, though, and I definitely hope this 13th year will prove a lucky one and the little rover will take advantage of the improving conditions to continue operating at least without any additional problems, if fixing the existing ones, or at least mitigating them to a great extent, will continue to prove impossible.

Time for another quick personal update, though I was considering waiting until tomorrow and making it a Sunday update after all, hoping I’ll actually manage to finish the original Tropico 4 campaign. Finished mission 19 last evening, so only the last one is left now and I tend to finish one every other day, after even finishing one per day at first, when they were easier, but I’d rather not rush myself with that and then either end up failing or leaving the post for Sunday evening and wondering whether I’ll even be able to post it after all.

I’m saying that because it was a good thing I managed to post the review for The Cavalier Club Saturday evening, as I had no Internet access starting just after I went to bed that night and until Monday afternoon. There was something of a blizzard starting that evening and continuing through Sunday, which I’d hardly consider a bad one and which in fact just finally brought enough snow and freezing temperatures to remind us that we actually are in the middle of winter, as opposed to the spring weather we had been having until then, but it seemed to be enough to snap a wire inside the cable, which was likely already damaged.
There had been some issues even Saturday evening, and I was actually worried I’d be unable to post even then, but it worked normally again by the time I did and, despite some power fluctuations and even a brief blackout, Internet access continued to work fine, bar one very brief outage around 4 AM, until I went to bed, at 5:10 AM. However, according to the logs I saw in the morning, at 5:20 AM it wasn’t working anymore, and I seemed to have no signal whatsoever, though if I moved the cable to another port on the switch, or plugged it into the broken old one, the LED would briefly flash every so often. That port on the switch wasn’t actually burned out though, since plugging the cable going to the computer into it made the LED light up normally, so it was weird.
Dad called after he woke up and was told no others from the area complained, but they’ll come and check. Then I called myself in the afternoon, heart racing and struggling to get a few words out until I completely froze, and was told they did check, works fine for the few others connected to the same switch, but they just couldn’t get on top of the building, since everything’s locked and apparently they didn’t get the key the guy who quit the network I used to be in, prompting this “partnership” with this other one, said he had. So the person I talked to said he was deeply sorry, but I’ll have to wait until Monday, as he’ll come with another guy then and see what they can do about it.
Monday morning, I woke up at 10 AM, since he said he’ll come around 10 or 10:30 and call first, but there was no sign from them until 11, when actually my mother called and was told he had just walked into the office and will be on his way. Didn’t call again before getting here though, so she was surprised to get called back a while later and asked to go out the window, so they’ll be able to see what cable to work on. That message was relayed to me, the cable was eventually identified even though another one apparently had the name on it and he kept saying it couldn’t be the one I was talking about, and even moving, and after digging it up from under the snow and ice, asking me to plug it in and out several times and finding the issue, it was eventually fixed… Which actually seemed to also fix the upload issue I had noticed before and which had prompted me to plug it directly into the switch, as running it through the UPS caused the upload speed to be only a few percent of what it should have been. Now let’s see how long it’ll hold.

But I was saying this will be quick and I’m at 700 words already, so let me move on to the fact that I actually went out for a little while that day, after I made sure the Internet worked just fine, supposedly to drop off some recyclables but really just taking a walk around the area to enjoy the cold and the snow, including the piles I had to push through to reach the bins. Didn’t enjoy the puddles though, and had to navigate a few as I crossed streets, one particularly large one being impossible to go around, so my socks and feet got rather wet and the fact that one boot wasn’t tied properly didn’t help. Or, in fact, it was tied as well as it could be, but the shoelaces had snapped as I was tying them and I had temporarily replaced them with others that were too short, since they were the same color as the old ones, only taking those out and putting some brown ones, which were of the correct length, in after coming back.

But then things didn’t go so well. Dad had apparently been asking for a certain dish for a while and, since I had been out of my room and even interacting that day, my mother asked me repeatedly to have some as well right after she’ll cook it, while it’ll be warm, and then called me again once she had some made even though I had said to just leave it for me to get to at night, even if it’ll be cold by then. And I did mean what I said, but we’re talking about the dish I saw as a sign when I suddenly saw it there several years ago, with all the mental links formed by it, and which I’m not sure has been cooked since, or if it has been then definitely no more than once or twice, so I couldn’t resist when it was there in front of me and took some to eat in my room.
Well, I shouldn’t have done that, as I somehow “managed” to bite hard on the fork instead of the food and chipped two front teeth. Or at least I see and feel that I chipped those two, and one of them actually bothers me a little since then, but it’s possible that at least one other was slightly affected as well. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but I wasn’t exactly paying attention, so I may have noticed out of the corner of my eye that the food was slipping and tried to bite hard and fast to catch it, but either wasn’t fast enough or simply missed, and this was the result.
Been wondering what to do about it since then, and whether I should use this as an opportunity to visit another dentist, as I had been unhappy with my regular one for some time, but I didn’t go anywhere yet. What’s odd is that my regular dentist’s site no longer exists, which may mean bad things even though the one time I sent them a message through it I was told I was lucky they saw it because they don’t usually check and I should just call, which I’m not going to do. But, either way, I had a look at other places in the area and picked one while dad kept suggesting another, so I eventually sent a message Thursday afternoon to the one I picked and then earlier today another one to the one he picked, since I got no reply from the first place.
Now let’s see what happens, and what, if anything, can be done about these teeth and how much it’ll end up costing. The prospect of going to some new place is definitely scary and this second place would make things even worse, as they seem to be focusing mainly on children and families, even having information posted specifically for pregnant women, which likely means they’re careful but also obviously creates an environment I’d never want to be in under any circumstances. But if they’ll reply and the other ones didn’t, I guess they may be a solution for now, if probably not the place I’ll want to return to whenever other problems will appear.

And this was far from a quick post… Once again, if I could add even a quarter as much to my story per day, it’d be something. Then again, I know I should stop struggling to just add yet another pointless paragraph every night, move everything after the battle with the three wizards that takes place after my characters sail away into another file and leave it there to get back to at some later point, and get to the edits and changes needed to make the part up to that point into an actual book on its own.
But that’s not going to happen, so at the moment I guess I’ll be going back to Tropico 4, since even playing a game and actually advancing is rare enough for me and may count as a little more than moping around and feeling like shit… Not that I feel any differently, nor that I could, as long as one particular miracle won’t happen.