Boston Wins and I am Looking Forward to Next Year

Final score: 131-92. Boston wins the NBA Championships. Lakers can go home and lick their wounds. Maybe next year. I just hope the next Celtics-Lakers finals doesn't come along in another 21 years. I'm
looking forward to another Celtics-Lakers NBA finals next year. And hopefully with different results.

-- Andoy
18 June 2008

Sorting Serial Numbers... huh???

I've had experience with various customers over the years, as I've been employed with several IT vendors usually on the delivery end. But this is the first time I've encountered a client which wants the machines' serial numbers sorted. I have no idea what relevance the sorted serial numbers have on their system, but the reason cited is because the company does their own asset tagging and want the items delivered to be sorted. I don't understand. Really, I don't. The reason I say this is because companies (specially large companies and government offices) have asset tags with property asset numbers. These are the ones with relevance. Other numbers printed or written on the tags are supporting to the property asset numbers. In that case, the machine's serial number's significance is to ensure uniqueness.

Looking at it from a different viewpoint, why are the machines not sorted according to serial numbers once these are shipped out of the vendor warehouse? One reason I see is that this ensures that machines from any single batch are distributed randomly across several vendors. This ensures that if there's any problem with a batch, no single customer takes the brunt of the error. Imagine if you bought a whole bunch of electric bulbs all from one bad batch, and these start exploding one by one, you would have to ask yourself why all of this happened to you, and to you alone? It starts getting personal from there. Batch randomization makes sense for the manufacturer.

Serial number sorting isn't so bad. Ten items in a box gets sorted pretty fast. But if the delivery gets to the point of thirty boxes of ten items per box, this starts getting pretty messy pretty fast. How about 2,000 items, with ten machines to a box? Or one set of three different items, each with their own serial numbers, and the order is for 1,000 sets? And you have only four people to sort these out? The only intellectual exercise you have here is the planning. Implementation gets to be pretty dumb, rote and repetitive pretty fast.

Just another rant.

--Andoy
18 June 2008

Linux Experiment Ends... due to the hard disk

A while back I installed Linux on my home PC. It was okay, an old Fedora distro. No problem it works fine and I really wanted to play around with it a bit. The real problem was that it was installed on top of WinXP using a third hard disk. A 4GB hard disk which is more than five years old, maybe closer to ten years old. Another thing going against the experiment was that I still didn't have internet access at the time I installed it. Would have wanted to see the performance on the net. That would have been fun.

But after this and that, and the hard disk being beyond the expected lifetime, it was beginning to show its age. At first the disk sounded very old school, like an old IBM 360KB floppy disk during boot up of an IBM XT compatible (going a wheezy/nasal "ka-zzhinng-eh ka-zzhing-ah hheengg heengg heeng"), or worse, sounding like a 10MB hard disk from thirty years ago (like a chicken with sore throat clucking "tock-tock-tock ka-shheeeghuee ka-shheeeghue"). But this only happened about once every hour or two after being booting up to Windows.

For about two weeks, I was thinking of deleting the third hard disk and reverting back to WinXP boot up. Okay, I procrastinated. And then I got busty last week, with Lilia at the hospital, I only spent about two to three hours a day at home taking a nap and changing clothes. (The kids weren't home, they were with my parents.) The PC was still running fine, except for the intermittent sounds from the third hard disk.

And over the weekend, the hard disk with the Linux OS died a natural death, from old age.

Which left me with a PC which could not boot up. Good thing I had a ready of things to do, to uninstall Linux. Simple enough to find the XP install disk, then going to the recovery console and running FIXMBR. Well and good, but for a while there, I forgot the administrator password and had to type in several possible passwords before hitting on the correct one. FIXMBR done on the console and rebooting I was able to have the PC up and running WinXP.

Next hurdle was the second hard disk. It was tagged by Windows as unformatted. I was about to give several names a call before I remembered that the internet was up and running. A simple search for a utility to "unformat" a partition, a little effort at understanding the command-line text-based interface, with almost literate computerspeak/technicalese and a reboot, and the hard disk was recovered without a problem.

So there, I found out how easy it was to uninstall Linux on the PC. Just needs some patience. A lot less patience than if you were uninstalling Windows. By the way, though installing Linux does need more technical knowledge, it's a lot less of a chore than theautomated install process for Windows.

So now I am back to a single OS machine. I'm still going to go back to Linux sometime soon. Or maybe using a second machine or even a third PC. I can wait.

-- Andoy
17 June 2008

The One Ring

After more than five years of telling myself that I will have my ring fixed, I finally did.  I had the ring cut and taken off my finger.

I have only one ring, the only piece of jewelry I wear, and that's my wedding band.  It's just there on my right ring finger.  Sitting at the base, like a good ring should be.  Unobtrusive.  Sometimes I twirl it around the finger.  Otherwise, it is not noticeable.  Except for the slight pain as it presses on the muscle.  

After the ring was cut and taken off, I found out that it was two (ring sizes) too small.  I have not taken it off for more than eight years.  Or ten.  I'm not sure.  But I remember that it had been pressing painfully against my finger for a long long while.  It might have started pressing on the muscle around the time I stopped taking it off.  Which was around the time I gained 10 pounds in a month.  And then added another 10 pounds, also in a month, five or so years later.  I weighed about 115-120 pounds when I got married.  I'm now at 140 (hovering between 136 to 145).

Every so often these past few days, I still feel round my right ring finger, as if turning a ring round the base of the it.  I feel the scar there.  It should clear up soon.  And the finger is getting some width (and muscle) back.  There is still the slight pain.  And if I press on the scar, it is still a bit tender.

I am told that this would be temporary, and the pain would go away in a month.  I hope so.  But I guess the scar would be there for a while.

-- Andoy

16 June 2008

Lilia's hospitalization

Lilia was hospitalized this week due to cellulitis of her right leg.  It sounds painful, looks painful and personally, I don't want to find out how painful really is.  Suffice to say, that Lilia was crying when she told me how painful it was.  At which point I told her we should get her to a hospital and in which case, the more she cried, begging me not to have her confined.  We compromised on a visit to a doctor.

She was prescribed antibiotics at first but on the follow-up checkup, there was no other alternative but to be confined in order to have the antibiotics administered intravenously.  After several days of that, her leg had improved.  She was discharged this morning, but with still a regimen of oral antibiotics for the next few days.

The main reason she doesn't want to be confined is because she is still traumatized after her prior stay in the hospital due to a gall bladder stones complicated by pancreatitis.  That was painful.

She's out now.  And taking another maintenance medicine.

--Andoy
14 June 2008

... and a month and a half later, Lakers and Celtics go to the dance

A while back, I wrote about the Lakers and Celtics meeting for the NBA Finals.

This should be fun.

-- Andoy

2 June 2008