buttonmashing

Mashing buttons since 1984

Asides

Long live the Internet!

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I have been connected to the “internet” for so long that I often forget life before Google (or HotBot or AltaVista or whatever). I feel I’ve become careless because I know that everything can be solved by Googling it. It’s a crutch, and I know it.

Well today wasn’t a case of carelessness, it was a case of an upgrade gone awry. Last week I added a stick of memory to my aging PC to give it at least another year of shelf life. I consider myself rather PC/Tech savvy — I built my current PC from scratch, so I know a little bit of how this works. I figured this was a no-brained upgrade. Sometimes, however, errors and problems crop up whose causes are unknown. By some weird cosmic combination of components and mismatched parts, Windows seems to go crazy and begins corrupting itself in some self-preserving, self-destruct mode. At first, it seems harmless. A simple BSOD pops up. Then an occasional reboot that happens out of the blue (no pun intended). Then things get wonky. This time around, I get an error message, on boot-up, along the lines of:

lsass.exe — system error indicates a revision number encountered or specified is not one known by the service. It may be a more recent revision than the service is aware of.

Huh? I swear I never touched lsass.exe! I’ve never even heard of it! Nevertheless this rendered my PC completely unbootable. After trying everything, I went to Google, looking for guidance. (Thank goodness for the laptop!) The nugget of wisdom that Google bestowed upon me came in the form of this site.

The steps were followed, windows was fixed and I was playing Guild Wars by 8:30. I could go on a rant and say how wonderful consoles are because when they crash (if they ever crash) a simple hard reboot fixes the problem 99.98% of the time. But I won’t, because my consoles don’t have 2+ years of baby pictures and movies. Or 4+ years of emails and contacts. I wasn’t so desperate that I was ready to wipe everything but I was close. Thanks to Google problems were solved and I have once again regained my throne of technical superiority in the eyes of those who care (mainly my wife).

Man it feels good to be a PC-fixing super hero. Now let’s see what happens when I put that memory stick back in…

Update: As Bobster noted in the comments, the problem was my Kensington Memory Stick being incompatible with Dual Channel Operation. Whether it some how corrupted data on my hard drive is unknown, I blame it completely for all my hassle.

So I’ve taken this as an opportunity to do a fresh XP install, clean out all the gunk and get back to a streamlined installation. Guild Wars is gonna fly now!

I am a lucky man

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I mentioned early this year that I have the world’s greatest wife. Well, now she’s out-done her latest show of greatness. She’s packed up the kids and went to her parents house for the week. In the process, she’s left me a to-do list that consists of mowing the lawn and playing video games. I’ll only have to do the former once. The latter will be done over and over again. Mostly Guild Wars but I’ll sneak some other stuff in there. Man, this is beyond love. Sure I have to work everyday but she didn’t weigh me down with a to-do list of unattainable magnitudes. Just two things I can actually do

Like I said early, that’s true love defined.

Silly online poker player, Spam for kids!

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I thought buttonMashing was immune to comment/trackback spam but I seem to have attracted the attention of some shady purveyors of online poker sites looking to boost their Google ranking. 285+ comments of spammy badness in less than a day. Crazy! Hopefully they weren’t able to boost the ranking of their internet site. While online poker may be fun, there’s no button mashing involved. Not my cup of tea.

Regarding the spam comments (and blocking thereof), I have installed Spam Karma 2, which has immediately gone into action and destroyed all remnants of the poker spam. I’ve only been using it for a couple hours but I recommend it, it seems to be doing its job swimmingly. Seems like things are back to normal.

But those spammers are a persistent bunch! In the time it took to download and install the SK2 plug-in (about 3 minutes) 3-4 more spam messages came in. Unbelievable.

(Update: I noticed that the sidebar is wonky in IE. I know most people visiting the site use Firefox (I use Opera myself) but I apologize to any IE users for whom the page looks funny. I imagine it’s a problem with the theme I’m using, I’m not sure if it’s been updated recently or not. It appears to be an issue with my Bloglines blogroll. I’ll mess with it later, I’m going to bed)

Extreme Makeover

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Buttonmashing is going through plastic surgery (a little nip here, tuck there) so things may look wonky as I make changes. With a new theme (that obviously isn’t in English) there’s a lot to do here, but things are starting to come together.

Update – Since the anesthetic hasn’t worn off, we’re going in for a second pass. I really like the way the dimension 2k theme looks but it doesn’t completely work and I’m too lazy to translate German so I’m hunting for a new theme. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to get everything looking the way I want it.

Update 2 – I think I’m sticking with my current theme, I like the way it looks and while I’ll be making a few changes, I think I’m pleased with the looks. At least for now.

Update 3 (4/13/2005) – I’ve finally added my blogroll to the sidebar along with some Google Ads. I don’t have to pay for hosting just yet but my free hosting will be ending soon, so any clicks on the Google Ads would be appreciated. I would still like to replace the header graphic, but I don’t have time right now, time to go play some Halo 2 online.

Busy week

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I know it’s a blogging no-no to apologize for the lack of posts, but that’s basically what this is. I have been busy with things (including hours of Halo 2 on Live) which have prevented me from my blogging duties. And now I that I have time to actually write something I’m headed out for a night on the town with the buttonWife. But I appreciate your patronage and your daily visits (even you, Ted Jr.) so I don’t want this week to go by without me offering something. (As if a regular post from me is anything, anyway)

With that in mind – if there are any buttonmashers out there that need a Google GMail account, let me know. I’ve got invites out the yazoo. Drop me an email at buttonmashing at gmail dot com or leave a comment here. They just recently increased the size of their mailboxes to 2 GB, so if you don’t have one already, now is your chance!

Newest button-masher is here!

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Mason, chilling

The newest buttonMasher, my son Mason, was born Friday morning. Dad couldn’t be prouder and can’t wait to get him a little controller in his hand.

(Update: I appreciate all the congrats I’ve received, Mason is doing great and is loving watching Dad play video games. He’s already on his way to be a great gamer)

Blogging will be light…

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At least for the next few days. The buttonWife is ready to deliver the newest buttonMasher to the world any day now, so I won’t be blogging much until then. When he/she arrives I will actually have more time to blog and game since I’ll be taking a week or so off, so hopefully I’ll be able to stay on top of all the cool gaming items as the occur.

Until then!

Bloglines and my feed

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(Update:Following the advice from Mike in the comments, I’ve tried to fix my files so the original RSS feed is operable. So far I can’t get bloglines to recognize my change, but hopefully you’ll have better luck

Okay, it turns out I didn’t save the appropriate files I had changed, but now they are all working and everything seems to be better. Thanks for the help, Mike!)

If you use Bloglines (or another RSS feeding machine) you have probably noticed that my Blogger feeds are no longer active. You can subscribe to my feed using:

https://buttonmashing.com/wp-rss2.php

I was previously having issues with WP and the feed, but that adress seems to work. I also updated the feed links in the footer of the first page. If you use Bloglines, you can always use the handy subscribe with Bloglines button:

Subscribe with Bloglines

Seriously, if you’re not using Bloglines, you’re missing out.