Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

A couple of months ago when I built this new computer system for under a $1,000, I splurged and bought myself one of those ergonomic keyboards because, well, because my hands hurt quite a bit of the time. Why else would anyone get one of those?

I liked it initially but after a couple of months trying to get used to it I finally switched back to the old Dell QuitKey, which isn’t so quiet anymore but still has a nice tactile feel to it. I could have eventually gotten used to the funny Qwerty part of the ergo keyboard, but the function keys and Home/End/Insert/Del keys were just too dysfunctional.

For example the F9 key was in the middle of a group of keys instead of on the left end of a group. Now that may not seem like much if you never use those keys but I happen to use the F9 key about a thousand times a day to refresh database views and have used it thus for over a decade. You think it’s hard to quit smoking? Well boy howdy let me tell you.

Same with he navigation keys. I am a primarily a keypad editor. It’s highly efficient. (Yes, I go way back.) Changing the Home/End/Insert/Del keys is like rearranging the furniture in a blind person’s apartment.

The pisser is that now, after switching back to the old style keyboard, I keep hitting the F10 key instead of the F9 key. Aaarrrgh!

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I can’t believe it is already Sunday. Where does the time go?

Quick update on the computer order

Sure enough, as suspected the ZipZoomFly delivery didn’t make it on Friday. ZZF had hands down the best overall apples-to-apples prices and offered free standard ground shipping on most products. If you are not in any particular hurry ZZF is a great deal. But I paid extra for 2nd day delivery and a week is not satisfactory.

Will I use them again, of course. Will their performance on express delivery affect my buying decisions on items needed in a rush? Of course. Maybe up to 15%.

On the Linux box:

There seems to be a major malfunction with this beeyotch. I installed a different power supply, supposedly known to be in working order, and still Suse wont turn on. I tried rubbing her power button just right and nary a flicker.

Shoot. This is a conundrum because now I have a decision fork, three pronged in this case.

1. Is the button switch bad? How often does that happen? Not too often I suspect. I don’t recall ever having a bad button switch service call.
2. Is the motherboard fried? There are decent odds that if the power supplied fried, the motherboard could be fried. Usually the power supply sacrifices itself to save the computer, but that is not always the case. Bad power conditions over the long term can stress every component in a system and the final fatal surge or spike can have multiple casualties.
3. Did I replace a bad power supply with a bad power supply? With used parts from a storage bin you never know.

This is a relatively low-end machine. A 1GHz Intel Celeron circa 2002 built on the cheap for strictly utilitarian purposes it was nothing to write home about in 2002. I don’t know if I want to spend too much more time jacking around with it. I can order a 2 GHz P4 chip with motherboard and a new power supply for a hundred bucks. Probably less.

iPod/iTunes support.

Yesterday I learned that to get the most enjoyment from an iPod you have to a better PC than a Dell Dimension 500L.

I stick the biggest dog in TheGarage’s PC inventory in the house for the kids to use. Up until recently it was all they needed since Nicktoon and Disney Channel websites and Reader Rabbit games were not big resource hounds. Can’t say the same for Apple’s iTunes.

I had an urgent request come in for software support: Could I download and install the latest iTunes so my daughter can buy videos from iStore? Sure I can.

No biggie, took about ten minutes and it was free. Except that now the old Dell can’t run iTunes and play the video. With a quick glance I noticed the on-board graphics was being used and taking pity I decide to give Cool-Kidz, the computer name, a quick upgrade that will hopefully be good enough to allow some semblance of the video to play. I figured an old Radeon 7000 64 Meg card ought to take quite a load off the processor and RAM.

No good deed goes unpunished.

The drivers I had for the ATI Radeon wouldn’t work because at some point Cool-Kidz was updated DirectX to version 9, a natural occurence of loading new software. The drivers I had checked the system for DirectX8 and could not recognize the newer DirectX 9, even though backwards compatibility is one of the hallmarks of DirectX. I have to download a 40 meg package to get the drivers I need.

In the end, iTunes running on the Dell with a 64 meg Radeon graphics card still wont play the video purchased from iStore. Of course you can only play video purchased from iStore on iTunes, I think, or an iPod with video, which we don’t have. We have an iPod Nano.

Interesting how a simple toy can drive big box consumer electronic purchases.

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Thursday’s wrap

After I started looking into the Dell PowerEdge upgrade costs it all started to become very familiar. I had already done this. The conclusion from previous research suddenly hit me. The cheapest way to upgrade the Dell PowerEdge 6300/400 from dual Xeon 400s to quad 550s is to buy this for $189.95. Ridiculous.

On the Suse Linux box the news is not so good. All the extra memory I have laying around is DDR and the Linux box uses the older SDRAM. It has 256MB installed and that is abit thin for any kind of real work, but I only use it as a trainer/demo. The onboard video was being used so I grabbed an old Riva 128 video card off the shelf and popped it in. That will save some CPU clocks and 8MB of precious RAM.

I never got to test it. I think the Power supply is fried. Luckily I have a few power supplies laying around. I may have to repurpose this machine and find something a bit more capable for my Linux sandbox.

Online for today

Rebench the Suse Linux machine and replace power supply, if needed, which I am fairly certain it does. Given that it would not turn on it is either the power supply or the little wire on the front power button was knocked loose when I was fiddling around with the RAM sticks.

Hopefully my ZipZoomFly order containing the bulk of my new workstation components will arrive today but I am not so optimistic. If the order does arrive, I will be assembling the pieces into a greater whole.

I ordered all the new computer stuff this past Monday from two vendors: TigerDirect and ZipZoomFly. All I ordered from TigerDirect was the Natural Keyboard and the GeForce video card and that package arrived Wednesday. Impressive. I had been thinking Thursday delivery would be good and Friday would be satisfactory. Monday, not so satisfactory. I paid about $80 total for 2nd day delivery on both orders. TigerDirect obviously takes their 2nd day a little more seriously than ZipZoomFly.

I also have a lot of research to do in support of the report I have been working on. Maybe I will share some of that if any of it turns out to be interesting.

Of course my dead workstation is now the second most powerful machine I have in inventory. The motherboard and processor work fine so I can build around it. I think the power supply may be a little weak but luckily I have a few power supplies laying around. Perhaps it will be the new Linux sandbox?

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We left off yesterday with a recycled workstation set up for temporary purposes until I get the new $1,000 Core 2 Duo unit assembled and put into service. I installed the hard drives from the dead PC into the temp PC so I already have access to all my non-server based data exactly as it was before. More importantly, the temp PC will allow me to get off this old ThinkPad.

I quickly setup Office 2000, FireFox, and AdAware on the temp PC from an install directory accessed over the high-speed network here in TheGarage. Took about ten minutes. Now all I have to do is drag the entire “My Documents” structure from the old harddrive and drop it into the “My Documents” folder on the Temp PC’s C drive and it’s like nothing ever happened.

Here is a word of caution, or is it more of a tip. If you ever use this technique you might find that you can’t access the “My Documents” folder on the old hard drive after it is attached to a new WinXP installation. Even if the same user name is used, the actual security is based on a user object from another machine and wont work. This problem occurs on NTSF formatted drives where special permissions were applied to a folder, e.g., My Documents, by the owner.

In the case where the other machine is dead making it impossible to log in from the other computer to reset the permissions, another solution is needed. Even the administrator can’t change permissions on a folder with special permissions denying access to everyone; however, the administrator can take ownership of the folder and then reset permissions. Kinda picky, isn’t it? But there ya go. Choose Safe Mode at boot up and login as the Administrator to have complete control over the computer.

Today I am going to take a quick look at upgrading the PowerEdge 6300 to make it a bit more substantial in the processing power dept. I think the geriatric server can get me to where I want to get in the near term. Temporarily, in other words.

Then I have some report writing to do but I am also going to see about getting my Linux box on the bench. The Linux PC is operational but has been ailing a bit. I think I scavenged the RAM from it for something else. I have some extra RAM now so I’m going to pop it in and see if Suse doesn’t perk up a bit.

I’ll post the PowerEdge and Linux hardware configurations later.

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In my last entry on the $1,000 workstation we built a brand spanking new general purpose workstation that will be able slice through productivity apps, IDE applications (integrated development environments, like eclipse) and video editing like a hot knife through butter.

I thought since I will be pre occupied with this project for several days it would be fun to continue with a few more entries outlining the process as I go forward. The next step is to break down the dead workstation and slam the hard drives into one of the old PC’s I have laying around so I can access and move my data.

When I get my old workstation tore down I’ll post the parts list to give an idea of the magnitude of this upgrade.

OKAY, I CLEARED THE BENCH. FOLLOWING IS the configuration I had been trudging along with for about the past five years.

I built the above, now deceased rig almost five years ago as a temporary, general purpose workstation, just like the $1,000 configuration I built the other day. It probably cost about $1,000 when it was built. Stuff happened and I never got around to building the dream machine I wanted and my temporary workstation turned out to be just my workstation. Which in a way is good because everything now is so much better and so much cheaper it’s ridiculous. I don’t even think in terms of a dream workstation any more. I just built it for $1,000. Spend another $750 and it’d be surreal.

No, no more lofty thoughts of stable, high-performing ergonomic PC workstations. Now I dream of internet application servers, unlimited bandwidth, and high-tech media production systems.

So now I’ve gutted my semi faithful companion, what to do with the remains? Ahh, the donor card is signed.

The other month ago, my brother dropped two PC’s that were a bit long in the tooth over to my house. I had helped him restore these machines to working order on an occasion or two in the past but when you let kids of any age have unrestricted access to your computers and the internet your stuff will become fubar very quickly. No exceptions to this.

He said he had given up hope on fixing them and did I want them. Sure.

Eventually I got around to putting them on the bench, gave them life and began the diagnosing process. Ahhh. Windows 98 on both machines. I formatted the drives and loaded Win XP Pro and both machines work fine. Too bad they can’t all be like that. Funny, huh? Little bro kinda frowned when I told him. Which made it even kinda funnier.

He said to me, “Oh yeah, cool I’ll swing by and pick them up.”

Having forseen this tact I said, “Okay, bring your checkbook, there’s a service bill owing.”

Thanks to my brother I have onw low-end and one middle-to-low-end PC sitting around with nothing to do. Waiting. Waiting for something to do. So I grabbed this one:

I marked with an asterisk where I scavenged from the dead PC to the new temporary PC. Now here is what sucks. The machine I just put into temporary service has everything the one that just died had plus an extra 40 gig hard drive storage and a pristine WinXP installation. Not only that it’s much peppier than the dead one was. I could live with this machine–temporarily.

Buggers. That’s negative thinking. The new machine is going to be great. With it I will be able to dip my toes into video casting, live streaming and such. And I have some pretty big toes.

Also on the project list I have a Dell PowerEdge 6300 server with dual Intel Xeon processors and Raid 5 disk array that I use as my primary web server. A reader donated it to the cause. He had it laying around. It didn’t work. Did I want it? Sure.

It took me a couple of days to sort this beast out but since I could not detect any hardware malfunctions I downloaded the latest drivers for every component and flashed the BIOS with the latest revision. MS Server 3000 was installed but since I didn’t have admin authoritry it was useless so I reformatted the boot partition and put a fresh install of Windows NT 4, service pack 297. NT4 is a solid OS. Rarely does this machine need attention.

The Dell 6300 limps along at the ridiculously slow speed of 400 mHz but the Intel Xeon processors are workhorses and I have two working together. Tomorrow I am going to find out what it will take and how much will it cost to beef the bad boy up a tad. I’ll have to research the motherboard specs to determine the fastest processor supported then go shopping. I think I can go from the current 450 mHz to 1,000 mHz. A significant boost I think.

The big question is the cost. The ASUS P5B Deluxe mobo I just bought formy new workstation supports RAID and certainly a Core 2 Duo can give a couple of 1 gHz Xeon P2 processors a run for their money. Thus, the processor upgrade will have to come in less than five or six hundred bucks to be cost efficient.

But that’s tomorrow…

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For the third year in a row my personal workstation has gone on the fritz with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) problems. Same symptoms, same time of year. I had to break out the old Thinkpad and hook up the wireless to write this post.

I think the problems coincide with the cold weather. The portable heaters come out, TheGarage office is like a meat locker, and static electicity is high. It’s as good a guess as any.

Fudge. This year I am not even going to try to fix the POS. I am going to spend money. Coming soon, a new workstation for me.

HP/Compaq, Dell/Alienware, IBM/Lenovo, Gateway/eMachines, Sony, ect can go to hell with their mass market pieces of high margin crap. I am building from scratch. I am finalizing my hardware list today and will post the components later. The target is a high performance, general purpose, Core 2 Duo machine for under $1,000. Maybe $1,200.

Is it doable? We will see.

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Okay, I’ve been busy and then out of town for the past several days. I’ll try to get to the bottom of the sidebar issue and maybe even the calendar.

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As anyone who has been by in the last couple days already knows, I have hosed my site royaly. My apologies. Hopefully we will be returning to our regularly scheduled programming very soon.

As you can see, there is no sidebar. It took me a while but I narrowed the problem to that chunk of code. Removing the sideblocks allows the site to display but now I have to narrow down within the sideblocks to find the actual bit of code that’s trashing everything.

Originally the server didn’t actually crash, it was just non-responsive because my hard drive filled up due to my log files growing to big, which, yes, has happened before. After the last time I enabled a cleanup agent to purge the log but it failed to run because the log had gotten to big. Go figure.

All I needed to do was clean up the logs and everything would have been back to normal, but nooooo. I decided it would be a good time to update my server to the latest version, which I need to do from time to time because this whole operation is basically a sandbox; a playground where I keep my skills honed. So as soon as I bring up the new server, I start getting the 500 error. So I switch to my backup server, which I use for mail but it can serve the web site too if needed, and I’ll be damned if it weren’t trashed too. The backup server would not allow anonymous connections. The database wasn’t denying the connection, the server was. Damn.

There are only a couple of switchs to throw in order to allow anonymous HTTP connections over port 80. No matter what, the server just would not allow anyone who had not authenticated to access the server. If I entered a user name and password, no problem. No password, no access. I’ll have to tackle that one later. I switched back to my primary server–the one I had upraded–and meticulously narrowed the problem down to the sideblocks. Shouldn’t be too hard to find from there; it will probably be something I added recently or that had been broken since the last event with the spam.

Update - Hell, I think I may like the site better without the side bar.

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I guess there are one or two people out there who have wondered what the hell happened to me. I don’t usually write about my personal life on here but I’ll make an exception this time. My father fell ill last year and has been sick off and on over the months. This August some lumps showed up on cat scans and efforts to biopsy a mass in his lungs were unsuccessful. A few days prior to a second attempt to biopsy the lung I was called to meet my parents at the emergency room; my dad was in a bad way and it turned out he had a large tumor at the base of his brain on the spinal stem. Whatever they were trying to look at in his lung had spread throughout his body, pretty much putting him in the terminal category. That was about four weeks ago.

Neurosurgery was scheduled and performed pretty quick and was successful. Unfortunately due to my father’s weak condition chemotherapy was not a viable option. As he was beginnning to get up and about after the surgery he suddenly developed severe difficulty breathing and it was off to the emergency room again. The mass in his lung had doubled in size in just three weeks and was cutting off air flow to the lungs. There were also many smaller spots thoughout his lungs and liver.

The plan was to treat the tumor blocking the airway with radiation in order to shrink it just as a means to provide a little more bit of qualiity time. Unfortunately, again, the cancer was enmeshed with the aorta and shrinking it would likely cause the aorta to rupture resulting in instant death. Thus, since this past Thursday dad has been in hospice care at his home, which is where he is the happiest. He dozed off Saturday afternoon and has yet to wake up and probably wont. He is expected to pass this evening or tomorrow, but knowing my dad he will wait till Wednesday just to prove them wrong.

The next post will be an obit and after that probably more photography than writing as I try to regain my bearings.

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I accidently let a couple of my domains expire, including EI, and was in e-payment hell for two days. Geez Louise. After the domain service finally got onto the problem, it was fixed with no more dialog. But it sure would have been nice if the electroinc payment would have worked the first time and I would not have had to dick around with it for two days.

C’est la vie. My screw up. In the meantime, my mail and stuff may be kluged for the near future since my host deletes all DNS records immediately upon expiration. Fuckers. That’s not the kind of 4-1-1 I keep handy in the brain. I have to add a couple of A records and MX records for three domains, including my mail domain, which didn’t expire. Weird.

Anyway…

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Does your wire installation look like this…

…or does it look more like the rig in the very last photo on this page about the Best Dressed Systems contest. If you’re in to that kind of thing, check it out. Their winners had some great racks .

If I feel like it I’ll clean my bench off a little a take a shot of my wiring rack. It’s pretty small-scale, but I’d say it is somewhere in between the best and worst. I’ve seen many examples of the worst, though.

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JD’s post this morning got a legitimate, out loud chuckle.

I need to think of some funny stuff to write about because the political stuff is so tired. Seems I have nothing left to say about it that I have not already said, ad infinitum. Watching these politicians on television play their games makes me have hateful thoughts. The same old bullshit over and over. I think we all know where we stand. We need to crap or get off the pot. Or, in this case, it is going to be crap or else get crapped on.

But I can’t think of nothing funny right now.

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The term “free time” seems innocuous, but it is really a very complex idea if you think about it for a while. Actually, I do not believe there is such a thing as “free time” and the term is frequently misused. The belief that there is such a thing as free time likely induces people to make bad decisions regarding the use of such time. All time is bought and paid for in some way or another so it makes sense to maximize the investment whenever possible.

Having said that, I think that sometime next week I will be having some time free up (a better, more accurate turn of phrase, I think) and will consequently be getting back into the steady blogging routine. Of course that means I will once again be out of work until the next “great opportunity” comes along. Ah, the bane of contract work.

There is still about six weeks until wildlife photography will begin to preoccupy my time and I think during that lull I will be dumping the Blogsphere platform that I have been using to publish this blog. I am tired of all the little peeves that make it a sub-par product.

I know it’s an OpenSource product and the rejoinder to my gripe is usually that one should fix what they don’t like and not complain about “free software”, another relative term, for sure.

The problem with that approach is that every time the OpenNTF people have a new release, all my little changes have to be managed so that the new changes don’t override my modifications, or that the preservation of my modifications don’t render the entire product unusable. Managing two code bases for one application is very doable but is not a project on which I want to continue to spend my free time.

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We are taking the kids to Galveston to stay at Moody Gardens and visit the Schlitterbahn. I am having difficulty posting remotely to this blog but I have it working on the photo blog. Hopefully I will get some nice pics this weekend and if I do, I will put them over in the photo blog.

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I apologize for the paucity of posts. I still have plenty to say it’s just that since I hung this shingle a couple of years ago I have been pretty much a morning blogger. Now, during what has historically been the prime creative hours of the morning, me and my muse are ensnared in my near-daily odyssey to H-Town. Most of the bloggable tidbits that occur to me throughout the day I can’t remember and those I can remember I don’t feel like writing in the evening.

And don’t even start with suggestions about keeping a notepad or a little recorder. I have two full tapes that have never even been listened to. All they represent are a fair amount of work and are prognosticated procrastinated upon for the said reasons above.

So from a rudimentary perspective, my job requires 55 hours of my time in return for forty hours of wages–a contribution on my part of fifteen hours, plus travel expenses currently amounting to about $200/week including mileage, tolls, drive-time refreshments, lunch, and smokes. Furthermore, whatever I used to do with those 55 hours–like steady blogging–that can not be pushed to another time slot can be considered a further contribution to the j.o.b.

Proudly working for “The Man” since 1982. C’est la vie, non?

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I saw this great “opportunity” posted on Monster.com:

Application Devlpr - Java -Lotus Notes
Lotus: Domino(3), DB2(2), Websphere(3), Use Programming Languages(2), Apply Knowledge of Business-IT
Requirements(2), Use Library Management Tools(1), Use Application Development Methodologies & Tools(2),
Use Applications Strategies for Maintenance(2), Apply Java Skills(2), Develop Java Servlets(1), Perform
Application Testing Activities(1), Use Java Developer Toolkit(1). Level 2 application support personnel on IWCS
project. Answering questions from the Web Master Db Responding to customer inquiries Forward non-problem
reports to appropriate channels Fixing entitlement issues. 

This role designs, develops and supports application solutions to meet client requirements. They may design,
develop and/or re-engineer highly complex application components, and integrate software packages, programs
and reusable objects residing on multiple platforms. 

BS/BA-CS, CIS, EE, Math or equivalent technical studies

>2 to <4 years experience in the primary skill required and/or >5 yrs of industry experience

Develop Program Specifications
Perform Application Testing Activities
Translate Business - I/T Requirements
Understand Data Models
Use Application Development Methodologies & Tools
Use applications Strategies for Maintenance
Use Full Life Cycle
Use Library Management Tools
Use Programming Languages
Use test tools knowledge

Job Title: Application Devlpr - Java -Lotus Notes
Primary Skills: DB2; Lotus Notes; Test tools; Java
Job Industry: Information Technology
Vacancies: 1
Job City: Austin
Job Metro Area: Austin
Job State: TX
Job Country: US
Salary: $20/HOURLY To $30/HOURLY
Hours per Week: 40
Start Date: ASAP
Job Duration: 6 - 9 months
Degree Type: BS
Job Type: BS

I added that last line about the Job Type. For that kind of money someone could choose a lot less stressfull job than building software for demandng assholes. Mid-level Wal-Mart flunkees make that kind of money with great benefits.

Anyone who takes that job is a loser or desperate or both. A college grad with five years experience who meets those requirements should be knocking down $75 K with good benefits or $50/hour on a contract basis. And that is the minimum.

I hope they hire someone who fucks their shit all up!

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It’s really not been long enough that I have any fond memories of owning a repo company, but I think back then I was writing some pretty good stuff. From Why would anyone be an auto repossessor?

But the issue I want to address here is not whether repossessors should be able to legally carry a weapon, or whether it should be legal to shoot a repossessor, or even whether it should be legal to shoot another person for any reason. No the issue I want to discuss is much more pernicious. The issue I want to discuss is who is paying for this guy’s foot? Seems to me, unless he was working for himself, someone owes the guy a foot like it was before he got it shot.

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Spider Solitaire that comes with Windows is flawed. I make this statement after about a thousand games over more than a year. There are clearly recognizable patterns over time where there should be none. My guess is the random number generator is of poor quality.

I ask you, how many times have you been burned by being dealt all the aces within two deals? And no twos?

I’ve tried to explain the card clumping away with nonscientific reasoning. I reasoned after some thought that it was that the mind recognizes more vividly when all the aces are dealt close together. So when the aces kill you again, as often as random percentages would allow, it’s more noticeable than if you had all the threes on the table and no fours to play them on.

So I decided to test that theory. The vivid recall theory, as I like to call it, is true, actually. But once you are aware of it and take the effects into consideration on your future calculation, what happens is that you notice the card clumping happens with pretty much the other cards too. Most noticeably the Kings. You’ll have a Queen to Ace lined up on a full stack of cards and the King comes up in spades killing almost every stack on the table.

I also noticed that in addition to the card-clumping, there is always one card missing. One card that you really need. And many times that missing card is the card needed to play the clumped card on.

Obviously, if I really gave a rat’s ass I would just keep track of the losing hands, of which there are plenty (it’s not like Freecell where if you are careful you can play at a 98% win rate over thousands of games. Every game is winnable–if you play your cards right) and then tally up the actual percentages of times pile-killing card clumping occurs. A scientific experiment, Brainiac style.

But I don’t care that much. Maybe I’ll write in to Brainiac and get them to do the test. All I need to know is that my win rate on Spider Solitaire is 41%, my high score is 1185, and no matter what my average is about 1150. I have been trying different strategies and techniques–methods of guessing I suppose you’d call it–for over a year and those numbers wont budge.

Therefore, or ergo, from a nonempirical standpoint, I conclude that Spider is pretty much non-random. Either that or I really suck at the game.

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I was gone all day today and will be gone all day for the foreseeable future as well. The reason I mention this is because it represents a major change in the way my day has been scheduled for the past couple of years that I have been trying to eke out a living from TheGarage. Such a reallocation of my time will therefore cause a change in my writing habits as well. I will continue to write here and continue my efforts to develop some of the other sites I have recently tried to get off the ground, but I certainly wont be putting as much time and energy into blogging as I simply wont have as much of either resource available.

The other reason I mention that I was gone today is because my Internet connection appears to have went down just after noon and I don’t want folk out there thinking I am a slacker. Normally I know within a half hour that my site is down because someone will bitch about not being able to get on the internet.

Sometimes the connection just drops for no apparent reason on my end. Turning the DSL router off for about thirty seconds usually fixes the problem, as it just did.

Sorry about any inconvenience.

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My sitemeter reports that I have blown by 35,000 page views sometime during the past week. A report comes in my email every Tuesday and that is about how often I check my stats. Otherwise I wouldn’t have even noticed.

There is an exception to that. When I get lucky on a common mispelling on a huge story and I start gettin one, two thousand hits a day for several days in a row, I become literally addicted to watching the bells ring and the lights light up.

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