Drifus' Travels – Well he thought he would

Well today I did something I have never done, I received stitches, 13 of them. It’s every RV’rs nightmare, I walked into a slide out of my neighbors RV. The worse part was that I hit the edge of the slide. The 3 inch gash starts towards the top of my head and goes up and back.

I went out to start my car and get it warmed up and let it de-ice itself. I got it started and got out of the car and took maybe 2 steps and “crack”. My first reaction was “damn that hurt”. I put my hand on my head and the next thing I know blood is running down my hard. So I continue back to my RV and a drop of blood hit the porch. I make it get in the RV and grab a paper towel and put it on my head. I call to Beth, the second time she can tell by my voice that something is wrong. She comes down and I tell her that I hit my head and remove the paper towel. I see how much blood is on the paper towel and 3 drops hit the floor, I now realize that the situation is a little more serious. Beth gets excited and worried at the same time and immediately wants to take me to the hospital. She starts to yell “get in the car, go get in the car”. I realize that I feel fine and am not dizzy so I take my time while she gathers a few things. I go outside and turn off the car, check the corner of the RV it hit and noticed a small plastic plate that was cracked and loose, later we checked and saw hair and skin attached to that corner. Well just in case your a little twisted, yes I have pictures and a movie of the stitches being put in.

With Stitches

Without stitches

Well it’s been cool here, cold for some, mid-30′s I enjoy it wearing shorts and t-shirts. I know May and the rest of the “summer” is close and I’ll complain everyday about how hot it is.

Well I began building a new computer or so I thought. After getting the rest of the parts the assembly began. The assembly went well, I knew going into this I would have some issues as reported by other with the same motherboard. I had created a floppy with the last Rom Bios file and flashed it as soon as I could get a boot screen. Well that went without a hitch. Before and after the flash I had issues with it seeing any keyboard (USB or PS/2) Well like I said I eventually got the bios update to work. From there things went pretty good. I was able to begin loading XP-64 and that finished and I was able to login and defrag the drive etc. I then decided to load the drivers (newest from the aBit site). This seem to also go well but I was never able to finish upon a reboot I received an error 9.0 (mistaken it to 90 at first). Well after much searching and reading and trying all of the recommendations I surrendered to the mighty error code. This has to be the worse error code for Abit users. It means the the internal Abit code is handing off to the BIOS code and you are stuck. A CMOS reset does not work using any idea suggested including the manual. Without a reset you can not boot to a floppy and reflash forward or backward. I have set up an eRMA with Abit and am waiting for approval. One other thing to mention I had purchased 2 2G dimms for this system. Putting in both caused a hung system before total post. I then tried them one at a time and used different slots, long story short one dimm was bad. So since there were in a package together the also got RMA’d.

So now I sit here looking at a power supply, a 8800GTS video card and a quad code CPU. So I am in a holding pattern until all returns. Bummer

So when I get to finish the PC it will consist of:

Abit IN9 32Max Wifi
8G DDR2 PC800 Memory
EVGA 320M 8800GTS video card
PCPower&Cooling 750W power supply
5Tb of disks.

Well another year has gone by, were all a year older unless you passed on which means your not reading this. After some time of considering using another blog for rants I have decided to keep everything here. This makes it easier for me and for you. So if things change here and you don’t want to read it I understand.

Well I had a good X-mas and New Year, everyone is doing well. I didn’t get to see my girls for the holidays (down side of divorce and distance), but I know they love me and I love them. We (Beth and I) spent 4 days in St.L seeing her family and also got reacquainted with the other half of the family. I really like both sides of her family they are all wonderful people. While in St.L we saw National Treasure Book of Secrets. It’s worth seeing but I felt the first one was more believable. Looking forward to see what the next installment brings.

On a different note, propane. WOW it’s getting spendy, $3.40/gal which equates to $300 a month. I don’t have last years bills with me but I think it was about $2.80 last year. I am glad it’s only like this for about 5 months, then I switch the fridge over to propane for the other 3 seasons. This is due to it being more efficient. This year I may try the fridge and the water heater. (not the hot water heater, no such thing)

New subject, I did some quick research and believe I can convert the whole RV to LED lights for about $320.00. Now your thinking that either the lights are expensive or we have a ton of lights in here. Well it’s about half and half. There is somewhere around 30 total lights on the inside. This is due to the fact that when you are on battery power only you will have about half as many lights. When connected to “shore power” all 30 will work. So why LED’s, a fairly simple answer. They last way longer than regular / fluorescent bulbs, use way less power and create little to no heat (great for the summer). You can also get them in about 5 different colors so you could take a chandelier and put a few different colors and have a festive mood set. For me I would like to take the “lights” off of the 110v and dedicate them to all battery and recharge the batteries (2) via solar power.

One last note, do the research, sure it’s expensive to change over but you should get your money back in power bills in the first year…

Well I’ll stop writing and let you get back to what you were doing, thanks for stopping by.