Sunday 11th January 2004
So, this kinda sucks....
I just woke up. And my laptop was sitting on the desk, frozen on the startup screen--the little HewlettPackard logo--not doing much at all. Restarting it leads back to that, and no further.
Dropping into the diagnostics, it looks round, works out that the laptop is running at 2.4GHz, has half a gigabyte of additional RAM, and that there's No Operating System Found.
Really impressive is that I can't get the thing to start up from a CD either, which is really starting to bug me now. Something is seriously broken here.
I'm not sure what caused it. Partly because I'm not sure what the computer has been throug lately. The other night, Greenback wound up using it to look around and download several hundred cookies and registry infexions. I thought I'd killed them all, but it's possible I missed something. Maybe some sort of worm. In any case, the drive is effectively blanked now. Which kinda sucks, for several reasons.
As it happens, I printed out Pandemic the last time I added anything to it. So that much exists. What doesn't exist, unless I'm able to get it back somehow, is megabytes of notes on microbiology. How and why a given virus could do exactly what it needs to do in this novel. I think I remember most of it--potentially enough to go back and find the stuff I don't remember. But the specifics of the chatlogues regarding endogenous retroviruii are probably gone. Which, again, sucks. A lot.
Meanwhile, a few other things I've been working on lately are equally expunged. Some of the files for Deadache are on the server, but thirty gigabytes were simply on the laptop. Something I've been meaning to burn to CD, but...it's probably too late now. On the bright side, it's usually easier to build something in LightWave once you've done it already. That's one of those things that can't exactly be explained; you get it or you don't.
SiteoftheLivingDead.com is nicely equalised, of course. If it exists on the server, then it exists in the universe. And not much exists on the server. There again, it should be easy enough to rewrite it all; it's just annoying that I'd got started on the content and never got round to uploading it.
And so on. Various stuff cancelled out by this mess. Including, of course, today's episode of RFD. Along with any other episodes not uploaded anywhere. In fact, I don't even know the passwords and protocols to upload shows anymore; I had those bookmarked in the FTP software. I'll have to EMail Reg to get those back.
On the bright side, I got the laptop at BestBuy, of all places. Traditionally, if I can't figure something out on a computer, those guys just write it off as Broken, and replace the thing with a newer model. Which it's about time to do anyway; 2.4GHz laptops aren't all that impressive anymore. The HPzd7015 seems to cost about what I paid for my ze5185 a year ago. Maybe they'll just give me one of those.
I kinda hope so, anyway. When the PCG818 I got from SoundTrack broke...that's a long story documented elsewhere. When the FX210 I got from CircuitCity broke, they just gave me a few thousand bucks in store credit. Ironically, part of that covered the price of Hunter's HPze1250, which I'm regrettably using to type this some idiot at HewlettPackard thought it'd be fun to move te Control key a few spaces inland, so I keep trying to hit the Function key to paste in the 'IMG SRC="images/gif/indent.gif" WIDTH="50" HEIGHT="1" BORDER="0"' every time I hit Enter]; they didn't happen to have the ze5185 I wanted. But, I have it on good authority that BestBuy tend to do the same sort of thing--at least for people who buy iMacs, which is probably description enough. I get the impression that BestBuy have worked out it's easier to replace a machine than work out how to fix it, especially when the general diagnostic complaint is 'thing broke; make better'.
Oh well. With any luck, I'll have a computer again within a day or two. Either because BestBuy can fix of replace mine, or because I go back to CircuitCity and buy a new one. It's just an irksome delay in a few things.
Naturally, I don't really have a Spam of the Day now, unless Hewlett Packard...Operating System Not Found counts. Although I could take a quick moment to mention to a few idiots spamming me with offers for '\/1@gr@' that haxoring 'viagra' isn't actually clever; instead, it's an admission of guilt. If your product is such universally-recognised spam that you've got to misspell it to trick everyone's spamfiltre, then disguising it merely assures us that you're spamming with malice aforethought. Grow a brain.
I guess that's it. Hopefully, I'll have my own computer for next time.
More later....
--Gremlin