Probably the Weirdest Email of My Life

This afternoon, I got what must have been the weirdest email of my life. Certainly of this blog's life.  It was from Blogger itself: 

Your post titled "Eliminating the Legislative Branch" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at:

http://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2012/01/eliminating-legislative-branch.html

Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

The post is dated January 7, 2012 and talks about the President (Bamster) going around the law to appoint someone to the newly organized (back then) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  While a bit snarky, I think it was fairly even-handed.  I made fun of both W's and Bamster's administrations doing the same basic thing: pushing through an appointment for a position that requires senate approval by waiting until the senate wasn't in session so they could just appoint them. 

I'll bet that post has had more reads today than at any time in the intervening 11 years since I posted it, when it combines me testing it at least twice and then having the diminutive but deadly Mrs. Graybeard test it as well.  

I can't imagine what could be "sensitive content" about it, but I have a hard time believing that someone stumbled across it while blog surfing and complained about an over 11 year old post.  There is nothing in their email about disagreeing with them, just what to do when you fix it, but since they never told me what was wrong with it, that's pointless.  Although it's hard to be more pointless than an 11 year old blog post about something that was a minor news story back then. 

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Two weekends ago, I wrote about trying to resurrect an 11 year old PC to take the place of a newer but lower performance PC I use to run a few things in the shop. Since I'm here, let me do a little update to that. 

By the time I posted that, I had gotten it to boot to Win7, but even the simplest things were exasperating.  I'd tell it to uninstall a program, or simply delete a file from a junk directory, and it would just sit there spinning one of it's "processing... processing..." indicators for minutes.  Digging through old DVDs, I found everything that came with this old Dell including some diagnostics and tried to run them.  Originally, it would halt with an error saying something like it couldn't verify it was a Dell PC so it couldn't verify the tests would work and then abort. That took a couple of days to find a way around.  

I gradually improved things, but every time I tried to run a functional test, it couldn't complete testing the older magnetic hard drive.  It didn't fail it, it just never completed the test.  It would get to some block of memory addresses and say the drive didn't provide an Interrupt Request (IRQ) reply fast enough.  Then it would put up a box asking quit or keep testing.  I quit the test several times, and then last Sunday decided to keep hitting Y, telling it to resume testing, thinking maybe it's just one or two bad addresses and after a few minutes, I'd have a list of the bad ones.

That's when I found out it would sit there (doing something or nothing) for up to 10 minutes before starting to retest, and then give me the same question with a different address being bad within a second.  I literally spent 90 minutes waiting for those "Continue (Y)es or (N)o?" prompts.  The kicker is that I could go to the Command line (i.e., DOS) and run the old CHKDSK utility.  That said the HD passed.

I concluded the HD was probably bad.  It's from 2011, after all, and 12 years out of a hard drive is really not that bad.  I looked around the house but couldn't find another drive I could test in its place and after days of debating whether to buy a used drive from eBay, get something newer, or just can the whole thing, went with the second option.  

That drive got here this afternoon, so I plan to try to get that swapped out tomorrow.  And if it doesn't get that computer working, this computer gets another hard drive.