Minor rant thread. Post your rants o' the day here!

Well that was a pretty wonky day.

It started with a wake up call at 5am due to a Severity 1 issue at work where 3500 production servers rebooted unexpectedly.  Luckily that was solved by the time I got on, but the finger pointing aka RCA was under a microscope from management.  The on-call guy who got saddled with it wouldn't let it go even though he was supposed to be on PTO to deal with hi great aunt going into hospice (I don't blame him, really).

Then my cousin's Mustang popped a bead on a huge pothole caused by a broken water main.  So I offered to pick her up and swap the spare on for her.

Since I was going to miss dinner (wife was making brinner!) I grabbed a meal shake and the necessary tools.

Picked her up in Gresham and headed to North Portland where her car was parked.  Along the way my stomach was getting upset and I was generally feeling gassy.  That should have been a clue.

So, we pull up and I park the FoRS and start working on the wheel.  At that point my bowels decided they were REALLY upset and well the tire change REALLY sped up.  All I can say is I'm glad we were wearing masks and that I brought a jacket with me.  Woof.

A few minutes later she's rolling out on the spare and I'm heading home with the windows open.

On the plus side, I missed the Presidential Debate and I got to put the kids to bed, so I got that going for me.

Why is it so hot today when there's storm coming!!

Today is picking up from yesterday morning. I really need to stop doing this to myself.

Since the shed is finally done and usable, I can move on to finishing getting the garage cleaned out and reorganized so it's actually usable and I can perhaps get the DMC in there to work on before the New Year. Next up was finishing the tire/wheel rack I was building so that I don't have them all sitting out under tarps in the driveway- but decided, 'hey... why don't I be a bit more efficient and start plastidipping the spoiler I want to put on the E46...' So I got it set up nicely to spray, got the first coat of plastidip on it and set my watch's timer to the 30 minutes they say to wait between coats and get working on the rack. Not 2 minutes before the timer goes off to do the second coat? It starts to rain- so I toss the spoiler in the back of the Infiniti. That's what I get for trying to multitask I guess... 

At least I got the rack done (though it wasn't without its issues as well, since I had forgotten to account for the 1.5" in height the pressure-treated 2x4s it has to sit on due to the water that gets in on that side of the garage and the garage door initially was hitting it...).

KyAllroad (Jeremy) (Forum Supporter) said:

Samuel L Jackson should moderate the schoolyard squabble.   

I suggest Mills Lane instead:

Duke said:

KyAllroad (Jeremy) (Forum Supporter) said:

Samuel L Jackson should moderate the schoolyard squabble.   

I suggest Mills Lane instead:

 

 

I'd rather have this guy and be done with it. 

In reply to Toyman01 (Moderately Supportive Dude) :

More entertaining to watch them try to kill each other.  Then the winner gets a date with the big guy in the black hood.  Repeat as necessary.

So, ummm.  Between these compression readings and the copious smoke coming from the turbo Miata I suppose things are no bueno.   Grumble.

Oh, and blowby.  Did I mention the blowby?  It's pretty atrocious as well.   berkeley me.

Trying to find things on FB Marketplace is a royal pain in the ass. Craigslist has its moments, but at least if you search for something it will show it to you... I've found FB marketplace to be absolute crap for finding car parts. 

And my main computer- a 2011 iMac- is having some annoying graphical glitches and occasionally freezing. I really want this computer to hold out until Apple comes out with the 27" iMacs (or whatever the larger size is if they change it...) with their own silicon, but we also count on this to handle all of the video and graphical design work for The Dancer's non-profit, so if it goes out I won't have much choice but to replace it...

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

We had the exact same issue with our 2010-2011 27".  The video cards run too hot and eventually fail.

We found an independent Mac repair shop who replaced the card with one from a later Mac for a few hundred bucks. It doesn't have quite as much horsepower but it works fine and it has bought us a couple years using the machine. 
 

The cost and complexity of everything from a new car to a basic website is multiplied by the inclusion of a lot of complexity, too much of it (IMHO) in support of shininess, glossiness, and novelty.

I briefly played with a framework for developing Java-backed websites as a candidate for something I'm working on. The basic application upon generation was half a Gigabyte. Of essentially text files. JavaScript frameworks and tools which pull in other tools which pull in other tools. Dependencies all the way down.

For so much of what we really need, and even want, this is too much. Again, IMHO. And the costs in terms of security issues, things outside one's control which can break everything, and spending time solving the framework instead of solving the problem are not insignificant. It's not getting questioned often enough, I think. (Though a quick search for "dependencies all the way down" -because that's how it occurred to me- shows that I'm certainly far from alone in my concerns.)

In reply to Duke :

I definitely couldn't get one with a less-powerful card... I'd hope I could get one with more power to eke a bit more life out of it. I'm not too scared on the whole of pulling it apart and replacing the card, but I'd have to find a way to know for certain that whatever card I got wasn't also going to have the same problem...

Oh, and I forgot earlier... 

Went to run some errands yesterday evening and couldn't get the convertible's top to move. Was running late so figured I'd worry about it later- and got about 3/4 of a mile down the road before realizing that 90% of the instrument cluster wasn't working either. So now I've got to figure out what's up with that... apparently they're related, but also apparently may mean that the cluster is on the fritz and will need to be replaced. -_-

EDIT: Another convertible-related rant... I want a spare trunk lid. I've got a spoiler I want to put on the back of the car, but want another clean trunk lid in case I decide to put it back to stock (since I'll have to drill holes to mount the spoiler. There used to be E46 convertibles in several of the U-pull-it junkyards nearby- but now there are none to be found. So I'm looking around at the non-self-service ones, and only one so far has had one:

Um, no. I'm not paying close to $400 after tax for a trunk lid...

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

You and wae are making me glad my German car is from 1974, and eastsideWife doesn’t plan on holding onto her GTI much longer...

Maybe my eustachian tube is clogged because I drove home on Sunday without hearing protection.

nope, strep.  And the amoxicillin pills are as big as golf balls, while the ability to swallow is not in my skill set right now.

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

The card that's in it is NLA and I don't think there was a more powerful card made in that configuration. Because of the chassis shape it's kind of in 2 pieces with a funky ribbon cable connecting them. Definitely not a standard video card. 
 

berkeley migraines 

Dusterbd13-michael (Forum Supporter) said:

berkeley migraines 

What do you take?

In reply to Duke :

I don't have the top-end model, so there is a higher-end card that was put in them (believe mine is 512MB and there's a 2GB card). I keep a watch on eBay for them, but they're rarely ever less than $150. 

For now I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed it behaves and hope that Apple is quicker with updating the big iMacs than expected...

In reply to matthewmcl (Forum Supporter) :

Caught early enough,  a monster and three excedrin migraines. Not early enough,  after i start puking i hit the rizatriptan and write off the night. 

Tonight is written off. The prescription E36 M3 does s number to me, but my headache is bearable....

Ashyukun (Robert) said:

In reply to Duke :

I definitely couldn't get one with a less-powerful card... I'd hope I could get one with more power to eke a bit more life out of it. I'm not too scared on the whole of pulling it apart and replacing the card, but I'd have to find a way to know for certain that whatever card I got wasn't also going to have the same problem...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2011-imac-graphics-card-upgrade.1596614/

This might help, its an MXM card.  I upgraded the one in my HP TouchSmart and it was pretty quick and painless, the iMac looks to be a bit more challenging, but still doable.  You can find MXM cards online, just make sure you get the right type, etc.

Good luck

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael (Forum Supporter) :

My wife is on several maintenance meds, using eletriptan (Relpax) as relief.  She was in early on Aimovig and has been seeing very good results from that.  With all of her meds, but before Aimovig, she still had a migraine almost every day.  Now she has a few days a month.

Nothing OTC touches hers, though. 

I swear to berk, I saw the thing I was looking for like a week ago, how the heck can I not find it in any of the places I think I would've seen it. This happens to me so freaking often.

In reply to slowbird :

At least 10 times a day for me.

At. Least.

This bitch is slippin. 

In reply to Stefan (Forum Supporter) :

Interesting... I've not seen anything about using other cards before, i'll have to look into that.