November 2002

Today was supposed to be the biggest shopping day of the year. I must say that the Monroeville Mall was a happening place! Michelle’s father and I did some shopping at CompUSA and Home Depot while Michelle, her mother, and Steph (aka “the girls”) fought crowds in the Mall. Not long after we got back, my parents called from Cairo to wish me a happy turkey day and we talked for a little bit. We spent the rest of the afternoon at Johnny’s (Michelle’s younger brother who is a freshman in high school) basketball game.

The prospect of having to go back to RPI and do a really nasty week’s worth of work is really scary! I will from here on out refer to next week as Hell Week. I’ll keep you posted.

It was very nice to sleep in this morning until nearly 11:00! I got up and helped make the Thanksgiving dinner. I made the pies last night (pumpkin and apple), and learned how to make several classic Fisher family dishes. It was an awesome dinner! Happy Thanksgiving all!

This is a quick entry to say that I’ve arrived in Pittsburgh! We left this morning around 7:15 and for the most part beat the traffic rush in Albany. As we expected, the roads have been cleared with snow for several hours now, they appear to be totally dry. All of the trees and fields surrounding the interstates are blanketed with lots of snow which made for a pretty drive through the winter wonderland! All said and done, I think both Troy and Pittsburgh only got about 2-3 inches of snow, several inches short of the predicted 6 inches.

Just as I thought I was going to get away from Troy for a relaxing weekend in Pittsburgh, everything seemed to go wrong!

I noticed a few days ago that my server was generating I/O Stop Errors when it was trying to copy files. I didn’t think much of it, because it happens a lot. However, when one of these failures happened while the computer was writing to a registry hive, the problem became serious.

Windows never likes to start when one of its registry files has been corrupted, but especially when the SECURITY hive file is damaged! And of course, that was the file to which the system was writing when it crashed. While I was trying to fix the registry file, the source of the problem became evident: my IDE controller card had gone bad. Shortly after the critical failure above, the card just died.

I pulled it out and called Gateway tech support to get a new card. I hate talking to tech support people, because they have a prescribed list of steps to follow to troubleshoot every type of problem. Of course, I had already been through most of those steps several times. I was also not in the mood to talk to the Gateway guy for a whole 30 mins. It was getting late and I still wanted to leave for Pittsburgh. Long story short, the guy finally agreed to mail new card to me, stating that he had never seen anything like this before. That’s entirely possible, since most people who call text support merely have a power cable that is loose.

Several hours later, I had most of the stuff originally running on my computer back in a functioning state. The only think I wasn’t able to immediately restore was all of my old e-mail, hopefully I will get that figured out in the next few days.

In any case, we’re still in Troy, not heading out until tomorrow morning. There is supposed to be a big overnight snowstorm (it’s already started snowing in Pittsburgh). The roads could get messy, but since tomorrow is the biggest travel day of the year, things should be cleared by the time we hit the road in the morning!

This will be my last post before I set sail (or hit the road) for the 9 hour journey to Pittsburgh! I have tons of errands to run this afternoon before we can leave, but ultimately the goal is to leave early enough to beat the huge snow storm. Of course, we’re driving right towards the worst of it! Six inches of snow in 4 hours is going to seem like a blizzard!

So with that, I’m headed off. I will try to post while I’m there, or at least write some stuff and post it when I can! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

I guess I should say a little piece about this being my 100th post! Well, there it is

I spent the evening with Rachna, Moh, and one of Rachna’s friends here in Albany. It was nice to have a mini-CAC reunion, right in my living room huddled around Moh’s sheesha. Definitely good times!

Tomorrow I’m leaving around 2 PM for Pittsburgh and Thanksgiving fun! It’ll be a good time, although the 8 hour drive is a little bit tiring. Look for more about this when I get back (or maybe I’ll get to post a couple of entries while I’m there!).

Today is definitely going to be busy, not so much in a class sense, but as in everything else! But the good part of the day will be getting to see Rachna this afternoon and catching up over sheesha! More details tonight.

I spent most of the day working on a project for the Union. It’s really coming along and functioning well! I’m going to continue working on it, hoping for a December 15th completion date. Wish me luck! I’ll post info here when it’s done so people can take a look at it

Woo hoo, my Sunday 10 AM meeting has been cancelled. That means I can roll over and sleep a bit longer before I slave away all day in front of the computer writing HTML and various other stuff! Expect some procrastination posts today!

I made Raspberry Jello for Michelle tonight since her stomach is a wreck. I’m not a huge fan of Jello, but it made her very happy!

We both spent several hours working in the Union tonight… I worked on the Club Management System and she was with her Genetics lab group working on their final project. I love working in the Union!

Every once in a while the Union has concerts sponsored by various clubs. Tonight Mother’s Wine Emporium had a lady named Lucy Kaplansky sing and play an acoustic guitar. She had a great voice, and could really play guitar, but UPAC Sound provided all of the sound equipment. Honestly, the room was small enough to not need much amplification, but it ended up sounding like a feedback-ridden rock concert. I feel really sorry for her, because it was way to painful to sit there and listen.