Benj's Busy Blog

My PC, since January 2005, sometimes had problems during start up. It just won’t boot sometimes. I suspected it to be a Windows problem as most people would suspect, but I noticed the hanging, occurs even before it enters Window. During memory check, or detection of IDE devices, it was happening quite often already, but I still remember even before I left the Philippines in July 2004, this problem has already occurred but in rare occasions only. And just turn off the power, wait a few seconds and turn it back on until it boots.

Around February, random rebooting started to happen. Although some viruses that plant Trojans may be capable of doing this, I can say I had a pretty secure system. My anti-virus software and anti-spyware softwares were always up-to-date, as well as obtaining Windows updates. The rebooting was not related to any instance that I do, it happens at different situations. I did suspect a memory and video card problem, and I got new ones last February. It helped make my PC run faster, but the problems were still there, random rebooting and failed start ups.

Last April the rebooting started to occur more often as well as the startup hang. Aside from that, CMOS settings always reset. You may think it was the CMOS battery but I do not think because I do not think it can cause and hang and reboot problem, but I can do a CMOS setting reset. Things were getting worse. I knew the end was near and all I can suspect that can cause the problems are:

1. Too many devices, low watt power supply which was only 230W.
2. Motherboard problem. Defective Motherboard.
3. Defective Processor
4. Temperature Problem.
5. Another hardware component causing the problem.

Just to discover the real problem to narrow down my list would consume time and I was not happy just thinking about it. I felt burned out already without even starting. I felt bad the first day my PC died. Although my projects have lessened already, I still have one major one, The Graveyard Chef, more updates for AME. Thanks Amor for working on MarkProf, and for helping out with the billing of clients in the Philippines. I’m doing passive selling for design, development and SEO, but active selling in hosting and domain registration since design, development and SEO consumes so much time and that is something I lack right now. Hosting and Domain Registration may not earn as big but is a regular payment for a long time. Just have to keep them all happy and make sure the server is secure and running fine.

To catch up with work, I need to get my desktop running. I get to get into the mood in fixing it too. Thanks babe for just being online when I wanted you online.

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-Move out of Del Dios, Escondido last Saturday going to Rancho Penasquitos, San Diego. Unloaded all stuff, stuff was a mess. After everyday sorting, arranging, fixing… things are starting to be in order.

-My two desktops are not yet working because I haven’t put everything together yet. Doing work on my laptop, not that convenient, I can deal with it being less ergonomic, but I am not used to the contrast and brightness of my laptop, and no matter how I adjust it, it does not look like how it is on my desktop. If you are working with fine lines, they seem to disappear in the laptop if they are too fine and when you adjust image brightness and contrast, hue and saturation to make it look good in the laptop, it will appear dark on the desktop. I make websites and these should be pleasing the majority of people online whom most are using desktop, I need to get my desktop’s up and running soon. Got a few additional things for MarkProf and I need major development done on The Graveyard Chef

-The shower is fixed but can’t be used for two days. So I’ll be taking a bath in Ma and Pa’s bathroom for the next two days. The phones are not setup well; we had our phones transferred too and Ma and Pa’s was connected on the 14th. Mine supposed to be on the 16th. But mysteriously, mine is connected already, and Ma and Pa’s is not yet connected. I checked all the sockets and all other wires available to get a dial tone, none of them gave a dial tone. Which means the wire in the house is not connected well to the connection box outside. I called up SBC to verify if it is connected and they said it is. So I asked the apartment manager where the main phone terminal box is, and she pointed it to me. I checked it out and it was all spaghetti. Wires everywhere, no labeling what so ever, just a few numbers written with a pentel pen, others with a pencil, and it is not clear which one it was pointing too. I thought of getting my phone and some wires outside and start calling the number on my cellphone to figure out the right connection. But that is a trial and error thing, and every time I get an error, I may be disturbing another co-resident at the apartment. There are more than 20 units here and I don’t want to risk making 20 wrong numbers before I get the right wires. So I called up SBC to have a rewiring done for me.

-My DSL comes after 10 days, I have no Internet connection at home, so I opened up a free 1175 hour, 50 day AOL dial-up Internet connection CD so at least I can use something in the meantime.

-After being a sponsor for iBlog, the Philippines’ 1st Blogging Summit, I have been having few signups, few but better than none at all. For those who haven’t seen my promo, check it out here: http://iblog.ydswebsolution.com. Imagine this, P888 per year, a free domain name, 75 MB disk space, 2000 MB traffic, unlimited emails, tons of ready-made, easy to install software. Yes, only P888 per year. Check it out.

-More people checking out Teresa Heights. Thanks for the good feedback.

-A blog visitor named Carmela posted a comment, since he was searching for Joel Arcellana, a long time childhood, neighborhood friend whom we treated as cousins. She posted a comment since she was Joe’s college classmate. I called up Joel first to make sure I got the right number, left a voice mail and he called back later in the evening. It was funny since we never talked to each other ever since he left the Philippines which was… early 90′s I think. I said he sounds different and he said I sound different. Gave a few updates of each other and went back to work. He said he hasn’t called Benny ever since he came here. Well everyone is busy here. And Benny, if ever you get to read this… belated happy birthday, which was last May 11, along with Archie Reyes from Teresa, same day. Which reminds me that Laureano “Jhun” Umagtang’s birthday, a highschool classmate, is today!

-Bills, bills, bills, I got a lot. And I also have to monitor the people I bill, check if they paid already. Good thing Amor is there to help me follow up.

-Nice thing about being here at Rancho Penasquitos, I’m near Master Won Kee Min again at Champion Taekwondo Academy. Aside from that, there is a Brazilian Jiujutsu by some student of the Gracie’s. I can’t wait to get into the Gracie system and try it out. All I know is random concepts in my head on how the Gracie system is but has never experience the actual training.

-Now time to check my wifey’s blog, along with my daughters… Jamie and Ate Dawn. Got to check them out and see how they are all doing.

-Benj Arriola Blogging out…

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I’m sleepy but the Fantastico Scripts installer on my cPanel of my hosting server is still not working after I upgraded to cPanel version 10.

I’m still fixing everything…

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I was a long time MS Outlook user, not only for email, but for synchronizing with my Palm, where I started with a Palm m100, then cIII and now a Zire 71. I tried StarOffice, and this other one I forgot the name. I was not happy.

My Outlook crashed twice within a week. All emails were still saved, in a separate file, but all my message filter rules were erased. And from the looks of it, My data might be erased completely soon if another crash may occur.

So I decided maybe it is time to switch to Thunderbird for my email. And even if Mozilla made the Calendar Project and Sunbird, they are not yet synchronizable with a PDA. So for other PDA Sync functions, I’ll use the standard Palm Desktop and for emails, Thunderbird. Fast running, stable, happy.

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After thinking on my trip to the Philippines…

I thought of buying a laptop. So I can bring my work with me, and even work on the long plane trip. Be more productive on lost time.

But I really do not have much money, the plane ticket is so expensive. I even searched for the best deal I can get for plane tickets, regardless of airlines and stopovers and not landing at the Centennial airport in the Philippines which is way better than the other terminal in MNL.

So I searched online for a good laptop deal with some low monthly payment. My first decision was if I will get an iBook/Powerbook or a Windows Notebook. I’m totally sold out with the power of the Mac, but after thinking of it, I will settle for Windows and will just start of with a MacMini for my use at home. But I’ll buy the MacMini when I come back from the Philippines. The my other desktop will run Linux.

Now that I have decided to get a Windows laptop, where do I buy it? What brand? I first searched on the websites of HP, Dell and Sony.

Initially, just by looking at the displayed packages, Dell has nice deals, good prices, low monthly payments. But all three websites had a “Customize” option. You choose the parts you want and the site computes the price along with the monthly payments. It tells you anyway if you are putting things that are not compatible so you can fix your options.

After customizing, making the options as similar as I can on all three brands, guess what’s the result? Dell, the one with the cheapest advertised prices, suddenly became the most expensive among the three. And the best deal was on HP.

I chatted with John on his views of the matter… Although he is a Mac advocate, he said since I am a PC guy, buy a Windows laptop and not a Mac. Which I agree, and I’d just buy a MacMini when I get back to the US.

He shared his views on using credit. And low monthly payments on a long term makes you pay for something for so long, until your laptop is old already and there are new ones out and you are still paying for the old one you have. But he also knows my concern of building up my credit history, since here in the US, no credit history, it is like you are unknown when you will buy a house or car. So he suggested to ask them if using credit will really help my credit history.

I am still studying all my options. I’ll let you all know what I got in my next posting.

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My PC has been running on Homesite 5.1, Dreamweaver MX, Photoshop 7.0 that had problems and used Photoshop 5.0 instead. GoToPdf. But I do have Homesite 5.5, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Photoshop 8.0 CS and Adobe Acrobat Standard. But I just feel that I do not have time to upgrade everything since every time I am chasing a deadline.

But I just could not stand working in Photoshop 5.0 anymore, so I decided to work on the upgrades. I started uninstalling an installing. And during the whole process, I am just watching and waiting for every step to go on. And in the meantime, bloggin.

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Mama told me if I wanted to vacuum my car since the vacuum cleaner it there. I said nope, not today Mama, I just something to do. Which is cleaning up too. But cleaning up a computer. One of my computers was used for playing around. And a few things here and there were installed.

-Uninstalled all unnecessary softwares
-Ran AVG, Updated and Full System Scan
-Ran AD-Aware, Updated and Full System Scan
-Ran Spybot, Updated and Full System Scan
-Check msconfig, Disabled unknown start up items.
-Updated SpywareBlaster
-Check for unwanted files manually on the hard disk.
-Removed browser toolbars.
-Made Firefox the default browser.
-Removed homepage settings.

And this time, before I forget, I need to create a separate user profile and just delete it everytime and recreate it again so it is much easier.

Now back to work.

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Just a few quickies since I need to sleep already

- Secondary IDE Port of my Motherboard is not working well, it can’t detect anything even with a new IDE cable and new hard disk. And both IDEs are enables in the BIOS.

- Got a new ATI Radeon 9200SE 128 DDR 8X AGP so I can move my old Riva TNT 64MB to the other computer so it can handle higher resolutions and hopefully get to install Xadros Linux this time.

- Billing is starting to be time consuming without an automated system, but I don’t have enough time to create one either. I’ll probably look for a ready-made opensource alternative.

- Moving accounts from server Moray to server Quezon for server Morays retirement.

- US Based hosting clients like drukelly.com, meredithvictor.com, kabalikatnec.com are cool. ericma.com is moving, jasonfinleykent.com under negotiations. Persuading infatex.com. I see it growing. natassia-malthe.com was cool.

- Marcia and Amor has a meeting tomorrow, good luck, I hope you bring home the bacon. Marcia might be meeting with a company president, marketing manager and IT head.

- Work is a lot at Einstein, but my builds are nearly all done. Thanks to John who has been doing like 20% of the total number of sites. Without him, I’d be still working on that 20% more sites.

- My company had employees and partners, then partnerless, then employeeless, for cost cutting reasons. Now I am going back to having an employee. I hope this is a sign that business is doing good.

- New phone, new numbers. Landline still not working. Will check it out well tomorrow. Salary is near, need to save up for plane tickets if ever I get a vacation from work.

- Room still a mess

- Dot.ph domains still need to be transfered.

- Personal Vault is cool.

- Did not see the previous comet since San Diego had cloudy rainy nights.

- First time I saw a humminbird in action yesterday.

- Trillian 3 rocks

- Set aside my Mac Mini dreams since I need money to go back to the Philippines. If the company does not grant me my vacation, I’ll buy that Mac Mini to make me feel better.

- That’s it, I’m out… Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

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I came to the States with a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz, 256MB DDR with two 40GB Samsung Hard Disk Drives, One 1GB Seagate Hard Disk Drive, a 32x/12x/48x CD/CDRW/CDR CyberDrive all on top of a Elitegroup Mainboard. I also brought the following peripherals with me: A Kworld USB TV Box, LifeView TV Out adapter, iOmega Parallel Port Zip 100 drive, DVII Video Cam / 2 MegaPixel Cam and Webcam in one. I also brought my Olympus D-220L Digital Camera with defective flash, Palm Zire 7.1 PDA and Nokia 3650 Cellphone.

I was not able to bring my HP Deskjet 3325 Printer and Canon Scanner. Mama and Papa said they’ll buy me one and I said we could buy it next time, but they insisted to buy it now. Actually they look more excited in buying that I was, thanks so much Mama and Papa. When we got to Best Buy, which was an electronic appliances store, they had everything there. When we went to the printers, there were a lot of them. There were three main HP models, we got the mid-range priced one, it was an HP PhotoSmart 7760, way better than the printer I left in the Philippines. The printer I had in the Philippines I guess was obsolete already in the States. They also bought me a new scanner, a Microtek ScanMaker i320.

I started applying online to tons of job opening at monster.com and hotjobs.com. I came across one job posting that required me to fax and will not consider resumes sent by mail or email, nor phone inquiries are not accepted. So I ask Papa where could I fax? He said, Bili na tayo ng fax mahine! I said: “Hindi na po, isang padalahan lang ito…” Papa insisted, saying “kailangan mo yan!” and parang galit pa na ayaw kong bumili. This time we went to Circuit City since it was their clearance sale and we bought a Panasonic KX-FPG381. It had a wireless phone with it, with telephone answering machine functions.

One major difference I noticed is that in the Philippines, when you buy something, before leaving the store, you open it and test it if it works before buying it. In the State, you cannot test it, nor open the box. Opening the box already voids the warranty. In the Philippines, warranty is void only if you open the product itself. You can even leave the box behind if you want.

In the Philippines, I test my products before I leave the store because I never trust the product quality and always need to test it before I leave just to be sure everything is running fine. Here in the States it seems QC people do a good job and they are the ones that assure you everything is working, if ever something doesn’t work, it’s the QC people that get the reprimands I guess.

Yesterday, people in the company where Ma and Pa works were throwing away computers, as in really throwing them in the trash! Papa said he got two CPUs right away and Mama even told him aan’hin mo pa ‘yan? And Papa said that I am here back home, baka kailangan ko and Mama started to get some na rin!

Well it was a good decision. Papa got an old Dell PC running a Pentium II processor, still with the old EDO RAM. The processor was Philippine made in Intel’s plant in the Philippines. The other CPU was a Gateway 2000 Pentium III, no memory installed. It had a Quantum 6GB Hard Disk and Philippine made Toshiba CD ROM drive. It had an internal ATAPI/IDE iOmega Zip 100 Drive. The drive was on a Promise Technology Ultra33 Raid IDE Controller card.

Although the parts were not complete, I could get the best parts of each and put them together and build a computer for Mama and Papa and teach them using their email. It had an Internet Lucent Technologies 56K Modem and 3COM LAN Card.

After putting the good parts together, I was not able to test it yet since I have no SDRAM which was missing in the Gateway 2000 PC. The other PC was using EDO RAM while my PC was running on DDR, so there was really no way to test it, until we buy some SDRAM. Since there were two CD ROM drives, an LG and a Toshiba, I got the LG and fitted in my PC. Since I only had one CD/CDRW/CDR drive, having another CD is great for faster CD copying and my burner would not be worn out right away since I will use another player for playing alone. My external iOmega Zip drive was not functioning well it was great Papa got the CPUs, I could now still read my zip disk since I installed the internal iOmega Zip drive on my PC.

One problem I encountered though is my IDE ports were filled up on my motherboard. My primary IDE had a 40 GB hard disk as master and the CD/CDRW/CDR as slave. My secondary IDE port had another 40 GB hard disk as master and 1 GB hard disk as slave. I had no places to add the CD ROM drive and Internal Zip Drive. But it was also a good thing the Gateway 2000 CPU had a Promise Technology Raid IDE Controller card. Just what I needed to add ports.

I added the card and noticed my PC was booting on the added IDE ports. I checked the boot order settings and they were fine. Until I noticed the BIOS chip on the controller card. I removed it and it now booted fine. WinXP had no problems in installing the correct driver for it as well. I removed the 1GB Secondary Slave and made it the Tertiary Master (The primary IDE port of the controller card) and the Internal Zip Drive as Quaternary Master (The secondary IDE port of the controller card.). The Secondary slave now has the LG CD ROM Drive.

Since I also ran out of power connectors from the power supply, I got two connectors from the Dell computer, cut them and soldered them on another connector of my current power supply. Since my soldering iron came from the Philippines, it was a 200 to 220V, 60W soldering iron and it took quite a while to heat up and the lead gets cold easily because of the 110V voltage standard here in the States.

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