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Once you’ve accomplished this task, and know how everything works, you begin to weave your own puzzle. You set everything up the way YOU like it. You may even implement a server naming scheme of your choice (I’m dealing with a Lord of the Rings theme at work and slowly phasing it out). At this point you may be a year or 2 into the position there when a better opportunity calls, and you leave to another company, starting the cycle over again for you and another sysadmin.

Me, my buddy and a bunch of friends skipped first class to go out to breakfast in high school. We went to a Denny’s-type of greasy-spoon diner, in total there were about twenty of us. My buddy, at the end of the meal bets me the price of his breakfast that he cant chug all the little shot glasses of maple syrup on the table. I agree and he starts blasting through heaps of the syrup, just throwin em back. Around 15 he starts slowing down and looking pale. He gets to 18 and gives up. We then go back to school for our second class: Geometry with Miss Cankles herself…Queen Manatee who was really mean, ill tempered and a bad teacher…the kind that likes to hear her own voice and undermine the students by picking on them. Half way through the class my buddy…now GREEN is waving his arms to be called on but Miss Manatee is ignoring him intentionally. He then stands up and bolts for the door; with surprising speed the instructor quickly oozes her bulk into the doorway blocking his path. “WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?!” she moos at him poking him hard in the chest with her sausage finger. Weakly my friend says “the nurse” she turns BRIGHT RED and screams in his face about being disrespectful to his elders and betters and that he will be serving a thousand painful detentions cleaning her toenails or something. He turns meekly to walk back to his seat and she grabs him “I’m not done with you yet!” As she whips him around to face her and as she OPENS her MOUTH to yell again my friend loses it. He pukes up his MASSIVE lumberjack, grand slam omelet pancaketastic maple syrup soaked breakfast into her horseface and (gloriously) into her gaping mouth..

The aftermath was fairly ridiculous; it was one of those three solid beats of silence that lasts forever as everyone was just open-mouthed (including and especially the teacher) and staring. The only sound was my friend’s whimpering and, post-explosion, blurping. Then one of the quiet kids in the back whispered “HO..lee shit” under her breath but since everyone was still in shock it was CLEARLY audible, echoing around the room. That broke the spell; we all BURST into fits of unabashed laughter both at the timing and source of the side comment and the craziness of the event itself. The teacher (I WISH I could tell everyone how evil this instructor was, she was one of those professors that does math a great disservice because of the way she teaches and behaves) blinks ever so carefully and slowly, wipes the goo out of her eyes, and turns about-face to go across the hall to get another teacher to watch us while she goes to clean up. Not realizing her sodden appearance she causes a HILARIOUS reaction from THAT teacher’s class causing my class to start howling in laughter. Then she leaves in a smelly and indignant huff. She will get her revenge later with homework and detentions galore. Unfortunately my friend was doubled over and crying at this point because the realization that he just projectile vomited 18 shot glasses worth of maple syrup and two pounds of breakfast matter into the face of the meanest, nastiest geometry teacher on the planet is starting to sink in. I and another friend walk over and rub his back and bring him to the nurse explaining what happened (skipping the part about skipping class) and he gets picked up by his older brother and taken home for plenty of rest and a healthy dose of videogames. I do not have many fond memories of high school. I was a late bloomer, angsty and rebellious as they come, but THIS remains one of my most favorite memories…ever..I’m glad I could share it with reddit :)

The hard part(s) came when I booted XP 64bit after doing the swap. It was only 1 generation up for the northbridge, and the processor should just be detected as a quad core 3.2 GHz chip. Well Windows decided to not boot up. Weird, I thought, and put in my BartPE disc to image the install before I just installed fresh. Once in BartPE, I tried to make an Acronis image of the LUN to my network storage, but the partition table was corrupted. I tried fixing it, but decided my backup was recent enough, and I store all important data off to the storage server. Wrote zeroes to the beginning of the drive to wipe out the MBR and partition tables, and just installed XP Pro 64bit fresh. Speed. Raw speed that I have only seen on servers that I set up at work. But for some reason, my Asus Xonar D2 wasn’t installing properly, and the onboard firewire wasn’t accepting drivers. Ok, so I google like crazy, update the BIOS (note this point) and move the cards around. The card worked in the bottom most PCI slot, but it blocks the heatsink fan for my 2nd video card, which caused crashes before due to overheating. This was 11 PM on Wednesday evening. I needed to go to bed and work the next day.

After work, I came home, and called EVGA. They too found the problem weird, and moved me up to level 2 support. The level 2 support guy asked if the card I was installing was a Xonar. I laughed and said yes. He told me the latest BIOS had a specific fix for this, and that my updating it should have fixed it, so I flashed it again via a boot CD and wrote the CD at 8x. Booted into XP 64, and it saw the sound card in the middle PCI slot, and the firewire controller worked fine. Yay? Not quite. I finished up installing everything, and wanted to play some WoW. So, I’d launch it up, start killing things, and get a crash. What? I disabled all the addons, still crash. Hm. Reinstalled fresh, and still crash. Weird. I had installed Windows 7 on my spare 10k RPM drive so booted into that, finished installing drivers and such, and copied over the WoW directory. In the 15 minutes I was playing, no crash. Looks like I’m now forced to stay in Windows 7 64bit, Vista 64bit or Server 2008 64bit. *sigh*

TL;DR version: I got hardware for free, bought hardware to make it work, and it was a PITA making it work.

• I discovered I have no idea where the hell the suction cup mount for my TomTom is.
• Target has universal replacement mounts for TomToms and other GPS receivers.
• The air vent mount looks damn good in my car and I like it.
• I only discovered that it was 9 PM just as I was going to take a shower.
• I am tired as hell but am positive I’m not going to sleep the whole damn night.

That is all.