Quiet and suddenly wet

[altivo]

That was Friday. Doorcounts are down and so are interlibrary deliveries. To everyone's amusement, the Windows machine that I swapped for the old Linux station is making "mooing" noises. Not very loud, and only when the screensaver is running. I think it's a fan noise, and happens only if the fan accelerates due to increase CPU activity. I had installed BOINC on the thing to run when it was otherwise idle. I did a delayed detach of the projects and probably by Monday it will have run out of work. Then I'll shut down BOINC and if the noise goes away, uninstall it. When I had that model machine on my desk, I also gave up running BOINC on it for similar reasons. Oddly enough, another clone of this machine is running the software without complaint, but that may not be a permanent situation.

Ordered some small parts from Dell today. Their cases are all different, if you want to move a drive from one model to another you need different rails and cable lengths. Not expensive at $2 for each, but a nuisance. The irritation comes when I place the order and they refuse to recognize our tax exempt status. Then I have to go through the whole rigmarole of filing for it again, and ask them why they haven't kept it on file from a month or two back when I last ordered something. They always apologize and say it is now taken care of, but I know the next time I order anything it will come up again.

Sudden severe thunderstorm warning right at closing time. Drove through a couple of brief squalls to meet Gary and Rob at a restaurant in Woodstock for supper. Then it did the same thing as we were driving home, stopping immediately after we arrived. More thunderstorms predicted for tomorrow morning, right as Rob and Gary have a performance outdoors. I'll be at a guild meeting at least through the morning.

The last few times it rained, we've had a small brook running across the garage floor. While things were dry, Gary discovered a "mousehole" on the front deck. Water from the deck is draining into the mousehole, and thus into the inside of the garage wall, where it comes out onto the floor under the insulation and bookshelves. He patched the mousehole with a piece of aluminum sheeting, and wondrously, no water on the floor even when we just got a half inch of rain in about 15 minutes.

Comments

[moonhare]

Tuesday was one of our busiest days ever with over 700 patrons coming in between 10-8. We're not a large library- 2 circ, 1 ref, 1 children's, and a couple of supervisory types. 17 totes of returns and a large delivery complicated things as well. This was mostly due to the Monday holiday. You'd think we had been closed for a week.

I had Friday off but return today.

Those rail issues are why I keep my computer graveyard at work. I've been lucky enough to have what I need with the exception of a couple of new hard drives. The only pain right now is my monitor pile. I have all these damned dead Dell flatscreen monitors that I hate to pitch but haven't been able to find a reasonable repair facility for. I think they only need the equivalent of a 25 cent part (yay, China!).

[altivo]

The rails are a pain, no question about it, though at least the Dell ones are readily available. Some of their models came with extra rails either in the empty bays or screwed to the inside of the case. This time though I want to move a drive from a case that had extra rails to a new case that came without any spares. The newer case is a much better design for ventilation, though, and the large air channels mean it stays relatively quiet compared to earlier models.