Monthly Archives: November 2018
Touchdown . . .
The Mars Insight Lander touched down right on time this afternoon, and seems to be fully operational. But it will be a while until they’re sure, and then they’ll deploy the solar panels and the test instruments. Hope all goes well.
Since I was out sick on Wednesday and we were closed on Friday, today was a catch-up day with a lot of stuff to send out and things on the website and in the catalogs to update with new prices. Busy, Busy.
Coming home I stopped in at Costco to fill up the tank for our trip up to Katy tomorrow. Found the price still at $1.91. How low will it go?
About 4:30 Jan and I headed back out to have dinner at the new Slim Chickens. Just as good as last time. Glad it’s close by.
Next up was a stop at the nearby WalMart for a few things for Jan to have for meals during her upcoming Adventures in Dog-Sitting. Then, just by happenstance, we drove by the Marble Slab where the coffee ice cream was calling out to us . . . ‘buy two small Coffees to go’. So we did.
Our last stop was the Santa Fe PO for our mail, where we found our new SD license plate stickers had come in. One less thing to worry about.
Tomorrow I’ll take Jan up to Brandi’s in Katy so she can dog-sit (and cat-sit) Miss Kitty, Baxter, and Mooshe (the cat) while Brandi, et. al., along with friends, Chantelle, Eric, and Maddox, are flying off to Disney World in Orlando where they’ll be staying until next Monday. Landon’s first trip to the Mouse Kingdom.
I brought home the System Image Recovery Disk and started trying to re-image the laptop hard drive after we got back home. But the first three times I tried it using the latest image I did on the 23rd, it kept failing, so right now I using the one I made back in October. And so far it’s working.
I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow.
Thought for the Day:
Freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself so others don’t have to do it for you.
ghjg
A Typical Fall Day In Texas . . .
Today is going to be one of those typical Fall days in Texas, what with running the AC’s this morning and the heaters tonight.
It was sunny and 75° today, but it’s going down to 41 tonight. And only up to 57° tomorrow and 38 tomorrow night. Of course it could be a lot worse like up north of here where the roads are closed due to high winds and heavy snow.
Today was just a nice stay-at-home day for us, computing, napping, TV’ing, reading, etc. Couldn’t be much nicer.
My project for today was to replace the HD in our ASUS X53E laptop, circa 2012. I’m starting to get errors from the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) firmware system built into the HD itself. Every time I boot up it gives me a DOS warning message that the HD needs to be replaced ASAP. But since I’m not seeing any ‘actual’ errors during operation, I’m thinking that the drive is probably sensing more and more intermittent read/write errors.
This happens when the HD tries to read some data from the drive and gets an error the first few times before finally reading the data correctly. Or the same thing when it tries to write some data to the drive.
So in preparation for this changeout, a couple of days ago I made a complete System Image of the laptop’s HD onto my 2TB WD external drive.Then all I had to do today was to find the replacement 500GB drive I had ordered for another project a while back but never used.
But when I found that, I realized I had another problem. I didn’t have a copy of the System Repair DVD here at home that I need to reinstall the System Image. So I’ll bring one home from my client’s tomorrow.
The neat thing about a System Image is that it’s a snapshot of the drive, so when I install the image to a new drive, it starts up exactly like it was before. There’s no reinstalling the OS, programs, data, etc. Just copy and go.
Or at least I will tomorrow.
Speaking of tomorrow, NASA got another Mars Lander touching down around 2pm CT tomorrow afternoon. After it lands (a toss-up since only about 50% of past Mars landers have been sucessfull), it will deploy a seisometer and a probe that will drill about 3 meters into the interior of the planet and then spend the next two years checking temps and monitoring for Marsquakes.
You can check out the landing on either NASA TV or streaming at Space.com.
Thought for the Day:
“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.” – John Barrymore
ghdgh
