FFoF!

So there I was, all set to sherman my way through the rest of the translation (albeit neatly, and with no wanton destruction or bloodshed), when Fate stepped in, flaunting the ever-flexing phalanges of its Fickle Finger.

The phone rang. I answered. I was fairly certain it was the client, whose Caller ID had lately become "Unavailable."

The client thanked me for all the work I did over the weekend, but then instructed me to stop work on what I've come to call "the Big-O." It turns out I was assigned the Big-O because all attempts late last week to get in touch with whoever does the documents in Russia were unsuccessful. It further turns out that the Russian end of the lashup finally got the message, but was not able to get back to my client with the news that the document would be translated over the weekend.

And so, it turns out the omitted document is no longer omitted.

It is customary, in this industry, to pay for work done up to a cancellation instruction, and I've no worries in that regard. Still, it's not pleasant to get into the swing of things and then get stopped cold with a respectable day's work left to go, but those are the breaks.

Technically, that clears my plate, except that the client wants me to edit the translated document, which I have yet to receive. Plus, I'm waiting for a possible go-ahead from a client on the East coast regarding a 3200-source word job they sent and asked me to quote last Friday (due in "four business days..." from when, I wonder?).

Cheers...

Stopping to deal with a major malfunction...

I was doing a spell-check a few minutes ago on my desktop when pop! the screen went blank. I cautiously hit Ctrl-S to save my work, looking at the hard disk LED on the machine's front panel to see if the "Save" keychord resulted in any activity. No joy.

Upon reboot, the display looked fine, but the file exhibited no sign of having been saved. To figure out whether the problem lay with the video card or elsewhere, I started pinging the desktop from my Linux box, onegin.

The problem reasserted itself again in the course of a spell-check, and onegin indicated that the machine stopped responding to ping requests pretty much immediately. I therefore conclude that the problem is a sudden catastrophic malfunction that is not local to the video card.

Moreover, upon bootup, the Windows desktop tells me that the OS has experienced an unexpected error. (I'll say!) The major upshot of the error is that the so-called "Active Desktop" (which merely displays a static picture for me) has been turned off. I click to restore the graphic.

I'm going to let gagarin sit for a bit and see if it spontaneously combusts, or something.

Cheers...

UPDATE (11:55): I'm thinking the culprit is Word, running the spell-checker, but cannot imagine why, as I run the thing all the time.

UPDATE (12:36): I've avoided starting Word, and all continues to be well with gagarin. Wracking my brain for possibly relevant information, I can recall that the crash did not occur in the same place in the file (that's usually a giveaway), there's no weird formatting or (any) graphics in the file, and that the only thing "different" about the file I was spell-checking is that it's password-protected.

UPDATE (12:57): No sooner had I posted the previous update than the ghost in the machine... quit yet again. I tried to start it again and boot the rarely-used Linux partition (to see if perhaps the problem is OS-independent), but all I got was a "kernel panic" message, which involves its own problems. Despite an inability to run Linux on gagarin, I am thinking that the only other time something like this happened was when the fan on ellroy (my old VAIO) quit, causing the CPU to overheat. I caught a flash of the CPU temperature during the reboot immediately after the most recent crash, and the figure was "80°C/172°C." Too bad I don't really know what that means. I've unearthed gagarin and blown out the CPU area with canned air.

UPDATE (13:19): I've found a freeware motherboard monitor (here) and set it up for gagarin's motherboard (Biostar M7VIF). It's reporting a CPU temperature of 67°C after several minutes of virus scanning. We'll go back to work and see what we shall see.

Enough with the updating...

The motherboard monitoring utility I mentioned in the last update to the previous post is quite feature-packed. In the course of doing the virus scan, the CPU temperature hit 70°C, triggering a preset audible alarm. I'm not sure of the significance of that temperature figure, but if that's a generally accepted "high enough to matter" temperature, then the 80°C temperature I glimpsed during boot-up is probably beyond the pale.

The dust in Pagosa is murder on electronics (and, probably, on the biological systems around here, too). I'm sure it clogged ellroy's CPU fan, twice, and it seems to have done a number on onegin's power supply, which keeps cutting out after some indeterminate amount of time (onegin lasted a week the last time I started it; today, it lasted less than 3 hours). I can only guess what it's doing to proust's CPU fan (although a little while ago, I could feel heat being spewed out of the unit's vent, so it's still working).

I've reset the temperature alarm, as the CPU temperature seems to be varying between 67°C and 70°C. We'll see where that leads us.

Cheers...

About frazzled...

When I put the side panel back on my desktop, the temperature went up past my setpoint, so I rooted around for an extra fan I knew I had lying around somewhere, but the best I could do was find a little frame with two fans mounted on it that's supposed to sit in the space occupied by a blank drive-sized knockout panel on the front of your typical case. I'd used the device on gagarin's predecessor and like everything else around here, those fans eventually got clogged with dust, so I removed it a couple of years ago, I guess, and just hadn't simmered up the "attitude" to throw them out.

A good thing, too.

I managed to figure out what kept the rotors of those little fans in place and proceeded to disassemble, clean, and reassemble the little devils, so now, in addition to the two onboard fans mounted on the CPU and some other chip, and the big, main, noisy fan at the bottom of the case, I also have a pair of twin screws running near the top of the case. (Ah, but for how long?) With the sides mounted back on the frame and with the CPU chugging away at just under 12% while I'm typing this post using Semagic, the temperature is 68°C.

At any rate, I've finished editing the Big-O, along with a couple of smaller jobs sent today. Plus, I've checked and sent the medical thing I did Saturday, due tomorrow. I've even compiled an invoice for the past few days of work, for dispatch tomorrow, as well as another invoice for a shorter job done... was it a week ago? Yikes!

What's left? There's 9 pages (about 3200 source words) due Thursday at 2 pm. Fortunately, I've already run the fax through FineReader and have a workable source file to process.

As far as going out into the world is concerned, I got about as far as driving to the store to bring Drew some checks for the store's checkbook. I've been gnawing leftovers - which are delicious, mind you - and guzzling canned iced tea - which isn't, and yes, I should get my head examined for buying canned iced tea - as if food and drink are going out of style.

It's time to go upstairs and unwind.

Cheers...