tiring weekend

I assisted at the CAO work party this weekend. There was much work to be done, such as a swale dug, in addition to the normal season-ending closing activities. I also intended to complete the setup of the weather server. Time permitting, we could play with my old Lionel 027 train set.



I arrived Friday afternoon. Only Dietmar and Erich were up. I started to work on another set of solar garden lights. Tony had bought 8 more units from Canadian Tire. I converted these from white to super-bright red LEDs.

It proved cloudy Friday evening so there was no observing to be done.

As others arrived, we were able to sort out the sleeping arrangements. Dietmar let me have the library. Better for all concerned (given my snoring ability).

Saturday arrived pretty quickly. Tony reviewed the task list with all of us over breakfast. I took an interest in laying the patio stones at the downstairs door. A group of us sloughed away. It was tough going at the beginning but finished very rapidly. The finished result, with Magic Sand in place, looks really good.



I was feeling very tired in the evening. Still, I wanted to make some headway with the weather server computer. I removed the old Pentium tower from the GBO warm room and installed the new 320 GB hard disk. It appeared completely blank.

Very fortunately, I found a CD for Windows XP Pro. But it was unusable! Someone had let it touch a glued or taped surface... Sheesh. I cleaned the disk with rubbing alcohol but it did not lift the old glue. More power! We then tried a solvent... It worked! I installed XP onto the hard disk. However, when I rebooted, it was not recognised by the system. Weird.

After much consideration and various discussions with Gilles, Tom, Nick, Dave, and chas, I realised what I needed to do. I put the drive into the Hercules computer and formatted a couple of small 8 GB partitions. I then left the rest of the drive unformatted. Reinstalled in the old Andromeda computer and it recognised it. Reinstalled XP. It worked! I loaded the weather station software and started pulling data off the Davis Instruments console. Sweet! I let it run overnight.

Tom wandered in from outside and informed us the skies were clear. No one moved. Too exhausted from the day. He dug out his charts and chipped away at his Herschel list. Good on 'im!

Sunday morning I began configure the WeatherLink software to upload the data to our web site. It worked! I created a test page showing current conditions and historical data (for 1 week). Woo hoo. Now we will be ready to monitor conditions over the winter. We just need to figure out what we want to view...

I put the solar lights outside to charge up.

In the late morning, I began to wire a new electrical outlet—inside the supervisor's closet. Dave helped me finish off the wiring. Then we dropped the new 50' ethernet (CAT 6) cable from the closet into the basement and over to the tool room, to connect to the switch behind our router. Just long enough. Whew!

The moment of truth. I moved the Andromeda computer into the closet, plugged it into the AC, connected it to the network, connected it to the weather console (on the other side of the wall), and fired it up. Everything launched. I suddenly remembered I had not installed the WeatherLink icon into the Windows Startup folder. As I did that, people in the living room started protesting. The internet was suddenly not available. Oh oh. Looks like my new computer had unsettled the LAN. I shut it down.

When I restarted it, something bad happened: "Disk read error." WTF?! It was just working! I spent another hour fiddling with it to no avail. What a drag. All that work...

My theory is that the old computer's power supply or the mobo is failing.

Upset, I proposed to the various council members present that I'd like a new computer. They supported my request in principle. I seriously considered ordering one of the on-special TigerDirect barebone kit AMD multi-core diskless machines for $200! But then Tony said that Trev said that he'd donate his old computer. When I discussed this with Denis, he said his office would be getting rid of some old computers for cheap. Huh.

I told them I want said "new" computer within 2 weeks. I'll come back to the CAO then and finish the weather system setup.

The weekend concluded quietly with Trev, Tony, and me closing up. Tony reviewed various procedures with me in anticipation to me receiving my own keys and supervising over a future weekend. He did not surrender the keys—he still needs to properly identify them.