This past weekend we all piled into the car minivan and went to spend some time with the relatives. It was hot out, so the kids played in the water. We all had a good time visiting and catching up. See all the pics here.
While you can never know the true cost of keep employee morale high, it’s fairly easy to determine the cost of not keeping it high. This article about the cost of Google free food caught my attention. The actual dollar value is a drop in the bucket compared to the benefits. I wonder why other companies don’t do the same?
Disclaimer: At Intel, where I work, they just made coffee and soda free to all employees. From what I can tell this is pretty standard in high tech companies. My visits to Adobe and Microsoft were accompanied by free drinks for employees and guests.
I’ve had my Dell Dimension 4600 for over four years now. It’s been a great PC. I used it as my main machine until a few months ago when I upgraded to a new Core 2 Duo machine I built myself. I decided to give my old PC to my father in law.
Aparantly I gave it to him just in time. After he took it home he kept telling me it wouldn’t boot. I was thinking that maybe something had come loose or that he didn’t have something hooked up correctly. Anyway, he finally got tired of waiting for me to come over and look at it and dropped it off any my house. I fired it up this weekend and found the problem. Sure enough, it wouldn’t boot. It couldn’t find the file HALL.DLL. That seems like a pretty important file (it’s the hardware abstraction layer - without it Windows doesn’t work at all).
Step 1: Try to “replace” the file. I booted the machine using an Ubuntu Live CD and tried to copy the HALL.DLL file from another PC. This didn’t work. Ubuntu could access the drive, but not the system32 directory where HALL.DLL lives.
Step 2: Move hard drive to another PC. I thought I might have better luck if I put the old hard drive into my new PC as a secondary drive. Once I did this it was obvious that something was amiss. CHKDSK revealed a bazillion bad sectors and other nasty things wrong with the drive.
Step 3: Format and reinstall. With Windows, it always comes down to this doesn’t it. I formatted the drive, reinstalled XP from my Dell backup disks, downloaded 537 patches and updates, installed some apps, and quit about 17 hours later.
The PC is now working. The only thing that bothers me is how it broke in the first place. I guess there are some things I am not meant to know.
We have this great tree in front of our house. It blooms wonderful pink flowers, which last for just a few days before falling off. It’s fun while it lasts.
We had two good days of warm weather this weekend. That made for all kinds of outdoor fun. The whole neighborhood came out to play on Emily’s swing set, and then our neighbors joined us for some slip n slide fun. A pity we were back to cold on Monday. We’re all looking forward to the next spat of warm weather.
This weekend Karen and I went on a “date”. Really we borrowed a friends minivan and went to Walmart. We bought a swingset. When I got home and opened it up, there were something like 200 pieces of wood and thousands of screws, bolts, washers, and other fancy contraptions.
Every night this week, I’ve come home, eaten dinner, and went to work on the swing set. I put a couple of hours in and made a dent in the thing. The interesting part was a couple of days ago when I moved the operation outside. Then I was working in the dark.
Tonight I moved the swingset onto the lawn.  It’s almost done. Tomorrow might be the day it gets finished. In the mean time, I get to hear “is it done yet?” repeated every 15 seconds. I also get to ignore the laundry 
Nicole came for a visit. She had always wanted to see Astoria. After watching Goonies and Kindergarden Cop, she just had to see it.
All of the images are here.
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