So, last week we had a storm. My UPS's were beeping so I got up and shut down my systems. The next evening when I got home I came to discover my system wouldn't boot up. Trial and error seem to indicate a power supply issue. Off to Fry's and one Antec 650 Watt power supply later my system was powering up.

My son then asked what was wrong with his system.... The system that was working before we left for Fry's. Nice boot screen with the white on black letters, "Hard disk failure, insert boot disk to continue". Oh joy. Found a hard disk on the shelf, started to load the OS. System died. Sigh. Dug another old system out (his was a P500) and loaded it up. Yay! It works. All he needs to do is surf the kids sites and his game.

Back to mine. Power up but no video, error codes are mysterious. Eventual conclusion, when the power supply went so did my motherboard and CPU. Back to Fry's.

Picked up an Intel motherboard and CPU, CPU fan. Got it all assembled. OS loaded. YAY! Back online. Fire up World of Warcraft, spontaneous reboot. What?!

Eventual testing leads to the ever popular memtest. Memtest runs great for a while but eventually the system just locks up. I am hoping that it is a memory problem as replacing the motherboard again is going to be a serious pain . Off to Fry's with the memory and receipt.

[update - New memory seems to have fixed the random reboot issues with the new system parts]

How time flies. I worked with a guy once who said, "Old is always 10 years older then your current age" and he was right then but as I am getting older I find that old gets further away. :)

Another friend used to have a saying, "You'll learn" that he would trot out when I said something particularly silly in my 20's. I have a much deeper insight into what he meant. From him I have learned my perceptions may not always be broad enough if I don't have the experience to comprehend the answer.

Every day with my children I remember things my father taught me, which is great as I see my cousins doing very similar things with their kids. Seeing that cycle is enlightening.

I could not have predicted what I am doing now and how rich my life is. I have a wonderful wife and two fantastic children and some very good friends. I like my neighbors and I am part of a world wide community with more friends and acquaintances all over the place.

Life has it's various frustrations and annoyances, but I am pretty happy with where I am overall. It's been fun an adventure so far and I will enjoy seeing what the next 40 years bring.

I own and use Windows based PC's. I use Windows for work and to play games. While enjoying the various ads from Apple I could not help but notice many inaccuracies in the various commercials. A friend sent me this article by Charlie Brooker on his take of the British commercial campaign which I found dead on.

One memorable quote;

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension.

There's more but you should go read the article for it, unless you're a Mac owner. :)

On the random front, this is a cool site. Jeff de Boer is evidently an artist in Canada and from the pictures of his work knows his craft.

No matter what your industry or job is, paticularly in IT, you market yourself whether you realize it or not.

Well, MYTH started as a joke. A coworker kept stopping by to ask esoteric questions about procedures and tools with Windows NT4/2000 and Exchange 5.5. Now, for these few weeks I would coincidentally have a tool or the location of the relevant Microsoft TechNet article handy. Finally she asked a question that I did not know the answer to, and she said, "Oh no, there goes the myth of Steven!". In the course of events, it was a good joke, but I got to thinking about it and turned it into a summation of my view of how to work within an organization.