Author: Joe

Progress?

Actual progress:
I finally reported the leak from behind my refrigerator to the apartment office. Duston (the maintenance guy) came and promptly pulled the refrigerator away from the wall (which caused the spigot where the ice machine connects to the wall to start spraying water), commented that it was loose, and tightened it. Problem solved hopefully, and if it happens again I’ll try that fix. I figured the valve wasn’t seated properly and expected it to be a somewhat more involved fix, but if this works that’s excellent. Now I should probably get around to mopping up the water/dissolved kitty litter marks in the utility room.

It also appears that Dustin was the one who installed the carbon monoxide detector with Talore in the room. As soon as the door opened and she saw him Talore hissed and started edging towards something she could hide behind, so I shut her in the bedroom.

The reason for the ‘?’ in the title:
I hoped I had resolved the pink screen of death (PSoD?) when I switched power cables to my video card a week or two ago, but it got worse last night. Now when I log into windows it does it, and last night it did it multiple times before it loaded my desktop. Further reading suggests that it’s a possible hardware problem (like I burnt out something with the hairy fan). I was hoping to wait for the next generation of video cards before upgrading, but it looks like I may be prompted to upgrade sooner. Alternately I could switch to my old video card (nvidia 7950 down from a gtx 280), but that’s probably not anywhere near to up to the level of performance I’m used to.

Carbon Monoxide Detector (Again)

Apparently they’re overly sensitive to static. That didn’t occur to me last time since I thought I’d just set my basket of clothes fresh from the dryer under it. This time I went to hang up a shirt that had a towel stuck to it, so I shook the towel off, it hit the detector, and that same whine started up. The expected alarm is a series of beeps separated by a pause, not a constant noise.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to take it by the apartment office or just try to find somewhere to buy them and get my own. If I get a new one it will be going on a different outlet. If only it was attached to the ceiling like the smoke detector this wouldn’t happen.

In other news, I managed to solve the first two layers of my Square-1. I don’t know where to go from there or if solving layer by layer is even reasonable, but that’s arguably progress over just being able to make it a cube.

I also finally got around to looking up how to pay Colorado the $5 I owed on my taxes. Apparently it can be done online, though it cost $0.88 to pay by credit card. That’s almost certainly cheaper than buying envelopes and all I’d need to mail a check, and much easier too. I made sure to save the pdf of the receipt for that.

Pink Screen of Death

Dusting my video card didn’t do anything to keep it from freezing apparently. It didn’t slow it down, and now it’s happening twice a day if my computer is on long enough. Usually the first is on login before I even load anything graphics intensive.

Windows once let me search for fixes to a problem, but it didn’t find anything and didn’t actually tell me anything about the problem so it wasn’t exactly helpful.

A quick search on google found a youtube video of (apparently) my exact problem. Looks like next time it happens I’ll be poking around in my power supply wires. I can’t remember if I have more of the type wire that goes to my video card than I used, but if that’s it hopefully switching cables will fix it.

It also sounds like the series my video card is in sometimes have an issue that sounds like this, and since I was strongly considering upgrading my video card sometime soon this might be more incentive for getting around to that.