Hot Day

Above is a shot of the temperature for late afternoon today. It shows just after noon but my thermometer is stuck on the Pacific time zone and I can not remember how to change it. While there are hotter parts of the country, this is unusual weather for Hickville. The problem with such high temperatures for Hickville is the accompanying high humidity levels; it is like being inside of a sauna. When the weather is this hot in Hickville, it is almost impossible to do anything outdoors in the gardens.

My friend Ron posted a link on his blog to an off site article about portable foods.  I left a comment on his page but thought I should share my comment with my readers as they may want to volunteer to be test subjects.

I am working on a new portable food myself, it is soup on a stick. Yes, I know you can get those little containers of soup you pop in a microwave, but you still have to have a spoon and it is hard to drive and eat the soup at the same time; those of you that have the knee driving down to an art are probably smirking, but the rest of us need at least one hand on the wheel. Therefore, soup on a stick. You would only need one hand to hold the stick and the other hand can be use to control the steering wheel. I am nearing a pre-alpha test phase and will be seeking test subjects.

I had a simple July 4 attending my sister's barbecue where there was plenty of good food and good times with the family. My offering to the feast was a chocolate chip and pecan pie baked by me. Afterwards I travelled to a nearby city to watch the fireworks. I would share some photos and videos of the fireworks, but I could not find a proper advantage point. Most of the fireworks would barely clear the trees, and harsh lamps were in the way. The show lasted for no more than 20 minutes and the amount of fireworks were less than last year. The economy has hurt municipalities and several of the nearby cities did not have any July 4 celebrations at all.

Below are a few photographs of me taken at my sister's barbecue. It would not be a holiday without new photos of Kimberly.

Kimberly in back garden

Kimberly in swing

Kimberly by pool

I am tired of being alone. Yet, when I mention I am tired of being alone I am told I should be glad that I am alone; that I have the freedom to do as I please. This is often told to me by those who are not alone. I guess it can become tiresome after some time to always have to confer with someone else in matters. However, time and time again, even coming from bad marriages and relationships, people seek out relationships when they are not in one. It is human nature to want to be with someone, to bond with someone; humans are not solitary by nature, they need the company of others, and they need the close intimate relationship of a partner. They need someone to love them.

I want someone to love me. Unfortunately, I don't think that is going to happen. In the few relationships I have had over the years, it has been me that has fallen in love without it being reciprocated. What I have learned is that love means nothing when it is solitary, my feelings of love only held significance to me. In the end, I found myself alone and hurting because I had fallen in love with someone who could not return that love. The question is how to prevent it from happening again. I don't have the answer to that question; it seemed that I always found myself in love before I was aware of it happening.

I told myself that this summer was going to be different. I pushed myself hard, too hard, this spring with the notion that I was going to finish all the projects that needed doing. I ended up just hurting myself and the summer is starting the same as the summer before. Here it is Saturday night and I am as I am every Saturday night. I thought I was going to have company tonight, but I had no word and as the day grew old I finally gave up. Tomorrow is July 4th; celebration of the birth of a nation. A local city will be having a fireworks display. If I attend the fireworks it will be alone as I do everything alone. Sometimes it is nice to be alone, to have some individual time devoted to just one's self. I think that is what is in the minds of those telling me that I should be glad I am alone. They really don't understand how it is to be alone day in and day out for years. They really don't understand how lonely it can be.

I recently purchased a new hard drive to replace the ageing one in the server. The old drive in the server was a 200GB SATA 1.5Gb/s Maxtor drive manufactured 23-8-2003. While the drive is seven years old, I have not been experiencing any read/write errors. The reason for replacing the drive was the small size.

I built the server myself from individual components that I selected base on their quality and performance at the time. The main board, or motherboard, is an Asus K8V-SE Deluxe AMD socket 754 64 bit with Hyper Transport front side bus, circa 2005. Yes, it is considered a dinosaur against today's computer system; the CPU has only one core. However, it has been a rock steady system that runs 24/7/52 and hopefully will continue to do so. The system has plenty of power to run even the most demanding operating systems and applications. While it is running a server OS, I also use it as my main workstation.

My new Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB hard drive

My new drive is a Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB 3.0Gb/s SATA II hard drive with a 32MB cache. While the SATA controller on the motherboard is only 1.5Gb/s, the new drives can auto-negotiate down to the slower transfer speeds. Therefore, I did not anticipate any problems installing my new hard drive in the server. Unfortunately, I was wrong and I did indeed have problems installing my new hard drive on my old motherboard.

The Asus K8V-SE Deluxe comes with two SATA Raid controllers; one is a VIA controller and the other is a Promise PDC20378 controller. When I connected the Seagate Barracuda drive to the VIA controller, the BIOS would not see the hard drive and would not post beyond the failure. When I connected the Seagate Barracuda to the Promise controller, it found it without any problems reported. Therefore, I decided I would just use the Promise controller for the new hard drive. There was one little problem with using the Promise controller, and that was the lack of drivers. I spent a day combing the internet for 64 bit drivers that would work under the OS without any luck. At one point I even crashed the OS and was unable to boot back into the system. I had to use a previous OS hard drive to remove the offending driver to get back into the system.

I gave up on finding 64 bit drivers for the Promise controller and turned my attention to possibly getting the VIA controller to work by doing a BIOS upgrade. Now doing a BIOS upgrade is not something to do lightly, the BIOS is the programme that starts the motherboard, identifying the video and storage systems, the CPU settings, the memory timings, to name just a few. If the BIOS becomes corrupted, then you may as well toss the motherboard as it may be cheaper to replace the whole board than trying to replace the BIOS. The BIOS, also known as the CMOS, is so critical that a lot of the motherboards manufactured today come with a second CMOS built into the board.

The latest BIOS listed on Asus's website for my board was a beta version dated 2005/10/19. I decided that a beta version was too risky and opted for the next stable BIOS dated 2005/07/14. I download the latest stable BIOS and the dos based flash utility with the intention of using a floppy drive to update the BIOS. After trying two different floppy drives and numerous format errors with the stack of old floppies I had on hand, I decided I would just format a flash card and boot from it. The format utility that shipped with the OS would not format a flash card to be bootable. I used an HP format utility designed for making a flash card or drive bootable. The flash drive boot utility is available as a free download from HP's website and can be obtained by going here.

Upgrading the BIOS did not help the problem with the VIA controller. It may be the VIA controller would not auto-negotiate with the hard drive to limit the transfer speed and my Seagate Barracuda can not be jumpered to operate at 1.5Gb/s. I even upgraded the BIOS to the beta version with the result of the motherboard not posting. That was a scary moment; however, clearing the CMOS brought the board back to life. I quickly loaded the last stable release of the BIOS back to the CMOS and left it alone. At this point it appeared that I would be unable to use my new Seagate Barracuda without buying a new PCI (this is an old board, no PCI-E slots here) controller card. I looked at getting a new 3.0Gb/s card but the price tag of $34.00 was out of the question. Therefore I looked at the 1.5Gb/s boards making sure they came with the necessary 64 bit drivers I would need. However, as I researched cards, I came across a SATA to PATA adapter that would not need drivers to work as it would use the built in IDE controllers on the board. A search on eBay found one for the total price of $4.28 with shipping.

SATA to PATA/PATA to SATA adapter

When my adapter arrived, I was a little put off to see the contents above just placed into a small padded shipping envelope. However, I really did not need retail packaging or instructions as it is fairly obvious to a seasoned computer person such as myself how to install the adapter. If I can build a server I should be able to figure out how to use the adapter. The adapter has an IDE connector on one edge of the board and two SATA connectors and a small floppy drive style power connector on the opposite edge of the board. As you can see in the photo above, the adapter came with a molex adapter as many systems may not have a floppy style power connector available. Included on the board is a LED to indicate the board is receiving power.

The adapter installed in the system

I plugged the adapter into the first primary IDE controller, attached the power connector, and plug the SATA cable into what I thought was the proper SATA port. There are two SATA ports on the card as this adapter can be used to go either way; to use a SATA drive on a non SATA motherboard, or to use an old IDE drive on a motherboard that does not have any IDE PATA controllers. I booted the system and the BIOS did not locate the new drive. I powered down the system, move the SATA cable to the other SATA port on the adapter, rebooted the system and the BIOS was able to find the new Seagate Barracuda hard drive without any problems. Entering the BIOS and reading the firmware of the Seagate Barracuda reported the correct parameters of the hard drive. I was now in business!

I partitioned the drive into a 500GB main boot drive and the remaining in a logical drive to hold files. I like to hold my files separate from the main operating system and applications drive. I was once called in due to a Windows system crash that not only took out the system files, but data files as well since the built in storage folders are part of the Windows OS. Having a separate drive for files also makes it easier to control backups of data as well. Once I had the partitions set up, I was ready to clone the old drive to the new drive.

Installing a new main drive with an operating system is a lot easier if the old drive is cloned to the new drive. Of course it is important that the old drive is free from trojans and viruses. If not, and you can not clean the old drive of the trojans and viruses, then it may be best to just start over from the beginning; installing the OS and applications. As you know, it can take a very long time to reinstall everything to a new hard drive. Cloning the drive makes the task very easy and your new drive will be exactly like the old drive. When you boot into your new drive you will see no differences from booting into the old drive.

My first attempt at cloning the old drive to the new drive was using Clonezilla, an open source application that is comprised of several other open source applications. Clonezilla is not for anyone who is not use to a command line interface and has some knowledge of Linux. Clonezilla will boot into a Linux OS and a semi-command line interface and uses the Linux OS convention for drives; in other words, you will not see drive letters. Clonezilla was fast; it clone the old boot drive partition of the old hard drive to the new boot partition of the new drive in 31 minutes and 15 seconds. However, upon completion the server failed to boot; Clonezilla did set the MBR correctly. However, I decided not to play with the Clonezilla and used a commercial cloning package that was build to clone server operating systems. The commercial package was much slower than Clonezilla; it took 55 minutes to clone the old to the new drive. However, upon completion the server booted from the new drive with everything exactly as it was with the old drive.

I am taking a slight hit with the transfer rate using the PATA IDE controller over the SATA controller. However, it is very negligible. The SATA controller on this board is only rated at 1.5Gb/s and PATA data rates reached 1.5Gb/s before they were replaced by SATA. The PATA IDE controller on my board is rated at 1.33Gb/sec so while there is a slight hit, it is not enough that one can noticed outside of benchmark software. If one has an older motherboard that is having trouble using some of the newer large fast hard drives, the adapter board that I am using will be one answer.