Andrew Pollack's Blog

Technology, Family, Entertainment, Politics, and Random Noise

Techo-Karma, and I'm on the payback side for a change!

By Andrew Pollack on 07/08/2007 at 12:19 AM EDT

A few months back I had a week go by where everything I touched broke. That's unusual for me. Nonetheless, it happened. Software didn't work, I went to clean up a PC and killed the motherboard, it was endless. It cost me a few hundred dollars to put things right, and then a few weeks later I picked up a new system board -- and went to a lot of trouble to find one that would support the same P4 and ram from the one I broke. Of course, this strange negative karma was still with me. When I put the old processor in the system board.....nothing. Not. A. Thing. Several hours later I found that I'd bent a couple of pins on the processor.

Fast forward to this week. I got a hell of a deal last week on a new board and processor combination. Not the latest and fastest, but fairly good. An Athlon 64 X2 dual core. Which - of course - required a power supply with an end connector I didn't have, so it cost me new power supply. Which delayed me getting things done, which were taking forever anyway because of some new software that just would not load.

All bad luck up to that moment, and then.... The good karma kicked back in.

The thing about good karma is that I'm much more used to it than the bad. Its a firefighter thing I think. We get automatic double-miles on good karma.

Within the last 24 hours, I've found two new books I want to read, go the new Athlon machine up and running, got the software that's been vexing me installed on both laptop and workstation, helped a friend get Asterisk working, figured out how to finish a key bit of work, and....... using an exacto knife managed to FIX the pins on the other processor and drop it into its motherboard. I've gone from having destroyed two machines to having two good new test platforms and having freed up a third. Since I only need ONE of these three to work, I'll keep the new dual core Athlon, sell the other two (an old Celeron 1.7 and a nice Pentium 4 HT 2.8 with a good video card) for enough cash to end up even after all is said and done.


There are  - loading -  comments....



Other Recent Stories...

  1. 01/26/2023Better Running VirtualBox or VMWARE Virtual Machines on Windows 10+ Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I has been nearly 3 years since my last blog entry. The truth is, I haven't had much to say that was worthy of more than a basic social media post -- until today. For my current work, I was assigned a new laptop. It's a real powerhouse machine with 14 processor cores and 64 gigs of ram. It should be perfect for running my development environment in a virtual machine, but it wasn't. VirtualBox was barely starting, and no matter how many features I turned off, it could ...... 
  2. 04/04/2020How many Ventilators for the price of those tanks the Pentagon didn't even want?This goes WAY beyond Trump or Obama. This is decades of poor planning and poor use of funds. Certainly it should have been addressed in the Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations -- all of which were well aware of the implications of a pandemic. I want a military prepared to help us, not just hurt other people. As an American I expect that with the ridiculous funding of our military might, we are prepared for damn near everything. Not just killing people and breaking things, but ...... 
  3. 01/28/2020Copyright Troll WarningThere's a copyright troll firm that has automated reverse-image searches and goes around looking for any posted images that they can make a quick copyright claim on. This is not quite a scam because it's technically legal, but it's run very much like a scam. This company works with a few "clients" that have vast repositories of copyrighted images. The trolls do a reverse web search on those images looking for hits. When they find one on a site that looks like someone they can scare, they work it like ...... 
  4. 03/26/2019Undestanding how OAUTH scopes will bring the concept of APPS to your Domino server 
  5. 02/05/2019Toro Yard Equipment - Not really a premium brand as far as I am concerned 
  6. 10/08/2018Will you be at the NYC Launch Event for HCL Domino v10 -- Find me! 
  7. 09/04/2018With two big projects on hold, I suddenly find myself very available for new short and long term projects.  
  8. 07/13/2018Who is HCL and why is it a good thing that they are now the ones behind Notes and Domino? 
  9. 03/21/2018Domino Apps on IOS is a Game Changer. Quit holding back. 
  10. 02/15/2018Andrew’s Proposed Gun Laws 
Click here for more articles.....


pen icon Comment Entry
Subject
Your Name
Homepage
*Your Email
* Your email address is required, but not displayed.
 
Your thoughts....
 
Remember Me  

Please wait while your document is saved.