After having been up continuously for a year, the machine hosting this blog crashed last week. I'm not sure why it crashed, but it simply needed a reboot and it was fine.

However, the simple reboot wasn't so simple. It turns out that the BIOS option to “turn machine on when power restored after a power failure” didn't work, and so the machine sat powered off for a week until someone could actually visit the colo to power it back on. Of course, I didn't know that that's all that was needed, so for the last week I fretted about how to fix whatever was broken. Sigh.

I'm happy that all it needed was a button press, but I wish it would have been easier. Thanks Jeremy, for visiting the colo and dealing with it.

Today, Anthony made a poopy in the toilet.

He'd been wearing underwear (not diapers) for parts of the day for a month or so, making pee-pee in the toilet with the occasional “shippai” (mistake) here and there. Since we have mostly hardwood floors, cleanup of such mistakes is not that big a deal.

Yet, the success of pee-pee in the toilet has been offset by difficulties with poopy in the toilet. We would have long talks about it, and he would claim that he can't do it. Not that he didn't want to, but that, apparently despite his best desires to do it, it's simply beyond the realm of possibility. The sorrow in his “I caaaan't make poopy in toilet” seemed genuine.

His belief that it was out of his control was made more evident by the lack of success of our bribe... uh, er, “setting goals”. We made it clear time and again that the day he made a poopy in the toilet was a day he got a very special “yellow truck” present. (He loves trucks and such). Perhaps that's the root of his sorrow, that he was given an impossible goal with no chance of payoff.

In any case, we eventually decided to lay low about the poopy-in-the-toilet thing to see if he'd naturally want to go for it at a later date.

So today, he came up to me and said “Daddy, I want (to) take underwear off (and) put on Anthony diaper (so) Anthony (can) make (a) poopy.” This was the first time that he was alerting us to a poopy before it came out. That's a big step.

I asked if he wanted to sit on the toilet for it, and he clearly said no (since, you know, he can't make a poopy on the toilet). I decided to push a bit and remind him that if he were to make that poopy on the toilet, that he'd get the new super-special toy. He asked to see the toy, so I said that if he just sat on the toilet, he could see the toy while sitting. To my surprise, he jumped at the idea.

So, I got him on the toilet and showed him this big yellow dump truck (part of a 30-piece construction set, of which he already has the huge crane, backhoe, flat-bed truck, etc). He turned into the quintessential gleeful child, positively giddy with excitement by just looking at it. As he looked and held it, suddenly, there was a plop. And then another plop. And my son was man... a man with a new toy that was now his. There was much celebration in the house. 🙂

In retrospect, I guess the toy really is a dump truck. (Sorry, just a bit of, er, toilet humor.)

Later in the day we were out at a mall (with him wearing a diaper, as we're not yet willing to take the chance with “mistakes” outside the house) and Mommy wanted to impress upon him how proud we were of his great achievement, so she took him to the toy section and said he could pick out one toy. He treated this task as the important life-altering event it was, and carefully considered a number of items before making a definitive selection: a garbage truck (a 1/55 scale “Hino Sanitary Truck” with four different “actions”). We then went for lunch, but he was too busy playing to eat. Other than the occasional need for us to create little pieces of garbage for him to put in the truck, it was the most peaceful whole-family restaurant outing we'd had in years. It was a very nice day.

Today Anthony is exactly one month shy of three years old. My brother (who has a 3-month-old himself) was impressed that Anthony had done this prior to his third birthday, but it's not that impressive at all. The fact that he did one poopy in the toilet doesn't mean he's “potty trained” by any stretch of the imagination. But one step's been taken.

My Ukrainian friend Sergey says that in Russia it's common to potty train starting at one year, finishing by 1.5 years old. Diapers are just too expensive not to. He's well off, but did so with his two kids nevertheless.

Another friend has a daughter and had started potty training at 3 months old, finishing at 6 months. In my experience as having been a parent of a 3-to-6-month old, this is absolutely inconceivable. There's no way in the world we had the energy to even consider it.

After about two weeks of having my Windows XP box powered down because we moved to a new place, I found that the computer would suddenly freeze – just stop it its tracks – without any kind of error message or other indication of the problem. The mouse, keyboard, and even front-panel power switch all became inoperable. The freezing would generally happen overnight, awaiting my discovery in the morning.

What had happened since before the move that could have caused this? Well, the prime suspect in my mind was the move itself. Perhaps something had been jarred or broken. Also, due to a move-related project that I'll talk about another time, I'd drilled a half-inch hole in the top of the computer's steel case. This, of course, created many tiny dust-like bits of steel that could do some nasty damage if they found their way to various sensitive parts of the computer. I'd been very careful about not letting that happen, but perhaps not careful enough?

To top it off, since the move, I'd noticed an alarm-clock type beeping coming from the computer now and then. Four very quick high-pitched beeps in a row, then a pause, all repeating every second. It would come and go at apparently random times, and did not seem to be temporally related to the computer freezing. Sometimes it happened just as I rebooted (which I had to do many, many times), and sometimes just in the middle of doing nothing. I'd never heard a beeping like this from a computer, nor, in fact, from anything at all except an alarm clock I have. When the beeping first happened, I thought that it was my alarm clock still packed in a box by my computer. I couldn't really pinpoint where the sound was coming from, and it was quite frustrating. (Not that I needed much to be frustrated with the &@#&!^# computer freezing up all the time.)

How do you debug something like this? Here's what I did, over the course of about two weeks:

1. Reboot, hope, become disappointed in the morning when I wake up to a frozen, blank computer.

2. Wonder if those beeps were indeed somehow related to the problem. I searched my motherboard's manual for beep-related info, and searched the web as well, all to no avail. It's as if no one else had ever heard these beeps, either.

   Meanwhile, the computer still froze up from time to time.

3. At first, the computer would freeze only when I wasn't actively using it. It seemed to freeze after the screen saver had blanked the screen (as I have mine set to do), so to see if there was some kind of message or other indication of why the computer was freezing, I turned off the screen saver. Thus, I can see the normal desktop even after it's frozen, and in doing that see the time it froze.

   I do (see that it's frozen) every morning, and at random times throughout the day.

4. Wondering if it's heat related, I leave the motherboard/CPU temperature-monitoring software running. The CPU generally runs 42C-49C, and the motherboard 35C-38C, both of which are fine. (I once had a dual-processor machine on which one of the CPU fans stopped. The log of the CPU temperatures read 101.6 degrees Celsius – 214 degrees Fahrenheit and hotter than boiling water – before the log stopped with the computer halting itself.)

   Despite the pleasantly cool temps, the computer still freezes.

5. Try a mini tune-up: take out graphics card, memory cards, vacuum everything, replace.

   But, it still freezes.

6. Bad memory? Go to store and buy a gigabyte of new memory to replace the memory I have (bought at 60% of the price I paid for the exact same memory last May).

   But, it still freezes.

7. I hear the beeping again for the umpteenth time, but this time the computer case is open, so I get down and check carefully, and it turns out that the beeping is coming from the graphics card. According to the little display on the card, the fan is rotating at 600rpm. The “600” is flashing, so perhaps that's the problem? So, I take apart card, remove fan, don't see anything obviously wrong with it, so go to store and get some oil, and douse the thing with it. Clean it up and put it back. Fan now going at 5,800 rpm, and no beeps.

   But, the computer still freezes. In fact, it seems to now freeze after just a few hours.

8. Maybe graphics card is bad altogether, so I swap in a different graphics card that I happen to have.

   But, it still freezes.

9. In my web searches I find numerous comments that reseating the CPU (simply pulling it out and putting it back) mysteriously fixed any number of strange problems, so let's try that. I go to store and ride the escalators up and down for half an hour (can you guess with whom I went?) and buy can of compressed air, heat-sink cleaner, and heat-sink paste. I really super-clean all parts of the computer (blowing and vacuuming), then clean CPU and heatsink with special two-step cleaner, then reseat CPU and reapply heat-sink paste and heat sink. I notice that the computer now runs with the CPU about 5C cooler.

   But, it still freezes.

10. Maybe it's not the hardware? Before swapping out the last plausible component (the $120 motherboard), I wonder if it's the Microsoft software updates that had been installed when I booted after the move (two weeks worth had accumulated, and had been installed the day I re-set-up the computer).

    To test that theory, I'll try running a different (non-Microsoft) operating system. So, I boot with a Knoppix CD that a friend happened to give me last year.

    Knoppix is a free Linux distribution on CD which is wholly self-contained. It boots from CD and creates a RAM disk. It never uses the disks that might be attached to the computer. I was using an odd graphics card (PCI-based DVI) hooked to an LCD monitor (Dell's wonderful 20"), and so perhaps that's why it didn't autodetect the display parameters correctly. I had to boot with an xmodule=fbdev parameter, and then it was fine.

    After booting Knoppix, you find that it has an absolutely amazing amount of software available (all from the one compressed CD). I'd never actually used Knoppix before, so was suitably impressed.

    I get a bunch of software running to try to make the computer busy, and leave it running overnight. I ended up getting a cold, so overnight turned into a day and a half.

    In the end, the computer didn't freeze.

11. The fact that the computer didn't freeze while running Linux didn't prove conclusively that it was a problem with the prior (Windows) software. Perhaps what was running during the Linux time didn't “tickle” whatever hardware problem I was having, for example. However, the Linux test certainly gave strength to the idea that the freezes were due to the recent Microsoft software upgrades.

    So, I got my Genuine™ Microsoft™ Windows™ CD™ and tried doing a “repair install”. This rolls back my OS software to whatever old stuff is on the CD. It was during this episode that I had to run out to buy a new mouse due to continuing Microsoft ineptness.

    I rebooted and it didn't freeze.

12. After running for a few days like this, I shut down and reattached the three (non-boot) disks that I'd detached prior to doing the repair install.

    It still didn't freeze.

    Victory!

At the moment, my CPU is running at 36C and the motherboard at 31C, both extremely good. I now have 2 gig of memory, and a dust-free computer.

Microsoft Update tells me that there are a bazillion security updates waiting to be installed, but I'll ignore them; my computer is behind a properly-managed firewall, and I don't use Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Microsoft's Outlook email client (historically, the world's flypaper of security bugs), so I'm probably safe from most security issues.

What I'd not be safe from, if I installed the updates, are new Microsoft bugs.

Here's another one of those “in case you have this problem too” posts.

While doing a Windows-XP repair install, during the “Installing Drivers” phase of the install, a dialog popped up about my nVidia graphics board, asking if I wanted to install the unsigned driver. Yes, I did, but I couldn't tell it that because some short time before that dialog popped up, both my mouse and keyboard became unresponsive.

On a whim, I went out and bought an old PS/2 mouse (really a USB mouse with a PS/2 adapter), and with the PS/2 mouse, it could actually continue. Phew!

(I still hate Windows)