Thoughts and Ramblings

I swear, the more I deal with them, the more I hate dealing with Dell. Apple, on the other hand, becomes more pleasant the more I deal with them.

Last night, one of our Dell servers stopped working in many ways. I noticed most of the failures were “Input/Output Error”. A quick google search revealed that this is likely a bad HD. Well that is not Dell’s fault, but it is very unlikely for such a thing to happen when the system is new, and using hardware RAID-1 (mirroring). So, I get to the office and try to figure out what the deal is. Dell’s built in RAID controller (PERC 5i IIRC) decided to turn itself off. A quick reboot fixed it, but still, this should not have happened in an enterprise level system.

I decided that I would not write about this until the entire matter is resolved; so here it goes.

On the 10th, I saw that my Verizon wireless bill was $272. I immediately called them to find out what the deal was. Turns out over $200 of that was data changes since I used my phone as a modem for my computer. Well, I did use it, but for the first two years I used this phone, I was never changed. The person I talked to promised to track it down and that I would receive a call within 3-5 days.

Well, I have been slowly recovering all the data that I was lost. I went through and reposted all the images in the blog which were missing from the last time around. So now, there should no longer be any broken links on any of the pages.

I have been keeping busy with school and other things. Teaching my class has been fun, and not too much of a time sink. I will have to design the firs test sometime soon. That will certainly be an experience. Hopefully it is better than the time that I was a TA and gave out a quiz. It turned out to be entirely impossible. I best make sure I don’t repeat that.