Made a minute change in the headers here and wondering if that fixes the RSS feed? Some people have said that there are errors in the feed and when I upgraded playing with some of the other aspects of the way this thing runs, I ran across a forum entry about a header that was wrong and I updated it …
Day: December 10, 2004
New Server
I just moved this site to a new server I assembled … It is an AMD Sempron 2500+ with 512M of DDR RAM (I think it’s DDR, whatever the really really fast stuff is … SDDR?) … I had been loading various things on it for a while, and I decided just to leave it as my development server … The server where I will throw all the sites I design and manage … In the process I upgraded this blog software as well … ‘Two birds’ is it? Another reason is this site is my default home page, and I was getting tired of the wait … I need things lightning fast, don’t you? This is my first AMD in a while … I used to be really big on them until I started hosting … Figured I needed to be all Intel and Microsoft … I have found that the monetary amount doesn’t reflect the production of the product … It’s a FreeBSD 5.3 Server … Command line all the way baby … Took me a while to get PHP fired up and working right … They port it different in the 5.x versions of BSD … But I’m still on Apache 1 and PHP 4 … I figure I could try to go to Apache 2 sometime later … With all the people saying it’s fine, there are plenty that say it isn’t … and when I initially brought it up, I installed Apache 2 and PHP 5 and things didn’t work immediately … So I bagged it and went back to what I was used to, enough to up the op/sys … this guy has a 160G drive in it … I have gotten the emails from Charlie and the drive has 0% used … too funny … I bought the 160 cause the game server’s HD took a dive … Instead of throwing the 160 in there, I put the 40 I was using messing with this Sempron … So the Sempron has the 160G drive and FreeBSD 5.3 and that’s where it will stay …
All this free time working with Octane has given me the opportunity to do these upgrades … plus I am making better money that I can put out for hardware and such things … Getting to be back like the old days … I even finished HL2 and have been playing Counter-Strike again … Ah, to feel like a person again … The drone of the house system was good, but way too life sucking …
Washer Repair
I can’t believe I forgot to mention this! Last Wednesday, December 1st, I repaired our washing machine. My wife put a big carpet in the washing machine about 3 months ago. One of those mats that’s bigger than a welcome mat but smaller than a remnant … I don’t know what you call them, but smaller than a throw rug … Anyway, when that thing spun to dry, you’d think terrorists were attacking my basement … So ever since then, when you went to fill the washer with water, it would just leak out the bottom … I figured it had hit the sides or something and chewed a hole in the basket … So, after a couple months of her taking the laundry to relatives, and the constant nagging that only wives know how to do, the guilt mounted and I went to work on the foul machine …
First thing that tells you I’m not a washer repairman is that I started in the back … Removing screws and plastic snaps so I could get in there and see what was what … As I pried up the back, I noticed there were wires going to the control panel, so I figured I would have to remove the cluster plugs and pull them through … As I was removing the cluster from the motor, I noticed some weird looking thing going to the panel, and it didn’t look like an easy item to remove and put back … To get a better look at it, I pryed the top of the washer off even more … The top is held on by a pressure fit … When I got the four metal springing things that held the top on free to take a better look at this thing, I realized I could just push the top up from the front of the washer and gain access into the basket … DUH!
So I get to work in there … removing the filter on top, the agitator in the middle and there are the three bolts holding the basket on … Either Governor Arnold or the old doorman from 15 North put on these bolts … One was so difficult to get off, I actually broke it … So, I pull the basket out, and I see no big gouges in the side or anything to indicate why water was escaping it … Maybe it was the holes all around it that led me to believe it didn’t hold water either … So now I am in the next chamber (where the water actually is held) and there is a rubber thing that affixes to the center and this inner basket … It’s held on with thin metal bands, kinda like the ones that hold your radiator hoses on in your car … The bottom one had separated from the outer basket … So, I removed the top band so I could get the rubber thing off and get a good look at it … Didn’t look damaged, looked okay … I figured the carpet fiasco simply pulled this rubber thing out of the metal band … So I put it back together very tight, and then assembled the rest of the washer that I had disassembled (Johhny 5) and vwahlah … The washer has been working fine ever since …