Happy to have a long week-end

I decided to stay put, it's going to be too cold and wet this week-end to go out in the middle of nowhere and attempt to canoe. I remember last year at this time of the year we had Indian summer, it was warm and it was awesome but not this year. 

I'm happy to have time off because the past couple of days I've had bad luck with hardware. Other then finding out my 250Gb drive with the Wind8ws installs got fried because someone accidentally pulled out the power cord just enough for my Z800 to turn off.  And then the hard disk wouldn't boot. I've spent the rest of the week trying to fix it by marking off the bad sectors with a manufacturer provided software since I am out of hard drives.  Getting new drives will take one to two weeks. 

Then yesterday afternoon, it was suggested that I might not have tried the latest BIOS on the ASUS F1A75-V Pro. They were right, the system didn't have the latest BIOS. So I downloaded the BIOS and the BIOS flash tool off the ASUS site, put it on my USB key, booted and started to flash. Sadly after  it got 1/8 of the way through it's progress bar it hung. And stayed like that for the next hour at which point I unplugged the system and knew it wouldn't boot. 

And the coup de grace, was trying to add a 2nd display adapter in the xw9300, I had named Final Fantasy VII, or FFVII for short. It has been months that the power button on that system is flaky. You turn it on, it turns off.  Except that in the past week it was you turn it on 10-20 times, it might post once.  But yesterday after 30 trials and no post, I gave up. Stripped the machine of all it's usable parts and putting it to pasture. I have 2 more xw9300 in my team, one named Castle, after tv show, the other named Opus, after Opus the penguin of bloom county.  These systems will inherit the memory, hard drives and possible the CPU if they were single CPU versions.

It does not beat that about two weeks ago I noticed that my two Lenovo's LT2452 lcds, that I'd only had for about 2 months at that point, were both displaying solid white though the analog input.  I tried 3 different graphics cards, several cables, and concluded something went funny on the LCD's.  Thankfully Lenovo crossed shipped me 2 new ones, and I sent back the 2 defective ones. But this is the weirdest break of an LCD I've ever seen. Maybe it's because these are LED's?  These are very nice monitors, they do 1920x1200, and have an analog, a DVI and a displayport port.  The mechanism to switch between them is friendly and they display crisp.