North Bay Floods

What better way to celebrate the last day of the year than with some good, old-fashioned water damage? It’s been raining all day and night in the North Bay, driving the Napa and Russian rivers to record highs. And Victoria’s apartment is right next to the Napa river. Like, right smack next to the river, only separated by a bike path.

Watching the water rise from 8 1/2 feet to currently 28(!) feet has been an interesting experience. We might be in luck, I don’t think the water will quite reach the doors. We still have a few feet of buffer zone, but downtown Napa is already flooding, the streets are impassable (forget getting back to Marin right now) and the King Kong matinee we wanted to catch has gotten a bit more difficult since the entrance to the movie theater is blocked by 2 feet of streaming water.

We’ll see what we get to do for new year’s eve tonight – I have the feeling that we’ll crawl into bed at 12:01. I only got 2 hours of sleep tonight watching the water. No, this night did not help us get over our jetlag

I Am Not Dead Yet, I Can Dance and I Can Sing…

I finally fixed my laptop! A couple of months ago, my Dell XPS started slowing down considerably, to the point where I couldn’t even stream simple video anymore, let alone play any games or do 3D work. At first I thought that some video/audio codecs had gotten screwed and eventually reinstalled Windows. When that didn’t work and I started getting BIOS errors about it I ordered a new power supply from Dell, thinking that maybe the CPU wasn’t getting enough power anymore and was throttling. That didn’t work, either. Then I found a thread in the Dell forums that talked about a well-known throttling problem that affects a significant number of Inspiron XPS Gen 1 laptops. Ouch! I was all set on replacing the Prescott processor on my mainboard, but as I started disassembling the computer I found a much simpler solution.
Turns out that the problem was caused by two completely clogged system fans, where the dust buildup didn’t let through any air at all. The computer was overheating just a few minutes after bootup, and the CPU throttled down immideately. I cleaned the fans and everything is back to normal – yay! Same thing worked for Jamie’s overly loud Inspiron 9300.

Victoria and I head back to the US in a few hours, and come the new year I’ll try to get a steady stream of updates going again. In the meantime, I redid the formatting of my Downloads page in glorious Notepad code, since I was getting a lot of hits for the dotXSI4Maya plugins. I’ll add a quick post to the Blog page, as well.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I’m Not Dead

Nope, I’m not dead. I’ve just been busy. More importantly, I reinstalled my laptop a little while ago and still don’t have a decent HTML editor back up and running. More when I get this thing fully operational again, the Windows reinstall did not fix my problems. Seems to be something with the hardware