Everything broke at once. The laptop, of course; we knew about that already. The Sony FX210 died about a month ago: the DVRom, the processor, and so on. So I took it back to Circuit City--where I'd bought it last year because they assured me that, unlike the Sony PCG818 I'd bought from SoundTrack in 1998, the FX210 would be fixed or replaced instantly if anything ever broke on it. So, since things had broken on it, I took it back to CircuitCity, where they told me to call the 800 number to have a box UPSsed to me in which I could stuff the laptop and UPS it to Dallas to be fixed or replaced.
Yay.
So I did. I sent it off on 1st October.
I got it back on Friday. With BestBuy stickers all over it. No one can tell me how a bunch of BestBuy stickers ended up on a laptop I bought at CircuitCity, and sent back to CircuitCity to have it fixed...despite the assurance that I wouldn't have to send it anywhere to have it fixed and that I could just take it into CircuitCity and have it dealt with instantly.
Also, it wasn't fixed.
The DVRom works again. But it still overheats and shuts down within half an hour. That's assuming I leave it in bios mode; trying to run anything kills it in seconds.
I took it back to CircuitCity, where they couldn't figure out why A) it hadn't been fully fixed, B) why it had been sent to and from Louisville instead of Dallas, and/or C) why it had BestBuy stickers all over it. Apparently, the manager is going to make some calls tomorrow and figure it all out. Then it can get UPSsed off to Dallas or Louisville to CircuitCity or BestBuy again and be fixed once and for all; otherwise, I'm assured in front of witnesses, they'll just give me a new laptop after all.
Which is no longer crtical, of course. There's a certain poetic justice in getting my broken Sony back with BestBuy adverts all over it: I went to BestBuy and bought a new HewlettPackard ze5185. 2.4GHz, a gigabyte of RAM, a sixty-gig drive, and a DV/CDRW. And, while it came infected with WindozeXPired on it, it's still a bit more stable than the Sony: it stays running for longer than half an hour.
Unfortunately, while the Sony came preinstalled with Word2000, this thing has WordPerfect9, which kinda sucks. I'll have to instal Word2002 as soon as I figure out where the disc is.
Meanwhile, we moved. So we expected to be offline for a bit. In the end, we were offline for a few hours before AT&T got someone to come out and switch the cablemodem to the new address. So that was easy.
However: in the downtime, the server disappeared. Which caused a couple of problems in setting up the new cablemodem, since my computer was set to hit gremlin.net on startup. Eventually, we worked out that we were online, but gremlin.net wasn't.
What seems to have happened was that the server's IP Address failed. Which can lead to a downtime of a couple of days before the entire 'net catches up to the change. In this case, though, the SysAdmin was on the other side of the country when it failed, so it was actually down for about a week. Obviously, it's back now.
Beyond all that, my car broke again. The bypass burned out and the cooling system failed again. I think it's mostly fixed now; I kinda underestimated the amperage last time. I may still be underestimating at thirty; if so, I'll kick it up to fifty when this one burns out.
I think everything else currently works.
Beyond that, there's a bit of news here. After years of excuses, I've finally decided--mostly at Hunter's insistence--to release Phobovore after all. Not the comic, though that'll be out soonish, too; the novel.
I wasn't going to release it at all, because it's a bit too...much. I was in a really bad mood in 1995, when I wrote most of it. Of course, I'm in a pretty bad mood now, too. So: Phobivore will be released on 21st September 2003.
There's other news, but I'll hold off on that for now. My head hurts right now.
More later....
--Gremlin