David's Mumblings

Computer bummer, bis

As a follow-up to my previous post, my best guess is that the motherboard was fried. I went to Fry's and got a new motherboard, which unfortunately meant I had to get a new processor and RAM sticks because the CPU/RAM I had were too old for the motherboards they had (sigh!! more $$ than I wanted), and everything worked. Well, sort of. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 11/28/11 at 03:15:13 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Computer bummer

Most of the time I love computers... but sometimes they drive me nuts. Today I got a computer desk so that I could use my desktop again, that I hadn't used in some 6 months due to moving around so much. To my chagrin, it would not start up.

After some 3 hours troubleshooting, going through motherboard POST codes, moving around every movable component in the box, I give up... no idea why it's not working.

I will probably have to buy a new motherboard, but I don't know if it's the motherboard, the graphics card, the power supply, something else entirely...

Sigh.

At least the hard drives seem ok, or at least don't fix anything when I unplug them, so it is possible that I will be able to retrieve the considerable amount of data on this computer. ^ TOP

Posted on 11/27/11 at 06:13:26 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Moving from NY to NY to CA

I moved twice this year, which is entirely too much moving in a three-month period. My first move was in June, across the city to a place in the West Village (right next to the Spotted Pig for those who know that area). My next move was in September, all the way across the country back to the Bay Area in California. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 10/28/11 at 03:57:35 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Traveling with pets

On September 25, I made my "final" trip out of New York to finish my move back to California. My stuff had gone on the truck a few days before then, so it was just me, a suitcase, and three cats. More about moving and all that fun another time, but for now, let's talk about the adventure that is traveling with pets with the help of our friends the TSA. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 10/28/11 at 03:00:29 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Long time

Howdy y'all. It's been a while. I owe a bunch of people some news, so here's to trying to use this thing a little more.

Executive summary after the jump; more posts to follow (but in no particular order!). Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 10/28/11 at 01:58:19 by dchaley (David Haley)
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GQL and Constant Values

I'm reading up on Google's AppEngine API and in particular a brief discussion of using GQL for datastores. (GQL is a SQL-like language.) Something I find interesting: the query interface does not allow constant values in queries. Instead, you must use parameter binding (positional or named). Beyond the fact that (just IMO) this is easier to read/write (string concatenation is annoying), it forces away the problem of SQL-injection-like attacks by passing everything through the API: there is no way to forget to escape values properly. Pretty clever! ^ TOP

Posted on 02/26/11 at 16:12:36 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Mobile check-in

I used mobile check-in and boarding pass for the first time today. It's pretty nifty; they send an email with a link to a magic picture (one of those square bar-code things with dots) that scanners recognize as a boarding pass by looking at the image on your phone screen. And it "just worked". Yay for technology! ^ TOP

Posted on 01/03/11 at 12:23:58 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Painting and RenFaire

On Saturday Aurelie and I rented a car for a one-day get-away. I finally got my NY license to replace my (expired) CA license, so I can drive again. :-) Picking up the car was something of an adventure: when we arrived, they didn't have any cars left! There were some 15-20 people waiting for cars, and about 6 groups in front of us. We ended up waiting about an hour before being able to get a car, which turned out to be an SUV. I'd never driven one before, so that was kind of interesting: it handled surprisingly well, but clearly was much bigger than what I'm used to driving. I huffed and puffed a little about their mess and we got a $25 discount (from an initial $85). So things turned out ok in the end, other than wasting so much time. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 09/26/10 at 23:00:38 by dchaley (David Haley)
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HTC Incredible review

I finally joined the 21st century about four months ago ago by purchasing a smart-phone. I've been thinking about getting one for several years now but finally decided to take the plunge. I got an HTC Incredible, and am overall quite pleased with it. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 08/12/10 at 20:53:56 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Pizza pizza

On Friday, I made pizza for the first time, and in a real wood oven to boot. Well, I didn't make the dough, but I threw some ingredients on, stuck it in the oven, turned it around to cook evenly, and all that. It's actually pretty hard to get it into the oven on what is basically a big spatula: if you don't push hard enough off the spatula, the pie stays on and ingredients go flying (we lost a few good pepperonis that way!). So you really have to flick it quickly and aggressively to get the pie off. (It would probably be easier if the pizza pie had a "border", but these were all flat crust.) Then turning the pizza is pretty interesting: I found that the best way was to pick it up, tilt the pie to one side, and then pull back. The tilting causes it to turn as you pull. But the people who knew what they were doing were far better at it, so I guess there's some secret technique I have yet to master.

Anyhow, it was good fun, and it was certainly novel to use a ~1000deg F wood oven to make pizza for the first time. :-) ^ TOP

Posted on 08/07/10 at 23:05:27 by dchaley (David Haley)
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