|
|
|
taking our immune systems for a test drive II
Friday, April 23 2021
Most of my discretionary spending happens via eBay, and a fair amount of this is on used items. I've been doing this long enough to notice patterns and develop a spidey sense of things to avoid. Never, for example, buy anything described as "untested." No seller refrains from testing the things they're going through the bother of putting on eBay. It's just easiest to say things that have failed tests are untested. A more recent realization concerns high-complexity items on eBay. If it's just one specific item for sale, the chances are good it's a problem unit whose problem won't be obvious with basic tests. This seems to be the case with the Lenovo LGA 1155 motherboard I recently bought on eBay and installed on Wolverine. Initially, the motherboard tested good. It started up fine, accepted all the memory I installed on it, and when it was running, it has been reliable. And if you shut it down, it always starts up when you start it up again. The problem comes when you restart it. About half the time it just hangs with the initial BIOS splash after a restart and will stay that way indefinitely, never booting up to the desktop. It's the kind of problem that doesn't make a computer worthless, but it introduces aggravating reliability issues and makes the computer hard to operate completely remotely. I don't want to have to physically manipulate a power switch every time the computer restarts. For me, reliability is more important than just about anything else, and yet its a feature that a distressing amount of my stuff lacks.
Last night I'd taken out sticks of DRAM to see if one of those was the source of the problem, but no, none of them were and neither was a USB 3.0 card I'd installed. While doing other things today, I ran numerous tests to determine if other components were causing the restart problem. In so doing, I eliminated the boot drive and numerous BIOS settings as the culprit. Flashing a possibly different version of the motherboard firmware didn't help either. (I could only find one such firmware file after much web searching.) It took a lot of tests to notice the pattern that the hanging boot happened only after a restart and didn't happen after a shutdown or if the computer had been powered off. Evidently this is a rare problem, as I only found one person describing it, and there were no solutions. It seems like I'm going to have to live with it. It's a good thing to know, because while uncertainty excists, my tendency is to obsess on arriving at certainty, to the detriment of the many other things I should be working on.
A little after 5:00pm, during the tail end of what I would call luppertime, Gretchen was easger to try again for an immune system test at Stella's in Uptown. So the three of us humans climbed into the Leaf with the dogs and drove into Kingston. Our first errand was to drop off insulated shipping boxes (a couple of which had been in deep storage in the laboratory) at Maresa's bakery. While there, I got a chance to meet one of the new tenants at the Wall Street house, a young man who works in the bakery.
Given the early house, there were a fair number of people in Stellas when we arrived. We were seated at a table and had the usual Stellas experience. The vegan version of the salad was as good as ever, though their bread game seems to have declined. We all ordered pasta, though that's usually not the highlight of a Stellas meal. We all had custom-made pasta with marinara sauce and vegetables, and it was pretty oily, but I thought it was good. Gretchen, though, thought it was as underwhelming as usual. By the time we left, Stellas was crowded, making us wonder what fraction of the people there were fully vaccinated and what fraction were unvaccinated nutjobs. Those are the only two kinds of people in restaurants these days.
After dinner, we went on a stroll around Uptown, eventually passing the Stockade, a favorite bar we haven't visited in all this time. Like several restaurants in Uptown, they'd fashioned an outdoor dining area in the side-of-the-street parking, and there were a good many people there as we walked through. They'd even made a window into a sidewalk-access bar.
As we passed our car, we got the dogs out and walked with them to Rough Draft, Kingston's bookstore-cum-bar, perhaps the most Portland-style business in Ulster County. They also had a busy outdoor dining area, though, given our vaccination status, we could've sat down indoor as well. But it was nice outside, so Gretchen and Powerful got coffee and I got some kind of IPA, and we sat at a picnic table where cars had once parked. A cute little black and white dog was so excited about Neville that her location was difficult to pin down in a quantum way. We had Ramona on the other side of picnic table, though she was being surprisingly non-hostile.
Gretchen smiles when she sees I'm taking pictures in Stellas.
Ramona with a hipster and, in the background, a mural of a similar-looking hipster, out in front of Rough Draft.
Gretchen and Powerful in front of Rough Draft.
Neville was getting tired of his little quantum friend by this point.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210423 feedback
previous | next |
