The one with the clean-up weekend.

I just bought a new motherboard to replace the bad one on Ayukawa. Ayukawa has been crashing ever since I bought it from Dennis a few years ago, but it’s to be expected for a computer that was dropped (which, incidentally, snapped the VGA port off the planar). It’s been a long time coming, but that’s mostly because I didn’t want to pay over $100 for a sysbd back then. I found one on eBay for $70, which is reasonable enough, so I clicked the Buy It Now button and went to click on the Pay Now button – wait a second, the button wasn’t there. I scrolled down through the auction and this ugly red text caught my eye.

We do not accept PayPal.

What the hell?! Who in their right mind doesn’t accept PayPal in this day and age on eBay? So, I e-mailed the person to validate this, and sure enough, they don’t accept it because they have a payment gateway on their store’s site. So, I made sure to write back my take on this.

I won't include this in your feedback, but off the record, I think that non-acceptance of PayPal is ludicrous. The majority of consumers, including myself, like to pay cash directly from our bank accounts as opposed to our credit cards, thus justifying the use of PayPal. Your exclusion of this service is very disappointing to me. Think of it as a store that doesn't accept debit cards.

In other words, go fornicate a hat, you jerk. Unfortunately, I still had to pay for the item because if I defaulted on payment, eBay would reduce my rating, and since my rating is so low, I can’t afford to do that. It doesn’t matter, I still need the sysbd anyway.

So, last weekend – huge clean-up! I cleaned up my room like crazy. Since it’s getting hot, now that it’s summer (or is it? – it was very cold this morning), it was time to clear out all my anime and game figures. Since they’re somewhat made of plastic, I didn’t want them warping from the extreme heat (no thanks to lack of aircon or central air). Unfortunately, I have more figures than I know what to do with, so I needed to find a way to keep them cool and dry in the basement, and without allowing Eugene’s friends to find/steal them. I had about seven storage bins in my side of the crawlspace, but they were all full of stuff, so I spent Saturday dragging them out and going through each one. I ended up recycling the majority of everything in them, with very minimal trash (GO! Global warming ファイト～). In the end, I only needed half a bin to store the essential keepsakes, so that left me with six bins, which only stored like 40% of my figures. At the time, though, I didn’t know how many bins I actually needed, so I went to Wal-Mart on Sunday and bought ten more bins. Anyway, that’s jumping ahead a little bit. I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my figures at the time, so I moved them all downstairs where it was a bit cooler and stacked them all up in the dining room. Then, I proceeded to reorganize everything else in my room. My bookshelves were in total disarray because of my figures and the influx of several J-Pop CDs and anime/gaming/idol magazines/DVDs. I should take pictures and post them up sometime (with my dying Sony Cyber-shot).

Anyway, on to Sunday, I did more of the same during the day – completed my bookshelves and cleaned up my room. After getting the ten bins and packing away the rest of my figures, I got to work on my server. Wait, I don’t think I mentioned that yet – I acquired an old P-III box several weeks ago (they were throwing them away at work) and installed Server 2003 on it. However, one day, I shut the thing down because of the increasing temperature in my room, but it wouldn’t stay powered on again after that. I suspected either the PSU or the sysbd was dying, so I acquired another one of the same box from work (they STILL haven’t thrown them away after all this time), swapped PSU’s, but nothing changed. I ended up swapping over the SCSI HDDs, NIC, and RAID card, and that nipped the problem. I should probably grab another box from work to use as spare parts. Anyway, I got it all set up, moved down to the basement on a KVM with Eugene’s PC, and plugged into a gigabit switch I bought on Friday, but I forgot to configure the RAID. I might have to reinstall everything, which isn’t a big deal, really, since I didn’t invest a lot of time on it (honestly, I didn’t). I’m currently looking at Gigabit-SATA-RAID-BYOD-NAS boxes to use as central storage for my private network, and I found a suitable one that balances both performance and reliability, and looks good – the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. It has four hot swappable bays, a decent web interface, average pricing of around $700 (if you shop on eBay), and stellar design. I want to buy it now, but I need to save money for next month’s trip to Winnipeg (Transformers premiere week), plus I need enough money to buy all the drives. I’m still contemplating if I want four 750 GB HDDs to get 2.25 TB or four 1 TB HDDs to get 3 TB. I also need to think about backup options, especially since the box supports one-touch backups to USB 2.0. At the same time, I could also build my own box and integrate SATA backups… who knows which direction I’ll take? Anyway, I just need to get my server up and running, then I’ll decide.

The WP’s delivery driver quit last week, so I had to take care of all the deliveries starting Friday evening. It sucks, but it feels good to have extra cash in my wallet.

Wow, this was a larger entry than I expected. I’d better stop.

以上。。。であります。