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Thursday, February 22, 2007

Dust Hotel

A few weeks ago I began to experience my computer shutting down for no apparent reason. As I began to investigate the problem I discovered that the CPU was working at 100% just before this would happen. This did not happen immediately but after some time of running a memory labor intensive program such as analyzing and encoding a DVD or generating a kinship report in the family tree file that I know has many interconnected people. The next step I took was to look up all that I could on the Internet to see what the problem might be. The general consensus was that the CPU was overheating causing the system to shut down. So I began to monitor the BIOS at boot-up to see what the fan speed, system and CPU temps read. Of course when in the BIOS one doesn't get the true temperature of the working PC as nothing is going on to make the processor heat up, or so I thought. I watched the processor heat up from 35 C and ending at about 94 C +/- 3 C in 20 minutes time !!! The normal temperature for my system should be around 40-45 C !! How long had this been going on? Well I had planned to clean out my system inside and out and adding the 2 GB of RAM I had purchased so many months ago but never seemed to get around to it. My computer was acting so sluggish and knew XP Home had collected a lot of junk over the past three years since I first bought it. I had the case off before when I put in a second hard drive and it looked pretty clean then. That wasn't quite a year ago. Well when I opened the beastie up it looked fairly clean, still. BUT when I got to removing the cooling fan from the heat sink that is when I got the surprise of my life!! The dust must have been 1/4" thick on top and extending down inside the fins another 1/4" or so. I whipped out the mini-vacuum kit and canned air and went to work. I then put it all back together and crossed my fingers as I switched her on. She purred like a kitten. I monitored the temperature from the BIOS and found that the system temperature stayed at around 38 C and the CPU at 41-43 C !! That was all it took! My system is very slow in booting up yet. This occurs up until the memory check. Perhaps something got fried in the processor or the BIOS got damaged? After Windows loads all works fine and dandy. In fact as I am typing this I have been generating a kinship report that has been going on for the past four or five hours at the most! It is on its second and final pass and at 86% complete. The CPU usage is showing a steady 55-65% with both going. Before I had to change the affinity to only run CPU0 in order to keep the usage fixed at 50% but I couldn't wait for the extra hours for the report to generate. I couldn't even run very many other programs at the same time. But now it seems I don't have problems multi-tasking.

I learned a great deal about wireless networking, keeping the PC clean and recovering a system these past six days. It all started simply because my brother-in-law gave my youngest son his old Dell P4 1.3 GHz computer without a hard drive. Pretty straight forward stuff here. Purchase a hard drive pop it in and install the operating system. Been there, done that more times than I care to remember. But this time all went sour when I couldn't get his machine connected to the Internet via the wireless network. One by one each of our machines went down like the domino effect. After intensive reading I decided to reset the wireless router and re-install everything from scratch. I knew the machines were connecting to the router but they weren't getting past the ADSL modem to collect an IP address. Resetting the router worked. I think the main problem may have been with the ADSL modem. We had it replaced a few weeks ago by our ISP for free because when we had originally rented it, later purchased it, there was no 1 MB speed for the ADSL. Gradually we were upgraded for free but the modem was not. We found out it couldn't handle 2 MB/512K so they gave us a new one that is good up to 25 MB. After I got it home I just disconnected the old one and connected the new one. Perhaps it needed to be set-up first? Well, it is all done and taken care of and all works fine for the moment. I am almost done with installing the programs on my own system. I need to install a USB 2.0 PCI card in Alexi's machine and then put it back in his desk. All that is left is to wipe Tiina's hard drive clean and do a complete re-install as well. That should pretty much finish off my week of winter holiday! No Jalasjärvi this winter holiday :-(

Monday, February 19, 2007

Lustila - Torpan Sauna.....

The following sets of pictures were taken in July of 2002 from the old Lustila croft in the village of Hirvijärvi of the municipality of Jalasjärvi. This sauna, as we were told, is more than likely the original one built. It is all that is left of the croft. We could see where the foundation was for the house and the caved in remnants of the cellar. Our guide, Seppo Pentinmäki, even found where the well was by the divining method!

The photo on the right is of the inside of the sauna. Here is pictured the stove and chimney and an old bed to the left!

If this sauna is the original sauna, which it does appear to be by the way it has been constructed, then there is a good chance that my great-grandfather, his siblings and my great-great-grandfather and some of his siblings were all born in this sauna!

My great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Matinpoika (Valkama) Lustila acquired contract to the torppa upon marriage (5 Feb 1842) to his wife Ulla Simontytär Palomäki. Ulla's father was a farmer/tailor and her maternal grandfather was isäntä (head of household/estate) of the farm Marttila.


The Lustila torppa burned down in the early 1920's. The current owners of the property have built a small log house, a lean-to and a small man made pond. The place is still called Lustila.












In these photos one can see how the hay is placed on poles to aid in drying as the ground can have a lot of dew, especially in wooded areas where the sun doesn't shine all day.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Hooray for the Chicks

I personally congratulate The Dixie Chicks for their current taking of all five categories of which they were nominated for at the 49th Grammy Awards. I especially applaud Natalie Maines for sticking to her guns and her freedoms granted her by the Constitution of the United States of America. Go girl! French fries and the Chicks. What more can one ask for? Before you all who happen across my blog decide to bombard me with words such as turn-coat, unpatriotic, disrespectful, etc., etc., I would like to enter a quote right here and now from one of the boldest presidents the USA has ever had.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt.

I stand by these words as should everyone else that believes in the Constitution of the United States of America. BULLY!

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Freedom what???

The other day at work my co-worker, I will call him TF, and I were discussing some things that have occurred in the United States since the illustrious Dubya took office. One of these was the re-naming of French fries to freedom fries simply because France was against the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps if I had been living in the USA at the time I wouldn't have thought much about it. No, I take that back. I would have thought it as a childish gesture all the same! I mean, think about it. Americans tend to believe that the US military were the only ones that won the war in Europe. France was invaded by Hitler and liberated by the Allied forces. To this day whenever France takes an opposite opinion from that of the USA people go nuts about it and drag out W.W.II and how "we" won the war for them. Even I know better than this. Why is it I learned it in school? Perhaps the rest were sleeping during this time? Anyway, it was an embarrassment to say the least for me, an American citizen and living abroad having to put up with this. Was I ever offended by the rude and crude remarks by my peers. No, I was not. Simply because I had to agree with them.

So now we have the change of French fries to freedom fries, later changed back.

TF, the other day said to me in a laughing manner, "Freedom Kiss". I asked, "What?"
He was wondering if the Americans changed the name of French Kiss to Freedom Kiss. Then we began to think of other things that began with French that Americans use in everyday speech.

The French Connection has now been renamed the Freedom Connection
French Horn to Freedom Horn
French Drain to Freedom Drain
French cut bra to freedom cut bra
French lingerie to Freedom lingerie
French's Mustard to Freedom Mustard
French bread to Freedom bread
French restaurant to Freedom restaurant
French curve to Freedom curve
French toast to Freedom toast
French dressing to Freedom dressing
French dictionary to Freedom Dictionary
"Excuse me, but do you speak Freedom?"
Victor French, the actor, has now become Victor Freedom, long after his death in 1989.
French Embassy to Freedom Embassy
French poodle to that of Freedom poodle
and the French tickler to Freedom tickler
and last but not least, New Orleans' French Quarter became Freedom Quarter.
Now is this silly or what?

Don't politicians have better things to do than trying to change a name of a product just because a nation of opposite opinion, and one that was right if I may add, disagrees with the great Capitol Hill???

Viva La France!