Saturday, September 6, 2003

"Error asking thread to die" message appears sometimes on Patrick's computer when using the Internet Radio or Internet TV features of Winamp 2.91. Only 16 hits on Google—no one seems to know how to resolve this problem. Oatmeal for breakfast. Laundry, dishes, and other house chores. Coded more for Lodestar. Patrick went to the Castro to study Mandarin in cafes. I stayed home and continued work on the computer with the new hard drive. Turns out the old hard drive was what was causing the no-warning reboots. I'd never seen that behavior before. The new system was stable. I added back the old hard drive to copy data over from it. 3 folders copied fine. Then one larger folder caused a reboot. Then a bunch of folders copied as a group again caused a reboot. Removing the drive returned all operations to normal. Had to go to backup tape to restore a lot of files—the most recent tape backup was in March 2003. May have to do that tape restore and then plug that old hard drive back in risking more reboots to get all the data back. All this restore work has made me realize that I need something better than what I've had. In the past I've considered DIBS (Distributed Internet Backup System). I might just use rsync or something similar between computers on our home network, maybe additionally do DIBS if I can find a trusted friend or two who agree to it. Dinner at home with Patrick: ordered in from Seniore's Pizza (415-661-2222, 2415 - 19th Av at Taraval): Caesar salad (much like last night except a LOT more croutons), chicken special (with red and green bell peppers, garlic, onions)—very tasty pizza and fast delivery. Patrick got a cellphone today. His ex-boyfriend Sam convinced his (Sam's) mom to buy Patrick a phone so that they could stay in touch better. The service is $40 for 600 daytime minutes per month, nights and weekends free, rollover minutes. The phone is a Siemens (Patrick pronounces this as "see-mens") A56—4.0 x 1.7 x 0.8 inches, blue with sparkles. Began setting up my calendar in Outlook. Shopped for computer components.