.,..when you have two devices on a LAN with the same IP address. The amazing thing is that it was not immediately and totally disastrous. Most of the LAN did just fine. However, this caused a lot of the recent trouble I had with my employer’s computer here at home. Still not out of the woods, but the remaining problem I can clearly refer to the Help Desk.
I just spent two hours on my employer’s computer, fighting network troubles and antivirus “improvements”. Not a good time, and a bad way to finish an otherwise quite good weekend.
mia_mcdavid and I got up a little after 8. After breakfast she did some spinning, while I did some woodworking in the shop. Very satisfying. Afterward we went to church in Minneapolis again. Something had been bothering us there from the service two weeks ago, and I had a chance to ask the Rector about it. Her explanation was entirely satisfactory, or, as Helmuth, Speaker for Boskone, would put it, “complete and conclusive”. I don’t get that nearly as often as I would like.
Afterwards we visited Tom, taking him for a visit to Como Zoo. By and large this was OK, although we were forcibly reminded of a couple things that do not work well with him. It is a a little frustrating that he did not seem to really notice the animals much, although that may be partly because a lot of them were doing the sensible thing and napping in the middle of the warm day. Perhaps those of us who are getting on in years could notice and appreciate that more than he did.
Trouble at work all afternoon, and through dinner. I had to drive into downtown Minneapolis three times. Not fun. Very obscure issues with SQL Server connectivity. We seem to have ended up with something that works, but there are still some unexplained issues.
I spend the last three days at an excellent class on SQL Server 2005 (Microsoft’s latest and greatest database system). I am not an enthusiastic M’soft fan, but it is what we use at work, and I have enough battles to fight there already.
Anyway, a couple side notes: Continue reading
The last couple days I was shopping for computer parts and visited two local stores that have used/reconditioned computers for sale. At the low end of the price ranges in both stores I saw the same model Pentium III Compaq DeskPro for sale. One store wanted $59 for it. The other was asking $149. Is the second just being greedy? They had more memory on the box. At current retail prices that would account for $20. It may have had a bigger hard disk–perhaps another $10-20 at current prices for old hard disks (I did a little checking). That still leaves $50-60. Pure profit? No–the more expensive store was selling a functional system with Windows 2000. The cheaper store was selling a nearly naked box. It had just enough pieces of DOS to boot. Looking at the current price of Windows, that is not unreasonable. So I really cannot fault the second store.
But, don’t you need Windows? No, you don’t. Linux is free. That $50-60 goes straight to Bill Gates.
After I got home tonight I did a little work for my employer. Nothing terribly difficult–just a system test that could not be done in normal business hours.
Meanwhile, using another computer (my own, not my employer’s) I tried to check e-mail. Unfortunately, it failed to boot. Looks like a hard-disk problem. I will try a file-system repair (this is a Linux box) from a rescue CD tomorrow night. I have a recent backup of my data, so I am not really worried even if that fails. I have another hard disk I can put in the machine and reinstall everything (I am writing this on yet another machine).
I did not do anything about that tonight because mia_mcdavid needed help with her new loom. I made a raddle, a gadget to aid her in the process of warping. This appears to be working quite well, so I have accomplished something. The computer will keep until tomorrow.
