Why does everything have to be so hard?

[Rant]

Someone has to understand, someone has gone through the rigors of daily life only to at least one time or another stop themselves and questions why everything seems so damn hard at times?

Do understand that I'm opting for drama when I say "everything," as somethings are easy, but why rant about the easy things? Sort of the foundation for sensationalistic news coverage of our local networks. If they reported that everything was 'ok', no one would watch. So we get hammered with car chases, murders, drive by's, and reports on dangers we never knew existed like how are kitchens are full of germs and by merely touching the sponge in your sink could kill you (according to "the experts").

But I digress... So...

Why is that everything seems to depend on something else to enable completion? Take for instance my dually. I need to set it up so it can be the primary interface for our digital camera (my lappy is currently the photo album), and my case has USB ports in front making it simple. However, my mobo doesn't have any internal USB ports. So I sit here and wait for Newegg to ship my USB 2.0 PCI Card with external ports, which I don't need, and one internal port.

Not a big deal? Well, I have four days off with nothing pressing for my attention so I'd like to install the new sound card, but why crack the box for a sound card when I'm going to have to bust it open again for a USB card in a few days?

Then there's cooling. The weather is beginning to heat up a bit here in So Cal and my Bartons are not happy. I have central air but the upstairs office still moves over to the warm side unless I crank the air up so much that we could start ice skating downstairs while upstairs stays in the 70's. So I'm going to water cool the dually.

Which leads me to the series of events of researching, purchasing, waiting for shipment, and installing said water cooling equipment. So now I have three possible computer shut downs to install hardware in a matter of days. It's like building blocks, one stacked on top of the other....

Then there's the farm. I'm waiting on yet another three mobo's to replace the dead layers. So do I spend the time setting up the four layers that are funcitoning after I took it all down to clean and reapply some Arctic Silver or wait for the new mobo's?

And my fiancee totalled her car, so we need to go car shopping.

And my Grandmother needs about five days of yardwork done and since I'm the only family member who seems to care, it's up to me.

And my mother's computer horked it's Java which requires an OS recovery install (XP Pro).

Did I mention my realitives live 70 miles away?

And one of my best friends need a DI-704 (router with print server) installed, he lives in Orange County (hour away with little or no traffic).

Oh... and let's talk about how you have about fifty bills you need to pay, things you need to buy, and things you want to buy but you have to wait on everything because the bank holds checks for 9 days or Uncle Sam is still as efficient as an Iraqii Government at sending money back.

It's just one of those weeks where everything depends on something else and none of it is in your control.

[/rant]

Thanks for listening,
Wedo

I hear ya, I'm also in the middle of the rut just like you however I don't know how to express it. Let's put it this way. At the least you can express it and feel better.

God zillion of things to worry about.

That's said it.

damn man, thats rough

I just found out I got into carn. mellon, but tuition will be 190k

I'm with ya in that life sucks atm

Thats a load my friend, but concider the view from there. You'r going to make progress most likely, so it's all up.

With all this on you don't you feel a great sense of being needed? I know it is overwhelming ( I am a father/husband/sole income, real job-side job workin fool), I know the feeling. But look at the karma/self-satisfaction you recieve.

Bill, yeah, everybody wants to choke that b*tch. But alas he persists relentlessly. All we can do is counter it by being productive, which you seem to have no problem doing.

Fold on brotha, do the good deeds and know it'll all come around.

Oh, Oh, OH!!!!

Speaking of karma, I forgot to mention something.

Two days ago I was on the parked in front of my favorite authentic Mexican food establishment (Taco Bell), while doing some emergency tech support via cell phone.

A homeless guy rolls up to my windows and asks for food, not money, but food. I had some change so I gave him what I had and continued with my call. While trying to talk someone through a printer reinstall, "No, I said Start/Settings/Printers and Faxes, not Start your printer or fax," I noticed the homeless guy looking at the drive-thru menu.

He was counting the change he pulled from his pocket and deciding what he could afford. After the call I went in and had lunch then decided that if the guy was still outside I'd buy him some good 'ol Taco Bell.

He was there so I went back in and grabbed three supreme taco's and a nacho supreme to-go. Out the door I went with my $5 in homeless guy food and upon reaching the parking lot the guy was gone.

I searched for that guy for about 15 minutes to no avail. Thus, my attempted helping hand sat in the bed of truck and is rotting as I type.

Crappity crap. In a month all of this will pass but right now everything is waiting on everything else.

Thanks for the comments,
Wedo

Sounds familiar. We all have our times in the ditch. But Lan makes a good point - your conscience is still intact and you continue to do the right things. Too bad about the homeless guy. Even though you weren't able to complete your act of kindness, at least you had the compassion to do something on his behalf. Few people will do that these days.

We all sympathize, so keep fighting the good fight.

I feel for you but I do have one comment/question. You mentioned that you have to crank the air up so high that it is freezing downstairs to keep it nice upstairs. Do you have one unit/thermostat running your upstairs and down ?! I don't think you can even do that legally withing the building codes.

i bet his ac just doesn't have the btu's required to cool the whole house evenly, usually in a two story house its a good idea to have one system for each floor, that way the same amount of cooling goes to each...sometimes it even helps lower the bill since one system isnt running 24/7 and 2 only run some of the time. just a thought from a fellow folder.

I know in my area you need around 500sq ft per ton of a/c and if you have two floors you need a seperate unit at 400 sq ft per ton for the upstairs.

In other words a typical 1 story with 2000 sq ft should have a 5 ton unit.

A home with 1200 sq ft on the first floor and 1200 on the upstairs needs a 2.5 ton downstairs and a 3 ton upstairs.

I rent a two story town house and the upstairs doesn't get as much of a temperature change as the downstairs. So if the air is on, it's colder downstairs and if the heat is on, it's warmer downstairs as well. I think we have one unit, but couldn't tell you the BTU's, tonnage, or anything else about it.

C'est la vie. All will be well.

Wedo

WEDO,
I feel for you man. I sat on the phone last week while i had another consultant basically telling me I'm a dumbass and I have no idea what i'm talking about because I had told the customer that the server that he got them was wrong and needed to be changed. He was quite vocal about it. He works for a big wall street firms IT department and basically thought that I (lowly independant consultant/nerd) should swoon with extasy that someone like him would actually grant me an audiance to bask in the light that was he. I'm usually a pretty laid back guy but sometimes A-holes on high (some COMPusa, Bestbuy and mall electronic store employees fall into this catagory) need to be brought down a few pegs, So i did.

After we hung up I called the customer back and apologized for the exchange that had taken place and said that if he had anyone else that he would like to call and run the facts by feel free to and that he could call me anytime to ask questions.

Being that most of the people here are in the business or at least have a better working knowledge of computers I will run down the situation for you to see if i was right.

this "consultant" (i use this term lightly) ordered a 2CPU 2.4g xeon, hot swap Raided, 1.5 gig of memory win2003 O/S MONSTER server from dell. this is a KICK *** machine. Don't get me wrong. its a nice configuration and Dell servers have been very reliable for me in the past.

this is where i have the problem

this hardware was for a UNIX application that would have run fine on a regular p4 Pc from dell with 512 mb of memory. This company currently runs a PROGRESS DB application for 5 employees with 2 printers on a p3 500mhz with only minimal slowdowns at month end processing.

Does anyone see where the frustration is setting in?

when i asked him why he orderded windows for a unix application his answer what that he was "going to convert the application to run on windows" I have done database version upgrades, platform upgrades and platform conversions between unix and windows and vice versa and this is a VERY lenghty process. there's lots of testing involved to make sure everything works as intended. One person doing this in his spare time is not going to do this (ok call me cynical)

I then asked about the "slight" overkill in hardware. He was planning for the future growth of the company. This company has been the same size for the past 15 years. they only see a need for more whse space in the next 3-5 years.

I asked him about the hardware firewall appliance that he ordered for them (they currently do not have ANY internet access at all.) He said that if i was questioning that then I really have no idea about networking. (damn he got me on that one. this is a nice appliance and i agree that protection is needed but this is WAY overkill. I bet he was gonna mooch this for himself. Did i mention that they have no internet access? )

and to top it all off this was ordered under his own dell account (rewards anyone?) and that he would not give me the administrators password. I guess i was not qualified.

Needless to say the customer talked to another consultant and i was proven right.

I tried to return this system to get the customer some money back (this was a big purchase for a small company) but it would have been a nightmare since this was ordered through the other guy. I now have them up and running on the fastest 5 user system around.

I am a digital janitor

well my fellow board lurkers... was i justified in adjusting his attitude? I can see if he made an honest mistake ( i make enough of them) but in my opinion he had no idea about their application or needs. he just ordered what he wanted with no reguard for the customer. He should stick to an IT department where he can be watched closely.

I rest my case

wedo,
As for the heat I have 5 servers in a small 10'x10' room which serves as my office. as you can see the heat buildup would be quite substantial without the window ac unit. All of my systems are in a wire shelving rack aginst the wall. Since all of the heat is expelled behind the units I put a 120mm fan on top of the rack with clothes dryer tubing attached to it that vents out the window next ot it. this seemed to reduce the overall heat nicely. the ac is still needed but it does not run as much. I'm sure if i added a fan at the bottom of the rack and made a hood (like over a stove) it would reduce it even more but i'm just not that motivated lately

@nahmus
If he is going to buy that much overkill then when he is not looking just put the quad FAH install on it, they will never notice

LOL I feel your pain, my friend.. I used to by a partner in the shop i work for.. I, not being at a time in my life where i want to delegate, would much rather do. So i gave up the partnership after three years and have been a regular ol mechanic since. My now boss took off for mexico (he really did need to get out for a while, as he is having a worse year than anyone i know right now), which means someone has to oversee what is going on and smooth over the piles of S*** that so predictably hit the floor around here. So for this week, my life has been in the hands of others as well, in hopes of being able to actually finish somehting without someone shoving some POS in the driveway gripping about a repair that was done 2 years ago (and the waterpump was fine, it was the radiator that went ) I dont even really care if i make any money this week, just so long as nothing catastrophic occurs. I troubleshoot cars for 6 other shops, so i ALWAYS have somehting "in the hopper" to work on. Wednsday was underbooked so "they" were slow.. I actually had three cars waiting for 2-3 days for me to work on.. Real "gravey" as well. I wound up giving them all away 95% diagnosed (about $300 the easy way) so the shop had something to do while I got hammered by some three shop reject where I truelly believe that I spent more time undoing what the other shops did than actually fixing what was originally wrong in the first place.

NO my house still hasn't closed escrow. I think i would reach my post length limit going into that barrel s*** SO I think its best not to bring out the details on that issue (besides i dont think i could do a good enough job editing out the #%$^^)

It is said that you begin a revolution be killing all the lawyers first (sorry flounder ) i think the bankers should be second. When somebody lays out a "to do" list of things to fund a loan, and you follow it, the loan should occur. Not 2 days before the close of escrow decide that the loan cant happen at the "rate" qouted and that the termite adendum which was acceptable in negotiations is no longer valid. Escrow was to close on the 19th of Feb. do to sellers issues, this date got pushed be to march 21st. My loan, as it was negotiated, was rejected on the 19th. OOPS i scratched the surface on the house anyway. but i better stop there

Wedo, as with all things, this too shall pass. And we will live yet another day without choking the living s*** out of somebody that desparately needs it.

PCGUY112887 said:

@nahmus
If he is going to buy that much overkill then when he is not looking just put the quad FAH install on it, they will never notice

Click to expand...

Trust me. If it had stayed a win server I would have borged it. After they got internet access of course

Wedo I feel for ya.
Just remember that folding comes last.

Learn from the karma thing. (Mine is better. Refused a "cancer guy" $20 to eat & lost $700 work has STILL not paid me in November LoL!)

About the water... Wedo I been on it for a good while, but just remember that you're not going to cool past the ambient room temp. Unless you're active cooling, you're not getting close to the ambient room temp.

Be sure you have enough headroom to compesate if the room is very hot. (80f+)

This is a Maze2+mazda HC+E-1250 running (see sig for info)
Right now with my fan OFF I'm running 38C Folding. With it on low I stay around 33-34C. However, during the day this room heats to 80f b/c of a 17ft vaulted ceiling & a huge window. The sun outruns what the A/C can cool.

Whenever the room hits 80f+ the cpu temp runs between 38 & 45C depending on the ambient temp!


Just an example. FYI All temps are 100% accurate. I am not using the cpu to read the temps...

I just finished typing this & turned the fan on. Current temp is 23C ambient, 33.9C CPU.

Right you are Toysrme, ambient is the most critical factor without active cooling. When we lived at our prior house, the ambient temps at the computer area would be in the 90's in the day and highest recorded by me was 104* My air cooled rigs were bouncing around 50* C and my watercooled rig was around 45*C. Im gonna miss El Segundo because right now my wc rig is @ 28*C WHen theres an onshore breeze its natures evap cooler

Wow... I am humbled by your understanding. Thank you.

Ok, Nahmus.... You were totally justified in your smackdown on that guy. I too work as an independant consultant (I love working for myself) and the amount of work Nik and I have had is directly proportional to the high level of screwed up work the company we replaced did before we got there.

It's the exact oppopsite of your high-fullootin' wall street guy though. Our clients former computer "expert" had them all on 10Bast T networks running single PII 350's for servers on a mis-configured Windows NT 4.0 network with NO firewall (and they do have Internet).

I feel your pain as well and you are making the right decisions for your customers. There are all kinds of IT Nazi's that shoot for the moon when it comes to new hardware and their customers pay dearly.

Walaka... Have you ever worked on a Dodge Dakota? I have a 2001 4.7L Quad Cab 4x4 that is in need of some overclocking. I want to put a set of cams and a new intake manifold into it and I was thinking about whether or not I wanted to do it myself.

And I do hope the "boss" compenstates you for your troubles while he was Livin' La Vita Loca.

Toys... When I pull my farm out of the office and move it to one of our clients air conditioned server rooms (sweet!), the room temp will drop and I should be able to keep the ambient under 80F during the hot part of the day (for the room). Thanks for the tips.

It is quite therapeutic to pound this out on a keyboard, again, thanks for listening and sharing your stories.

Wedo

Wedo I feel for ya man.
I'm here in LA too.

Sucks that 3 layers of your farm died. But I'm glad you got it moving into the server room.

Now about cooling, if you have a spare window and your boss doesn't mind (I recall you saying you were your own boss, so correct me if I'm wrong, or maybe your building manager/landlord), install a window a/c unit from home depot. It's only around $100 for a nice 6,000 BTU unit, it'll cost you less than watercooling, and will give you some good performance. But below 80*F ambient (in the room) is fine for w/c. The room my computer's in is on the sunward side of my house, and thus it's the hottest. But getting the windows redone and getting a HVAC unit helps to combat heat.

That's a great idea, but... there's a problem. The only "window" in my office is a sliding glass door (this is my home office as I don't have a regular office). I think I'll be able to keep it under 80F though. I appreciate the tips.

Besides... doing my first H20 rig will make me happy. I need to bust out some home OC'ing to keep the edge off.

Good news already.....


I'm #2, I'm #2!!!!

w00r!

Wedo

P.s. Walaka... about the cams for my truck...?