An honest man

She finally made an honest man out of me!

My primary PC is still toast (I haven’t even shipped out the parts for RMA), so updates will be slow in coming.

Wedding photos will come along shortly, while I work with our photographer on getting the digital negatives and such uploaded, but I’ll come out right now and say that we could not possibly be happier with the photos – they turned out fantastic!

I’ll try to get the honeymoon pics off my camera and iPhone and posted as a gallery here this weekend, along with a write-up.

I still have three draft posts kicking around in the queue, but obviously the wedding comes first!

Fail

Last week my computer started acting up. Windows 7 was restarting spontaneously while i was AFK, and I was stumped as to why. 7 had been treating me well, with almost no significant crashes that couldn’t be explained away as a driver issue or something similar.

Indeed, it wasn’t until I was sitting at my system and actually saw the BSOD flash up that I realized I had a problem. I disabled auto-reboot (quick aside: why does MS still ship with that option enabled?), fired her up again, and waited. Sure enough, I returned a few hours later to find the error waiting for me. The words at the top spelled it out for me: Memory Management Error

I didn’t have to guess on this one: something was wrong with my RAM. Ok, not too big a deal, let’s just memtest test the sticks, all at once to confirm the issue, then one-by-one to isolate. Find the dead stick, RMA it, and get back up in running in short order. I have 8 gigs in there, I can afford to drop to 6 for a few weeks, right?

Memtest completes a full pass on the whole set. Then another. And another. On the fifth pass, it finds errors, and lots of them. Hmmm.

Ok, so, let’s test all four sticks, one-by-one. They all pass. Multiple checks, and they all pass … I can’t repeat the error … Hmmm again.

Ok, let’s put all four back in, run memtest overnight. Wake the next morning to see … no errors. Run Windows memory diagnostic tool all day, come home to find errors.

Ok, so let’s reboot, see if we reset the BIOS, make sure we didn’t mess with something along the way. Press reboot. And.

Nothing. Power on, fans spin, things whir … but no POST. HDD is silent. CD light never flashes. Check my connections; everything is hooked up right. Power up again. Nothing. An act of desperation: pull the RAM, power up, pray for a beep.

Nothing.

Well, fuck.

Call Asus. No POST, problems started in memory, must be the MOBO, right? Nice try, hotshot. AND put the memory controller on the processor – your quad-core Phenom could be busted instead.

My best bet? RMA them both. UPS ground (the cheapest I could ship) is 5-10 days from here to both their facilities. Warranty service is the standard 10 days, and UPS ground back is another 5-10. So we’re looking at 20-30 days without an operational system. And that’s assuming either of them approve an RMA replacement.

You know, I’ve been eyeing a Macbook Pro for three generations now…

– posted via my iPhone, the only damn computer I have that works well enough for me to write something this long –

How We Spent Our Labor Day

When we were just starting to plan our wedding stuff, one of the things Maggie and I agreed on was that we didn’t want to have off-the-shelf cake toppers. We wanted to make that our own thing – to add a degree of “us” to the cake, I guess.

I (of course) had this extravagant idea about modeling our characters in 3D and having them printed by a professional printer. Maggie, as ever, simplified things to a point where they were actually workable She bought these simple wooden dolls online called Naked Peggies (link is totally SFW, I promise), and some basic hobby paints from AC Moore. Her idea was that we should paint each other, so we set up shop in the living room and went to town. The hours just flew by, and by the end of the evening we had another item knocked off the to-do list!

It took us around 4 hours to finish them, but I think they turned out really great! Hope you like them!