Good morning you happy denizens of the digital landscape… or at least it is morning here as I begin typing up my morning blog post. There are various sundry reasons that have made me late in getting started this morning… not the least of which is that my wife left the house crazy early this morning for a seminar at her school. As a result I got up, made her coffee, and then promptly went right back to sleep. I did not wake up of my own volition until roughly 9:30. From that point forward I have been dealing with various things around the house.
Rat vs Pump
One of the things I had to deal with was the pool pump. When I got home from work I pulled into the driveway and upon opening my door there was the most hideous noise. My brain immediately lept to… god please don’t let it be the air conditioner. Our AC unit is original to the house, and at this point is over 30 years old. We had been advised by the air conditioner folks that we should just let it run until it died… because they simply do no make them like that anymore. So each season I find myself worried about the imminent death of our unit and the insane price tag that will come from replacing it.
As I got closer to the AC unit, I realized that the noise was not in fact coming from it. I breathed a quick sigh of relief… that quickly changed as I realized the noise was coming from our back yard. Sure enough… it was the pool pump letting loose a horrific death shriek. I turned it off immediately and noticed that the pump pot basket was dry. First thought was a clog in the skimmer basket at the pool. Sure enough… it was definitely a clog. Sitting in the basket was a rat… the likes of which I have never seen in Oklahoma.
Seriously… I had no clue we had rats like this. Apparently it had tried to get a drink from the pool… fell in and gotten sucked into the skimmer basket. I always thought rats could swim… or at least you are given that impression from the movies. I dislodged it from the basket which sent it floating out into the pool proper… at which point I retrieved it with a shovel and promptly employed it as a ratapult to sent it sailing over our back fence into the unmanaged green belt behind all the homes. Going back to the pool pump… I could hear it sizzling… so I brought over the hose and tried my best to cool it off.
I put the hose in the pool and filled it to the brim and later on that evening tried the pump again. Still making the same death shriek. Normally on Saturday mornings the pool guys come out, so I called them to warn them of the impending death of the pump motor. Sure enough after looking it over… they agreed that the pump was well and dead. They feared that this time however it had likely warped the impeller as well as the motor assembly itself. So sometime around the beginning of the week they will come out and install a new one. Here is hoping that we do not lose the war to algae in the meantime.
Service Pack Shuffle
Additionally this morning I decided to work on my wife’s laptop while she was up at school. We had been behind on patching it, and after windows update failing multiple times on automatically installing service pack 1 I thought I would take a stab at downloading the standalone install and getting that going. While the 900+ meg download was coming down from Microsoft at a blazing 200kbps I thought I would do some general maintenance as well. There were a ton of things sitting in the On Start Up section of her registry. So after a bit of googling on a few of the items… I whittled it down to only a handful of required items.
Finally while sitting there waiting on the pack to install… I decided to set up open hardware monitor. Essentially for some time that machine has been seemingly underperforming its specifications. I used it briefly as a gaming machine, prior to getting my Asus g73sw, and it always felt extremely sluggish. Open cracking open the monitor it seems as though I might have found the problem.
It looks like the default windows 7 drivers are not taking into account the full processing power of the core 2 duo processor. So I have the intel drivers sitting waiting to install if the service pack install goes successfully. Here is hoping this will resolve the issues for her. She has been super frustrated with how sluggish that machine has been acting. Essentially it is currently only performing at roughly 1.5 ghz where it should be performing at 2.5 ghz. I figured while I was waiting on the service pack install, that I would come downstairs and knock out a blog post.
Wrapping Up
Last night was another NDA test for me… so I really do not have a lot of gaming related news to share. However I have heard rumor that participation in any future stress tests for this certain NDA bound game… greatly increase your chances of getting into “other” activities. That’s about all I can say on that, but if anyone is reading this… and has not been participating in the “break the server” nights… I highly suggest that you start doing so. My allergies are still going crazy, so here is hoping that we get some rain to wash out the air. I hope you all have a great weekend… and I hope when I get back upstairs that service pack 1 has installed nicely.