I have been pretty silent as of late as Karin’s dad was quite ill.  Peter had prostate cancer for a number of years, and it was expected that it would eventually enter his bones.  He had bone scans every 6 months in order to detect when this occurred, and was warned that once it did he should be prepared for severe pain.  Once the cancer was in his bones, the prognosis was for no more than a year left.

Despite his ill health and onsetting dementia, my father-in-law still made his annual trip to California and Arizona for a month at the beginning of this year.  Upon his return it was obvious that his health had worsened, and his next scheduled scan confirmed that the cancer had progressed into his bones.

Even with his pain and rapidly declining health, he still showed his strength through his determination to be at family events.  Many of us did not expect to see him at his granddaughter Angela’s wedding, as he could barely sit up for more than an hour each day during the preceding week; but he showed his resolve by attending both the church ceremony in the afternoon and then a large portion of the evening reception.  This took a lot out of him, however, and he did not leave home again.

My mother-in-law Gertrude was faced with the fact that she would not be able to keep him at home much longer, even with several visits a day from palliative care nurses, but Father’s Day was approaching and she hoped to have one last day with the family.  Again he showed his resolve and sat in his easy chair in the living room all afternoon as his children and grandchildren gathered, but again it took much out of him and he did not leave his bed again.  We did not even see him during a several hour visit the next day, during which we visited the hospices in Langely and Mission, met with one of the palliative nurses, and made our decision to move him to the Christine Morrison Hospice in Mission.

He was transferred the next day, and just in time.  The facility is lovely, and it allowed Gertrude to stay with her husband 24 hours a day while he received pain management and care from nurses around the clock.  The facility even took great care to make sure that Gertude was cared for also, with meals available to her at any time, shower facilities for her, and even professional massages to help with stress.  Within a couple of days, the nurses told her that she should make sure that the family all knew that they should come say one last goodbye.

Peter Nickel passed away at 5:07 pm on Sunday, June 22nd.  It was a grey, lousy day all morning and afternoon, but once his suffering stopped the clouds parted and the sun shined down.  We all gathered at the hospice to say our goodbyes, and then we spent the past week planning and holding the funeral.  We laid him to rest on Thursday.  While it was a sad time for the family, we all were relieved to know that his pain had now ended.

Instead of documenting the events that were occurring, I was busy offering my support to others in the family.  I will miss Peter and value the time I did have to get to know him, but of course my loss is nothing compared to his wife and children.  If you want to know more of the events that occurred, both Karin and Waltrude blogged during Peter’s struggle. I would only ask that you not fill their blogs with comments offering your condolenses as they have ended their tears and are moving onward.

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I have been pretty well offline for the past few days as I attempted some computer upgrades.

That doesn’t sound like I’m much of a geek, but let me explain. First, I’m not counting my time at work; I am online on at least two computers at once while working, but I’m working. Right now I’m writing the first half of this post on my work notebook during lunch. Even if our network goes down at work and I am not online, I support computers for a living and that is geeky in itself. But I have to consider the work time different than the home online time; otherwise I probably would not go near a computer when I got home.

The upgrade was supposedly a simple memory upgrade. Karin and I built identical computers 6 months ago when it became impossible to continue on our old dinosaurs. I ensured our motherboards were capable of running 8GB of memory each, but for budget reasons we put 2 gigs each in at the time to see if it was enough. The computers run well, and we’ve had none of the problems everyone complains about with regards to Vista or a 64 bit operating system, but when I had multiple photos open in editing software while also keeping track of my favourite blogs, I could notice the slow down. This is to be expected when photo editing; it is a memory hogging task.

So last Monday we headed into Langley both to make a stop at the dentist to pick up pills for Karin, and to also stopped an NCIX to purchase extra RAM. If you have a dual-channel capable board, information in the memory can be accessed quicker if you have two sticks in the same coloured slots on your motherboard. Basically, this allows the system to access both at once, which lets your memory keep up with the speed of today’s CPUs.  We had put 2 sticks of 1GB each into each computer, and so my plan was to put all 4 sticks into one computer to give it 4GB, and then buy a package of 2 sticks of 2GB each for the other computer. The best available for budget minded people such as ourselves was some OCZ Platinum XTC for $75. This meant we each got to double our RAM for $38 a computer, a deal in my eyes.

But then the struggles began. I put the 4 x 1GB sticks into Karin’s computer, and then I Monday night I could not get my computer to boot with both sticks of the new RAM. I had to finally leave it so that I could get enough sleep for work the next day. Karin’s appeared to work fine, but then she messaged me Tuesday morning from my home computer to say hers was frozen. I had to have her pull the two extra sticks out so she could get it to reboot.

Karin’s solution was simple, I just had to bump up the RAM voltage in the BIOS because the RAM runs at a higher voltage the the board provides by default.  But for mine there was no such luck.  I flashed my BIOS to the latest version, and then began changing the voltage and many other settings.  Each setting has a range within which it could safely be set without voiding any warranties, but to try every combination took quite some time as I would have to insert just one stick, boot to the BIOS, change settings, shut down, insert the second stick, reboot and test.

After a couple of nights of this and some advice and research on the OCZ support forums, the possiblities were all tried and it seemed I might actually have defective RAM.  I ran Memtest86+ and confirmed that one stick is bad; and then kicked myself for not testing it sooner.

So this entire week has been one of working on my computer hardware, which is geeky; but wasting time when I should have tested for defects sooner, which is not so geeky.

We’re now off to Langley to exchange the RAM, and hopefully I will be up and running tonight.

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