LinLog

Yay, I can blog again! I was going to post something when I got home, but Time Warner's internet service has been completely unreliable for the last few weeks. It's like having dial-up, but more expensive. I'm going to have to call anc complain, because it's just getting ridiculous.

On a different note, I spent way too much time trying to install my new SATA hard drive last night. I ordered it from NewEgg earlier this week, along with a 1GB flash drive. I thought it would be a quick, painless installation. Just plug the drive into the integrated SATA controller on my motherboard, hook it up with th epower cord adapter, and I'm good to go. Little did I know....

After hooking up the drive, my system wouldn't boot. Heck, it wouldn't even finish detecting the available IDE devices. Even the memory test slowed down to a crawl. It made no sense. I tried fiddling with everything I could think of in the BIOS, but nothing helped.

The breakthrough came when, in desparation, I decided to try out the jumpers on the drive. Initially, I made the really stupid mistake of actually believing the label on the drive that said no jumpers were required. I guess the guys at the hard drive plant were in the mood for a practical joke that day. Anyway, after I set the jumper for 150MB/s only mode, everything worked perfectly.

In other news, I spent half a day at work last week configuring wireless modems for police data terminals. Why they need a Systems Analyst at pay grade 15 (for reference, the assistant IT director is a grade 17) to do boring, repetitive hardware configuration, I don't know. Well, actually I do know, but it would be unprofessional to say. At any rate, all you need to know is that it's boring, repetitive, and time-consuming. Sadly, I didn't know I'd be working on them that day, or I'd at least have brought my MP3 player.