2 events

1. bus broke down

this bus was 1 trip earlier than the one i took home. Apparently the doors opened and couldn't close; the doors were freely swinging back and forth as though they ran out of gas. Yes, literally since the doors were not fully electric ones. Since the braking system was designed to be fully engaged when the doors are open (note: this is an example of inter-locking brake system), the bus was dead on the spot. Can't even move an inch, similar to the SBS buses such as the wheelchair Scania K230UBs.

so in 30 minutes, the mechanic from the depot came. He took out all his tools from his lorry, which had 4 compartments, started to tinker with the rear of the bus. He thought he found a leaking air pump, trapped the holes and the driver tried closing the doors. Nope, no response.

another 30 minutes passed, he gave up and called for towing. Meanwhile, he started to dismantle a portion of the front bumper. Off came the registration plate and a block of wood, probably an area where the tow can attach to. The tow uncle came, spent another 45 minutes fitting his tow under the bus, jacking it up and pulling it back to workshop.

just after the bus was fully jacked up, the tow uncle went into the bus and tried closing the doors.

and the doors closed as per normal! The brake was released with a gassy sound, and the tow end jerked a bit because of reduced axle pressure. Then tow for what? Maybe the mechanic had his reasons, lah.

conclusion? bendy buses are hard to maintain, hard to tow back. And i discovered the mechanic kept washing his hands using some detergent and water. The moment he was done with washing, he took his tools and played around. -.-...

Notice the doors


The bus behind nearly got stuck cause' of insufficient clearance


Dismantling the front bumper for towing...

After so much of adjustment, finally lifted the bus

2. pc crashed

actually i didn't crash it. Few posts ago, i was talking about turning off my server and transfer its job tasks elsewhere. So i decided to setup a new file server with data redundancy on my PC. Armed with 2 new 320GB drives, using the onboard RAID, i switched from AHCI to RAID in the BIOS.

booted Vista, and it crashed with the usual blue screen. No solutions online, thus had to reformat. If you have a modern chipset that offers AHCI and RAID, please please please use RAID. The modes are not switchable once you installed your Windows.

then i tried to clone my server's data drive to my new RAID array. Symantec Ghost refuses any operation from/to the array, since the latter was disabled in all screens. After some hair pulling, i realised the RAID controller didn't fully initialise the array with a master boot record. Had to use my Windows XP installer, pop in the floppy containing the RAID driver, create a partition and return to Ghost.

now my PC has 4 drives, 2 running in RAID 1. The other 2 are my existing ones. The server has completed its job, and powered off for a good rest. Probably giving it to my eldest niece when she is ready to use it.

RIP - Server hostname SUN01. From Pentium 200MHz, through many upgrades, to current Pentium M 1.73GHz. 2002 - 2008