What I Haven't Mentioned

What I haven't mentioned, is that a couple of things have happened while all this rain and flooding has been going on.

One, my desktop PC has totally crapped out. I can't get it to boot up at all. When I press the ON/OFF button, I hear the DVD player cycle, and a couple of fans start up, but nothing else happens.

The other thing that has happened is the gate motor has quit working. That, and the gate lights as well.

Yesterday, I took the PC in to Fred at Corozal Virtual Office, for him to take a look at it and see if he can find out what's wrong.

Then, I called Arturo Rancheron, the electrician, to see if he can get the gate motor working again.

He and his wife (who's an able assistant) came and began troubleshooting the gate area. What they found was a lot of the wiring was, in places, stripped of insulation, so it was shorting out.

Broken Pot Metal Waterproof Housing

Arturo blamed geckos for eating the insulation. I'm more inclined to believe ants are the culprits. Especially since each receptacle box they opened was stuffed to the gills with dead ants and debris from their nesting.

Receptacle Clogged With Dead Ants and Debris

Luckily, using my fish-tape, Arturo was able to run all new wiring to the gate motor at least. He tested the link with his meter, so we know juice is at the motor. Unfortunately, the motor isn't responding. I'm going to have to call Roger Chang at Capital Metal for his repair guy to come look at the motor. Dang it. And the gate lights still don't work. That means, all the rest of the wiring for each of the lights will have to be replaced as well. What a pain. Well, as they say, or at least as I say, often enough, "If it was easy, it wouldn't be any fun."

Arturo Cleaning Dead Ants Out of Receptacle

 Lots and lots of dead ants and stripped wiring, in some cases several inches at a time, so it's just bare copper wire touching each other and causing shorts.

Even More in the Cavity Behind

The ants are doing a couple of things. One, they're looking for high ground to avoid the flood water that is accumulating everywhere; and Two, they're probably fire ants or a close cousin and as such, they're attracted to electrical fields. They cause outages and shorts and get themselves electrocuted by the thousands.

Our front gate area as been a constant attractant for ants. Must be some juicy electrical fields right around here.

Yesterday evening, I called Fred for his assessment of the PC. Not good. He apparently got it to begin to come up, but that's about it. He said the disk is telling him it's locked. He can't get it to a state where he can enter my password. Not good news. He was going to try later in the evening again, but it's looking like I may be starting from scratch - new PC, and no recoverable data. Oof course, I didn't have a viable backup plan in place. Foolish me. Well, more on that later.

So, that's all I know for now. I'll let you know more as I know more.

Sunday Morning Grab Bag... Again

I got delayed again, with a posting. I really have a good excuse this time. My laptop suffered a terminal case of the spurious and creeping electrons doing whatever they wanted.

This was actually the second time my laptop had done that. It has gone berserk several times in the past, but I was always able to get it to work more or less right in short order. Not so this time.

I emailed Roger hoping he was still in the business of building PCs. No. Being a farmer is a higher calling. Doesn't he now he's supposed to be retired? I asked if he knew anyone who did such things and he suggested any of the PC repair shops in town do such things, but that they usually end up with inferior quality parts.

I wasn't so worried about that. My track record on laptops (coming down from the States) tended to be pretty dismal. I'm on my third one since moving here, or is it my fourth? I can't remember.

Anyway, I headed downtown to check out what might be available. I have developed a pretty good working relationship with Fred Orio and his cat at Corozal Virtual Office, so I thought I'd start with him. I asked if he ever builds replacement PCs for people. He said he does it all the time. In fact, he finished a nice one the day before, and was expecting a new power supply and motherboard for another one that afternoon.

We talked a bit more, he told me it would have a brand new Intel Pentium chip, brand new super humma-humma power supply, and some other stuff.

Sounded good to me, so we struck a deal. I told him I had a used 500GB hard drive he could stuff into it and I'd bring that by in the morning.

Imagine my surprise when I ripped open the old box for that drive and found it was an IDE (old style) drive and that it was only 120GB.

I told Fred what I'd found, and he said he had a new either 350GB or 500GB drive. Price was only about $50 BZD difference, so I opted for the biggie.

This all happened on Thursday morning. He said I could come back Friday and pick it up.

Of course, along with the box that contains the CPU or motherboard and a whole host of other stuff, like a DVD Recorder, card reader, 7 USB ports, and 3 fans, I also needed to get a monitor and a keyboard. I already had a mouse. I used it with the laptop. I can't stand using the touchpad.It's been years since I've had a desktop machine and I almost forgot you need all that stuff separately. Laptops are so convienient.

Anyway, Fred had a brand new LG 19" monitor, which I drooled over, and the keyboard... well, it's used. But, all the keys work like they're supposed to. The only other keyboards he had were monstrous tan-color POS's. The box for the thing, I've forgotten to describe it. It's black, used, box shaped, and easy to work on with the hood up. Lots of room to hang periferals onto too. So that might be fun again.

I didn't want any extraneous software as I use pretty much all open-source stuff, Libre Office, etc. I stayed with Windows 7, and I had done a full system backup before my laptop went totally gonzo. I was able to restore the backup to the new machine, slick as a whistle (You do do backups, right?).

I even rooted around in my workshop in a box of old cables and connectors and managed to find my old set of really nice Bose speakers and a web cam that was in like-new condtion. Unfortunately, it's an early model and is no longer supported, so no driver is available. Bummer.

All I need for the speakers is USB/RCA connector of some sort. I need to go into town in the morning anyway, so, with a little luck?

The upshot of this all is, that in the space of two or three days, I'm back up on the Intertubes with, for all intents and purposes, a new PC. Life is good, eh?

Oh, and lest I forget, Dianna and I were in the pool most of the day yesterday. Water temperature was a very nice 86°(f). I tell you, that was why we moved down here. It was just excellent. Of course, the downside is that today is gray and it's raining.

We seem to be hard-pressed to get more than one really nice day in a row this year. At least we haven't had any of the things that this is the season for, and that's weird in and of itself. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

I am complaining about the road situation. Me, complain about the roads? You ought to hear the doggies complain about not being able to go for walkies for weeks on end. They're about at their wits end.

It won't do much good to complain to anyone in government. They're up to their ears in flooding, road, and bridge outtages throughout the country. That's going to occupy their activities for a long time to come.

And those politicians who aren't caught up in flooding on the grand scale, are probably caught up in the immigration goings on. What a mess. It's beginning to look like sales of visas and passports was a widespread and growing enterprise involving all sorts of folks.

On a related note to the computers, I'm still trying to figure out how to use my NAS (Network Attached Storage) hard drive with the MIFI from Smart Phones that we use now. Once I get that nut cracked, we should be in fat city as far as computers go. Of course, then something else is likely to break.