bryan wann :: binary fury

If you own or will soon own a MacBook Pro, stay far, far away from Corsair ValueSelct RAM. Every day or so my MBP will spontaneously reboot. It doesn’t seem to be related to heat or load, I’ve had it reboot on me while it’s sitting on my lap generating a nice 122 degrees F, and I’ve heard the Apple chord reboot sound at 6 AM when it’s doing nothing but running a screen saver. Reading over Apple and Corsair forums now, this problem is affecting more people.

Since I’m already out of my 15 day return policy at Fry’s, I bought another 1GB stick today to swap and see if that would make a difference. Not a smart move buying the exact same RAM when I think it may be a compatibility issue, but I did it anyways in hope it points my other stick as being bad. Besides, I wanted 2GB of RAM anyways because I’ve come to use Parallels a good amount for development. Since installing a “new” stick, I’ve experienced two reboots while starting Parallels. At this point I don’t know if Parallels is doing something stupid or it’s just a inopportune coincidence. If I can get a week uptime out of this configuration, it’s probably okay. If I still have problems, it’s all going on eBay. Maybe it’ll find a better home in somebody’s HP or Dell notebook.

That was what I did Sunday, in addition to spending four hours reading over jwz’s website, because I was in no shape to do anything else because of what I did to myself on Saturday.

Saturday was a perfect day to go riding, 80 degrees, light to no wind, clear and sunny. I had planned on trying a 120 mile trip, but I didn’t get out the door until noon. The woman at the tri shop convinced me I should try a 70 mile route to San Marcos.

I left my apartment, rode down William Cannon to Escarpment (ok took a short detour to south MoPac first), down to Slaughter Lane, over to south 1st street, then caught Old San Antonio Road south until it met up with the IH-35 frontage road. I took that all the way down to San Marcos. I was feeling /really/ good, either because I was well rested, wasn’t pushing into a stiff headwind for once, or my weight training was really paying off. Maybe all three. The ride felt pretty effortless and I was sailing along at 18 mph. Riding along the frontage road was getting monotonous, not a whole lot of scenery along IH-35. From my apartment to San Marcos was exactly 37.75 miles.

Coming back, things started going wrong. Somewhere around 45-50 miles I was starting to get a stabbing pain in my gut and I was feeling nauseated. I stopped at a c-store for several minutes to rest. My stomach didn’t settle down much. When I saw how much salt was crusted on my face I realized I had been sweating a lot and not really noticed it. I was badly dehydrated by being out almost 4 hours and hadn’t drank my CamelBack dry yet. I pushed on and by the time I reached Cabella’s at Buda, I wasn’t feeling well at all. I tried calling a friend to pick me up, but couldn’t get ahold of anyone. I kept feeling like I wanted to throw up, so I went behind Cabella’s and let it rip. Not much came out, but it anything burping made me feel moderately better. I had some sport drink with me, but my stomach grumbled at the idea of sugar water. I had some water, but it certainly didn’t feel good drinking it. By the time I made it back to Austin my mouth was completely dried out and it was taking everything I had to keep going. Along the way I bought bottle of water and sipped it down. I finally arrived at home, drank a couple bottles of Pedalyte and laid down in the floor.

After a few hours I was starting to feel better and hungry. I weighed myself, I had lost FOUR pounds! Not cool at all. I went out to dinner and discovered my throat was now very irritated. It was painful to eat anything except chips and queso; the cheese was soft and gooey, at least it went down easily.

So here I am, worn out with a sore throat, battling RAM problems. Did I mention the odd sunburns on my shoulders where I apparently missed putting on the Bullfrog? Lessons from this weekend: don’t buy Corsair RAM, drink water every 15 minutes like you’ve long been trained to do, and Chloraseptic sore throat strips do provide instant relief from irritation (enough to eat a meal), they don’t last very long and they’re addictive.

Some weekends I welcome going back to work on Monday mornings.

I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that I haven’t done anything remotely interesting lately. My routine is well, very routine and it feels like the weekends are just waiting for the weekdays to arrive again.

I need to start planning my Burning Man and Rainier trips. I haven’t put much thought yet into how or when I want to arrive. Alex & Victoria have invited me to fly to Seattle, then we’d all drive down together. Hotter n’ Hell is on August 26, two days before BM starts. I’ve been toying with the notion of knocking out that first, but that leaves logistics problems of do I take my bike to the desert, or do I leave it all in Dallas and fly out.

I’d like to see west Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. Half the fun of last Burning Man was seeing a lot of new territory, but driving 16 hour days was exhausting. Google Maps plots a route from Austin to Reno (it didn’t know how to get to Gerlach) via El Paso, Tuscon, Phoenix, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Sacramento and then Reno. That’s one hell of a side trip going on.

Time is another consideration. I’m not going to have twelve days to devote to Burning Man like I did in 2004. I’ll be lucky if I can get a week off of work, maybe 10 counting weekends. If I drove, that would eat four days right off the start, leaving 3-6 days to enjoy BM. Flying to Seattle would probably reduce travel to a day in each direction.

I rented “The Aristocrats” today and watched it. That is the raunchiest material I’ve heard in a while, I loved it. My jaw is still sore from laughing so hard all afternoon. By far my favorites were Bob Saget and Billy The Mime. Most of the others seemed like they were just arbitrarily throwing together actions, but when Bob let into it, he gave enough detail over a timeline the events sounds plausible.

I gave up trying to get my wireless working on my PC and reinstalled Windows 2000. I spent about three hours installing drivers, applications, and I’m currently fighting with the Cisco VPN Client installer. At some poing during the install it locked up, so I had to reboot. After that it kept saying there was an older version installed, requiring a reboot to install the new one. Of course, this never happened. I wound up going through the registry and blowing away anything related to the VPN adapter. What a fucking pain.

I need to find a new century route to ride. The route to Shiner is bound to get me hit by a car one of these days as there’s long sections of it with no shoulder to ride on. Doing 34 laps at the Veloway for 6 hours isn’t my idea of fun.

I’m bored.

Stupid fucking PC hardware and Windows. This is a clear reminder of why I’m so happy with my Macs. So here I am trying to install a Linksys 802.1G and a gigabit ethernet adapter into my Win2k PC. Pop in the CD, let it do its thing, turn it off, shove in the adapter and turn it back on. “An error occurred during the installation of this device. The INF or the device information set or element does not match the specified install class.” Say what? So I uninstall, reinstall, go into safe mode, futzing with it to get it working. Next comes the googling for answers, and I find a Microsoft Knowledge Base article telling me to remove PCI keys with RegEdit. After a couple of key deletes and reboots, it still won’t install. I go to linksys.com, it bombs out with some 500 Servlet Error.

It’s midnight, I have no working wired or wireless ethernet in my PC. Fuck you.