Vincent The Dragon

Currently posting this from an older laptop running..wait for it...
Windows Vista Home Premium !

To my left is an older laptop running Windows 8.1 ..its well its windows 8.1 so its rubbish but the Vista one ain't all that bad.
I would take this Vista over Win11 any day.

Been working on cleaning the house and organizing.
We HAVE made a dent but it's going to take awhile...

I have not been posting much.
It's time, it's past time.
My life will be much improved when it's over and done with.
Williams not so much, I am having the hardest time with that part but it's his own damn fault.

same shit, different day.

It was a good unit, I will be and to see it go…

This is my Hitachi UltraVision 65S500 circa 1999.
Top of the line when this came out, back when HD1080 was just coming out.
DVI-HDTV HDCP Version 1.0
Still has a beautiful picture
Ran me around $4000 when I got it.
Lately it’s been doing odd things and now it’s stuck in a reboot loop.
I have been suspecting the electronics are dying and we have been wanting e new one for a few years.
I’ll crack open the chassis and have a go but I am not confident.

Straight from the vet.
He has always had some snot issues and lately his ears have been bugging him.
have been making sure he has eatmite meds, tried flushing ears too but he scratch one until it got infected.
No mites, they think he may have allergies.
They dug a ton of stuff from his ears and we have some meds.

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It's been said that I stopped taking pictures and documenting the ongoing remodel/fix-up of the house.
Well...yah, I have. I won't be keeping up the other parts of the blog like the house project page or the bio page.
Really nobody does their own online blog anymore except us old nerds.
Mostly online blogging has been replaced with what we ubiquitously refer to as social media.

Anyway; life got in the way, money dried up, various disasters ..etc..
The kitchen, living room and dining space were patched up a bit and covered with cheap covering.
This go us by rather well for years but the materials used for the floor by whomever built the place is garbage.
It's retains anything spilled on it, crumbles and smells bad.
It was always the plan to come back in fix it up, it just never happened.
well, the kitchen floor is coming apart and the dining area really stinks.
With gracious help from my mom, this project has once again re-booted.
It's going to be more difficult due to there being 3 of us here in this house but it's got to be done.
Shadow seems very eager to assist.

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Just been really busy with life and work and work and also work.
Managed to scrape together the down payment on a replacement vehicle.
Got a nice looking 2017 Sante Fe.
I found a mostly full service history in the glove box, looks the the previous owner always too it to the dealership for things.
Had it for a month, noticed a nice oil leak.
Brought it in as it's still covered under warranty.
Its coming from the timing cover, which should not be that big a deal to fix.
Picked it of, drove around for some errands, it through an engine code and leaks more now that before.
Brought it right back, seems the tech got goop in the variable cam timing actuators, which they had to order and now they think the oil is leaking from the cam timing actuators covers.
It's been 2 days, after my treatment today I am going down there and face to face find out what the deal is.

Just a small vid of some of the stuff I work on.

Not had much to say as I have just been busy doing day to day treading water.
now this happened.

Have not managed to pay off the monies spent on the Dallas trip and my line of credit is currently full do to some restructuring and consolidation. Also the truck is not payed off so this issues outcome is likely not going to work out in our favor.

Making beef stew in the crock pot.
Started with cubed round steak seasoned with salt, pepper, tyme, garlic powder, crushed bay leaves and some rosemary pan fried in a little olive oil.
Reduced drippings with tomato sauce.
In goes diced turnip, potato, carrots, Worcestershire, Tabasco, the reduced tomato sauce and a can of crushed tomato that have been blended, 2 cans of water.
Slow simmered for awhile.
In goes diced bokchoy and leek and low heat simmer.
ENJOY !

AT&T has done diddly squat in infrastructure updates around here.
So we switched to a T-Mobile 5g cellular hot spot.

Well the latest issue is HAL7 decided to die...
We have been noticing that it was randomly rebooting or going into a reboot cycle.
Thought it was a software issue and was digging into that but then it decided to turn off and not come back on...Meep!

HAL7 is older hardware, being an HP Proliant ML350 G6.
Come to find out my raid array was not being backed up either and the raid itself can't just be plugged into something else and recovered that way.
Online research suggested it was the power supply back plane distribution board. I can't find anything visually out of place like a leaky capacitor and were were about to give up hope.
Found ONE article online that shows soldering on a switch and manually forcing the power supplies to turn on. Currently its back up and running and we have completed a manual backup of the data.

I may pull the board back out and replace caps, we will see.
Usually older server hardware parts can be found online for pretty cheap but not this one. We can find it, but its in the $200 range.

Lesson learned is to verify your backup solution.

not been much of anything interesting to post about.
work, eat, sleep, poop, repeat...
just the same struggle of trying to keep the bills paid and the bellies full...gets old