Webb Family Blog

I've just upgraded the software of this website.  I'm hoping that for the most part, you don't notice anything.  I believe I set everything back the way it was before the upgrade, but I'm not 100% positive that I have.  You may wonder then WHAT was upgraded then.  Well… to be honest, I'm not exactly sure myself.  I upgraded from WordPress 2.0.1 to 2.0.4.  I had try'd many times to upgrade earlier when it was an upgrade to 2.0.3, but kept on failing.  I tried following the "simple" instructions.  It finally dawned on me that I needed to do several extra steps to upgrade.  I took those extra steps and it appears I've been successful.  Apparently, there were some security flaws and a few bugs that have been worked out since the inital version I had installed.  I never figured those old flaws out.

As I wrote about a while ago, I was hoping to get on-board in the trial study for a new EvapoTransporation sprinkler control system.  Well, today it was installed.  It is pretty cool, although not QUITE as complex as I originally was lead to believe.  The installer arrived in the early afternoon.  The first thing he did was to install the weather station.  We found the best mounting spot, which also happened to be the most convenient.  Then the controller was installed.  In the process of taking the old controller off, he noticed something odd.  He saw that there was both a yellow wire and a red wire attached to "Zone 2".  When he said this, I then thought… "You know… I HAVE found it odd that when Zone 2 goes, there is two DIFFERENT lawns that water… a ways apart from each other.  They are both in the front, but it seems odd that they go off together."  I then walked out to the valves and wanted to see what was beeing done with the yellow and red wires out there.  That is when I realized… my current controller was a 6 zone controller, but I have 7 valves.  I saw that on the valve end of the wires, that the yellow and black were bundled together again, with the wires to the solenoids of two different valves.  Since the new controller can do many zones… up to 16… we decided we may as well split them back up.  Once the system was all connected, he tried to test it.  The controller has a test feature that detects the resistance in each circuit.  It was showing that all circuits are open, a bad thing, meaning that none of the valve solenoids were getting a signal from the controller.  He was initially thinking that there must be something wrong with my valves.  I told him that wasn't very likely.  I told him that the most likely problem was with the "Common" wire… the white wire that ALL the valves connect to.  Each valve solenoid has two wires coming off it.  One connects to a colored wire and the other gets bundled with one wire from every other valve and to the white wire.  He opened the box back up and noticed that when he was working with it earlier, he had made a splice with the white wire and the splice had come apart.  He put it back together and tried the test again.  Again, it didn't work.  Same error.  He again said it was a problem with my wires and I again told him it HAD to be with the common.  He opened it up one last time and found… he had connected the common to the wrong location.  Once this was rectified, everything worked great.  We programmed the controller, which requires a lot more data then a standard controller. For each zone, we had to tell it what type of plant was on the zone, I believe the choices were, shrub, annuals, tree, cold weather turf or hot weather turf.  It then asked if it were a drip, rotator, or a spray head.  It also asked if there was a slope to the zone and if so, to what degree.  It asked for my ZIP code (so it would know the latitude and longitude.  All this data is combined with the weather station's humidity, temperature, wind and rain sensors.  We told it what days each zone should be watered and an approximate duration for each zone.  It may take a week or so for it to gather weather patterns and I'll keep an eye on the different areas.  I can go in and say that maybe zone 1 isn't getting enough water, or maybe too much.  I can tell it to increase or decrease the watering, per zone.  It will be a trial and error situation for a little while, but eventually, it will be a complete forget about it system.  By the time the trial study is over, I shouldn't ever have to think about changing any programming.  No need to make changes in the winter, or turn it off during the winter.  It will probably not work during the winter, but IF we should have a dry spell, it may water.  I won't even have to think about it.  That will be very nice.

As you may have read in previous blog entries, starting around December, I’ve made several visits to the dentist and as you can tell, I have an aversion to going to the dentist. It is not a personal thing, I just start to panic when I can’t swallow when I want to swallow. I don’t like the fact that I’m not in control. Anyways, our dental coverage has been through Kellie’s work at Kaiser… Delta Dental. It has a yearly cap of $1000. With all the work already done, we’ve surpassed that amount by $1000 or so. Due to not understanding what I could have had, I had not applied for dental insurance through my own job. Open Enrollment occurs in July for us, so this time around, I chose a dental plan… the best possible plan, through Aetna. It covers $2000 a year. I had several things that NEEDED to be done to my teeth, but have had to put them on hold… until this past weekend. I started having pain to the right-side lower wisdom tooth. I previously had one wisdom tooth… the lower left removed due to a fracture. It LOOKED like I had a crack in the wisdom tooth in question and every time I ate anything hard, like tortilla chips, they would wedge in the tooth and cause a great deal of pain. I decided that, like it or not, I’d have to see the dentist. While my Aetna plan allows me the same coverage whether or not the dentist was an “in plan” provider, they couldn’t guarantee that rates would be based on pre-negotiated price for procedures. The dentist I had been seeing was a Delta Dental, but not Aetna provider. He was also at the south end of Citrus Heights. I decided to look for a new dentist that takes BOTH plans and is in Roseville. I finally found one. Granted it is in the south side of Roseville, near the Citrus Heights border, but it is half as far. This new place is River City Dental. I called on Monday and they got me in this morning (the next day). After the initial paperwork, they brought me in for x-rays. I was immediately impressed… As everyone knows, I’m a technology geek. The x-rays were digital. I could instantly see the x-rays on a computer screen in the room as they were taken. They then directed me to the exam chair. Along with the standard implements of torture that you see in a traditional dentists office, they had a 15” LCD computer monitor. There was a wireless keyboard and trackball device on the counter nearby. They brought up the x-rays on this monitor. It was obvious that they ran Windows XP. The screen saver was an informational slide show and advertisement for cosmetic procedures available. I felt the dentist was very friendly. He had a strong accent, which I couldn’t place. His last name is Gogani. I later saw that he graduated from the dental school at the University of Gothenburg… Gothenburg, Sweden. I’m not sure if that is where he is from or not. Anyway, he mentioned that there was a large cavity in the wisdom tooth in question, and that extraction was the best treatment, as it is also a “Mesioangular impaction.” If you use the “Universal Numbering System”, the tooth in question is #32. He suggested that #1 and #16 also be removed; #17 was the one previously removed. In addition to this, he mentioned that #18 and #30 needed a filling and #31, which had a previous filling, had some decay underneath this amalgam filling. He said that a composite resin filling would be better/safer for #18 and #30. For #31, he felt that the amalgam should be removed and drill out the decay, then fit for an inlay. He said this is a slightly cheaper, easier and less painful treatment rather than a root canal and crown. As the canals are currently not affected, he justified it the best route of action. I agreed to all this. There was one other suggestion,but unfortunately, it was not covered by insurance. He suggested Lumineers for #8 and #9, the front upper two teeth. They would cover the chips in the teeth and prevent further chipping. They would make my teeth LOOK better, but at $1100 EACH ($2200 for both, which would have to be done), we don’t have that much laying around for something rather cosmetic. The inlays were not covered either by insurance, so that cost around $550 out-of-pocket. Before the doctor got to work, Kellie went home and grabbed my iPod Nano for me. It helped to drown out the sound of the drill during the work. I had to keep a finger on the dial to turn the volume up full-blast during the drilling, but down low after he was finished each time. This all started around 10AM. By 1:45PM, they had done the fillings, drilled out the decay under #31, took an impression and placed a temporary inlay and after a major ordeal, #32 was finally out. Dr. Gogani didn’t want to put me through any more torture today, so he said they’d remove #1 and #17 when I return for the placement of the permanent inlay next month.

We stopped by the Kaiser pharmacy to pick up some Vicodin. At the time of picking it up, my face was swollen and numb. Shortly after arriving home, my mouth was extremely painful. I was also very hungry. It hurt too much to eat anything though. I took some Vicodin and later some ibuprofen. I made some Jell-O and later Kellie and I went out to Safeway to pick up some more soft foods. I’ve kind of lounged around the rest of the day. I’m about to go to bed now.

Wow… Sorry I haven’t written anything for a while.  It’s been like 3 weeks since I posted anything here.  It’s not like nothing has happened during this period, I just never got around to posting anything.

The biggest event was probably our first wedding anniversary and my birthday on July 10.  Kellie had to work, but thankfully I had the day off.  While Kellie was at work, I got my hair cut and bought some flowers.  Before getting home, I stopped by The Melting Pot, to drop the flowers off for dinner.  I had made reservations a month earlier and let them know it was for my birthday and our wedding anniversary.  Our reservation was for 6:30PM.  When we showed up, they took us to a very small secluded table.  A table most people probably never see or even know about.  It was kind of dark, except for a fiber-optic star field above and a single accent light.  It was expensive, but it was good. 

The day before my birthday, we had a small party at the Weiferts with the grandparents and Kellie’s cousin.  It was nice.  I picked out the cake… a 3-layer white cake with coconut butter-cream frosting… it was yummy.  We got "his" and "hers" hammers… a framing hammer and a general purpose claw hammer.  They are very nice quality; definitely NOT something to be ashamed of on a job site.  I also got some foldable saw horses for working on stuff around the house.  It’s amazing how owning a home changes your perspective on what kind of present is cool.  Phil knows much of what I need, since he’s the one I borrow from most often… until I buy my own.

Warning: The rest of this post contains geek talk. 

This weekend I created a crisis for myself.  I decided I wanted to play with Linux again.  This has been a passing fad with me.  Linux has a huge stair-stepped learning curve, by no means smooth.  Despite how many nerds have mentioned that Linux is "easy" and is better than Windows, it remains a nerd’s operating system due to technical issues.  In the past, I’ve installed Linux and have gotten frustrated and gave up when I couldn’t do some simple tasks.  I get the courage to try again every year or so.  For those that didn’t follow the Linux link to the Wiki, Linux is credited to Linus Torvalds, who came up with an open-source operating system very similar to UNIX.  As it is open-source, people can use and tweak it at will.  Groups package their own "flavors" called distributions. I’ve tried several distributions, and I’ve found SuSE to be one of the prettiest.  The last distribution I used was Fedora, a take-off of Red Hat. 

It is possible to have several operating systems co-exist on the same computer.  It takes a boot loader and either extra hard drives or partitioning of a hard drive.  Partitioning allows a single hard drive to be viewed as multiple drives by the computer.  For example, you have a 250GB hard drive.  You can break that up into roughly two 125GB hard drives (these numbers aren’t exact, but close).  They can be formatted in different file formats.  Microsoft Windows XP currently uses NTFS, while older versions used FAT32 or FAT16.  There have been many formats for Linux as well, like ext2, ext3, ReiserFS and swap.  The last one, swap, is a special format that basically acts as virtual RAM.  It is the cheap way of getting many programs to work at the same time when you don’t have enough RAM.  It caches RAM to a special section on the hard drive.  You can install multiple Windows operating systems and/or Linux operating systems.  The boot loader allows you to choose which one you want to use when you turn the computer on.  Previous to this weekend, I had 2 partitions on my main hard drive.  The first partition was pretty large, while the second was small.  I had Windows XP Pro on both, but primarily ran the second partition.  I shrunk the first partition by about 40GB to make room for Linux.  I then installed openSuSE 10.1.  It installed it’s boot loader, GRUB.  It takes precedence over Window’s boot loader.  If you choose "Windows" from GRUB, it brings up Window’s own boot loader.  Linux installed well, but I could not boot into the Windows XP that I normally used.  It kept giving me an error that "<WINDOWS OS>/Windows/system32/hal.dll" was missing.  I could access that partition when booting into another operating system, and could verify that it DID in fact exist.  I was puzzled.  I couldn’t figure out how to boot into my old system.  I tried multiple things to try to get it to boot to no avail.  I had a feeling that the problem lay with Window’s boot loader, but I didn’t understand why.  The data for the boot loader is in the root directory in a file called "boot.ini".  It looked like the following…

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional 2" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Trying to figure out what this meant, I had assumed that this referred to the first Windows partition and the second windows partition.  As you recall though, I mentioned that I reduced the FIRST partition, and created a new partition.  This new partition resided BETWEEN the first partition and the other partition.  It came to me last night in a brainstorm… edit this file and replace the number 2 with a 3.  BINGO!  That was all there was to it.  I spent days and hours working on this and it popped into my head at a random thought.  Now, my Windows is operating as it always has AND I now have OpenSuSE too.

OpenSuSE, as I earlier mentioned, is a pretty OS.  I’ve had a much easier time getting things to work.  One of the areas I’ve had problems in the past with are things like the printer.  This time, it automatically recognized the printer and installed it.  It also recognized the scanner and installed it.  Linux has come a long way in simplifying integration with other computers.  I was happy that I was able to get it set up to allow me to connect from my laptop to the desktop and share the use of the printer.  The printer is physically connected to the desktop.  OpenSuSE was able to share it with the laptop.  When ever I’m at home on my laptop and want to print, I just tell it to print to the printer named: "stylusphotor200", which is attached to the desktop.  It works perfectly.   

I’m still having SOME issues with Linux.  It’s more complicated adding new programs.  In Windows, you often double click on a .EXE or .MSI program and it goes though an install process.  All the parts that are needed to install the program are included… often into one file.  With Linux, they’ve tried to simplify installations using an installer program called RPM.  It is supposed to automate everything, but most programs require all sorts of dependant libraries that are not included.  If you don’t already have them installed, it fails and you have to find the library that is missing, which is sometimes extremely difficult.  Most of the time, your RPM is distribution and often even distribution version dependant.  The bottom line is that it’s more difficult.  I’m learning and hoping to become much more of an expert at it.