Josh the Aspie’s Blog

About a month ago I went to a group interview at Lockheed Martin. About two weeks ago, I accepted a job offer to work for them as an Associate Systems Engineer, in a position that requires a Security Clearance.

As a part of this process I will be taking lie detector tests, and my fingerprints will actually be taken and placed on file in a federal registry. Some people who know me locally, and know my strong support of the right of Americans to protection against search and seizure were surprised that I was fine with giving up my fingerprints. I’m fine with it because it was my choice. There isn’t a bill requiring me to give up my fingerprints against my will.

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Approximately One Third of Americans adults are Overweight. Obesity, especially extreme obesity, has long term health effects, reduces enjoyment of lifestyle for many people, and causes increases medical costs, medical insurance costs and… of course… food bills.

On the morning of April 22nd I weighed 278 lbs, placing me on the lower edge of the “Extreme obesity range” for my height. I’ve been putting off trying to loose weight for a while. Any time I make a resolve to do something this big when I don’t have the time, I inevitably fail. I’ve spent a lot of time getting other things out of the way, finishing commitments, performing tasks that I’ve been meaning to forever, and now I’ve begun working on this very important health issue.

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One of the things that bugs me is that when people start talking about that “stuff that bugs them” they tend to talk about things that are totally inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. They’re bugged by oh… people that use the word “ain’t” or people who drive slow in the fast lane. And this is a topic that pops up in discussion or on message boards over and over again.

There are a lot of things in this world that bug me, but most of them are things on a large scale…

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Well, the RAID on my hard drives degraded again. I rebuilt it, but while I was doing so it was rather hard to use my computer, and there was no bumping going on this time. The drives are huge, but for some reason they don’t want to keep a RAID running well.

I got the drives, my case, my processor, and some accessories (like a built in 3.5″ bay card reader) from Schrock Innovations, a computer repair and web design company. They had a really great sale called their holiday special, where I got the computer at 5% over cost (to cover parts shipping). I simply customized my computer by asking them to take out the motherboard, remove the keyboard/mouse set, and remove the monitor.

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Back to the computer Saga.

Once I got my laptop working, it was time to get things up and running on my new Tower, Kusanagi_Makoto. This singular wonder, which I have also come to call Minus Morgol in the back of my head, had a bit of a RAID problem. To be more accurate, it had a RAID 5 array that ceased to function.

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Well, over the last few weeks, I found myself with quite a bit of computer trouble. With both of my Internet capable computers, and due to some other time constraints, like work and sleep, it took quite a while to solve said problems.

Norton had expired weeks ago on my laptop, and so I temporarily installed AVG. Almost immediately afterwards my laptop slowly began to display more and more worrisome symptoms, reminiscent of the virus laden computers I had worked on in the past. So I slotted it for an OS reinstall. Unfortunately, before I got to -that-, my new Tower had a hiccup, and the RAID degraded, and then broke down.

Now, I had a choice. I could either work on my Tower immediately, and wind up possibly needing to use my laptop (virus infected as it was) to fix it, or have to pause mid way through, to change over to my laptop, possibly loosing my place on where I was on the tower. Or, I could try to fix my laptop first, even though it would likely take longer. Since either way, I’d be taking about the same period of time fixing my computers, I went laptop first.

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Here I sit, writing in my new blog, sitting on a recently reupholstered chair, writing an entry into my new blog!

As you can probably guess, I have recently completed installing my computer. At the moment she’s running like a dream, and with only one window open I feel the power… not being used.

When I get home today I’ll definitely need to put Kusanagi-san here through her paces, and test her out using various pieces of software. First two pieces of software out the door to test her with will be Adobe Photoshop, and StarCraft. From there, I’ll move on to other games and pieces of enterprise software.

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My computer is currently installing windows, after having formatted the new partition over night. Hopefully by the time I get home from work tonight I’ll have a fully functioning (if low on software) computer. I may need to select a few more options and wait a bit longer, but it looks like my computer is on the verge of being fully installed.

As a part of the installation, I had to name my computer (pick a network name). Now for me, the Christening of a computer is a very important stage of the Install, as the entire feel of the computer, the display theme, ect, can be influenced by the PC’s name. How you treat the computer, and how others do as well may be unconsciously affected.

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Windows set up continually said nvrdx64.sys was corrupted. The reason for it was that I kept selecting the 64 bit version of the drivers… while trying to install a 32 version of windows (All versions of windows home edition are 32 bit). Once I realized this and put together a disk for 32 bit, things started working, much better.

At the moment, I’m formatting the partition on my RAID 5 array, which will wind up being just under 1 full Terrabyte. I’ve got 3 different hard drives that were billed at 500 GB, set up.

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… but I’m not there yet.

I’m still working on the RAID array, unfortunately I have to do it in a rather indirect manner.

The hard drives are all SATA, and when setting up a RAID array in XP, that means several additional steps.

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