Not quite the plan, Best Bumbling

The chicken integration has continued to go well.  At this point we now have the young birds going into the coop at night without us having to physically place them there.  They also now realize they can come out in the morning on their own once the automatic chicken coop door opens.  They are still hesitant to go in the chicken run when the adult birds are there but it’s slowly getting better.  The chicks seem quite happy to have so much space to roam.  So far Daelin the rooster has been doing fine and seems to to realize that I am the true rooster on the top of the ladder.  He eats out of Cindy and my hands just fine.

Saturday I got out on the skateboards a bit for a ride.  It has been awhile.

I dug into my desk area on Saturday, using a hole drilling bit to cut a couple extra holes into my desk to make it easier to route wires.  It made a huge mess, producing more saw dust than I expected.  Saturday night I did a test stream using the new hardware Cindy got for me, a proper frame and two bright LED lights.  It made a big difference in the effectiveness of the Chromakey effect.

Saturday night we also watched our latest rental, Tully.  It was one of those f with your head sort of movies that pulls the rug out from under what you think is the plot.  It was still entertaining enough for a B+.

I woke up Sunday morning and noticed my computer was off.  That’s odd, I don’t recall shutting it down.  When I hit the power button there was no response whatsoever.  After doing the normal checks it seemed like the system had died.  It is over four years old at this point and sees heavy use so I figured the power supply gave out.  A pain in the ass but I figured I could pick up a replacement at Best Buy later.

So I came up with a plan where I would ride to DD on an EUC, have Cindy pick me up and then we could run errands, including getting the power supply.  That plan had a detour as well when my Msuper started giving me low battery beeps less than three miles into the ride.  I had to swing a U-turn back to the house where I picked up the big Monster instead.

So I got a power supply as planned, a more robust model to be safe.  When I got home I dug into my PC, ripping out the old supply and installing the other which was a bit tedious and patience testing at times.  After some sweating and swearing I got it in there.  I wanted to do a quick test before I closed everything back up so I hit the power button and was not thrilled to see everything remained dark.  After double and triple checking my connections and repeated tries the shitty revelation came to me that it was the system board that died, not the supply….. damn it.

Well that is a much more serious problem.  Trying to secure the correct system board and the process to replace it is anything but a quick process.  I needed to have the system up and running.  I decided that although it is going to be costly and a huge pain in the ass, a new pc was going to be my answer.  I told Cindy of my plan as I shoved off for Costco, hoping they would have suitable replacement.

My hopes were not realized, all Costco had were entry to mid-level boring systems that I  was not interested in.  Luckily Best Buy was in the same shopping center so I rolled over there next.  I saw HP Omen towers.  These are high end systems designed for serious gamers.  Although I am not a serious gamer, I still benefit from a high horsepower system for my video processing.

I saw the price tag and noticed it said they had an open box version for a couple hundred less.  I flagged down an employee and asked about it.  He said they did have it in the back and he would bring it out, sweet.

So when he tried to ring it up he was blocked from doing so.  The inventory system said it was not able to be sold.  The short version of the story is HP sent out a bunch of these systems with incorrect labels.  For liability reasons they were pulled off the shelves until they could be relabeled.  That relabeling had been done but whatever back end work that had to be done to put them back in inventory had not been done. So basically, even though I was standing there with a box at my feet and my credit card in hand, Best Buy could not sell me the system.

I told the guy it seemed rather crazy that I am willing to buy something that was right in front of me and they weren’t able to sell it.  He even jumped on the Best Buy website to see if he could release the inventory by buying it online and selecting store pickup, nope that didn’t work either.   I asked one more time if there was anything else they could do and he apologetically said no.

So as I walked out to the truck I was very frustrated but not defeated.  I fired up the Best Buy website on my phone and did a HP Omen search.  It popped up that the Gulf Town Center location had another open box unit in stock, the higher end model with a better video card and larger hard drive.  The price was higher than the model I looked at but it was discounted more, $500 off normal price.  I was able to complete the purchase online and drove the 17 miles further to get it.

I felt a small sense of triumph as the clerk brought my open box Omen to the counter.  I had actually asked the guy at the first store if other Best Buy stores in the area might have them.  He said no, they would all have the same restriction.  Well I’m glad I didn’t take his word for it.

So the rest of my Sunday was diving full scale into recovery mode.  Luckily with the cloud based environment we live in, I had base functionality returned pretty quickly.  I was able to throw my 3TB hard drive into the empty slot on the Omen to get access to that data.  I was able to use a USB to SATA external rig to connect my old SSD drive to the system to move other data across.  Since most of my important stuff is saved on Dropbox that is very easy to recover as well.

At this point I would say I have 80% of my core functionality returned which isn’t bad at all considering how bleak I felt yesterday afternoon.  I went ahead and ordered some additional upgrades for the Omen including a larger internal NAND SSD drive and another stick of DDR4 RAM to double it’s capacity to 32GB. Although a new computer was not on my radar, I certainly appreciate the additional muscle it brings to my daily processing needs.

I do have a theory regarding the failure of my old system.  One of the holes I drilled was next to the computer itself.  The side I punched through on was also the side of the computer case that has ventilation holes.  I am wondering if during the process some debris/saw dust got into the case and killed a component.  That would be a real kick in the nuts if my carelessness resulted in a $1500 replacement bill.

Today for my last day off I will be trying to put things back in order as the office turned into a crime scene of computer parts Sunday as I scrambled for resolution.  Order must be restored.