eddyfate

So previously I had complained about the weird service I was getting from Dell. I sent a message through the website to the Outstanding Issues department, and got a response back within 19 minutes via email. This morning, I was issued a new case number, and as of a few minutes ago, the status was that it was shipping. Also a few minutes ago, I actually received a comment from dellca, a Dell Customer Advocate named Larry. I sent him an email as well with the current situation of things. I'll feel a little better once I actually have a package tracking number in my hands, but thus far Dell's done a good job of making it up to me.

Does anyone know how I can download photos taken on a RAZR V3 to a computer?

I've been having a pretty crappy day thus far. Nothing particularly bad, but a pretty constant buzz of annoyance from a variety of avenues all day. It has been capped off by the realization that I haven't heard any word about my replacement notebook dock from Dell, and after 15 minutes of digging around on the website and forcing it to speak to me, I discover that my service call order has been cancelled for some unknown reason. So, now I have to email Dell back and ask them WTFd00d?! And tonight looks to be a long night of Mage work, so the odds of my mood improving are not good. Maybe my cardio workout today will help me to blow off some steam.

I'm having a shitty time:

* Burst a tire on my car hitting a curb. It was my own damn fault, and the second time I burst this same time on this same curb (the one leading to our garage). I'll have to take a different route to park in the garage, but I've been pissed at myself ever since.

* The satellite internet people jerked us around, and we have to pay another $125 because we have a flat roof (something they didn't bother to tell us about earlier). So our options are stay with bad customer service and bad internet, or go with bad customer service and potentially good (and expensive) internet.

* We had to move the treadmill, couch, and other heavy shit last night. We'll have to move more tonight, either before or after we work out.

* Some of my games fell over during the moving last night, scattering cards and pieces everywhere. One I had to repack twice because I dropped it as I was putting it away again.

* IC annoyances in the Cam due to OOC frustrations that were no one's fault.

It's all petty shit, but I was really pissed at myself for the first item, which made all of the rest really annoying.

I haven't updated worth a damn in a while.

The main reason is because I've been focusing on updating my PrivateJournals. Forcing myself to write about something, anything, no matter how private or stupid has been a good experience for me. Sometimes it bugs me because it feels like a shitty first draft, but then again I'm getting more comfortable with writing shitty first drafts, so it balances out.

Tampa was good. It was much more relaxing than my usual convention experience (although my PC is pretty fucking stressed out). I got to meet and hang out with some people I've never met before, and also spend time with people I don't usually get to hang out with at conventions. I got sucked into a Trustee black hole [1] and was told some very surprising things while I was there. I also got to relax, just spending time walking around, writing, or reading a book. If it wasn't for the fact that I felt like hammered shit on Sunday, the vacation would have been completely relaxing.

I also got a very surprising business opportunity. I can't say any more about it. However, I can say something completely unrelated to it, which is that I have a decent-to-good chance of attending DragonCon and GenCon Indy this yearn (as well as another surprising offer of crash).

Jazz has been doing just fine, and was a welcome companion in Tampa. I recently rearranged my office, which caused me to lose my wipeboard, but I'm experimenting with a piece of free software (Stickies, which are virtual post-it notes) that might replace that. [2] Not that I NEED to replace it, but it's one less thing cluttering up my office.

Which reminds me, I need to declutter my office.

Seasons 2 of both Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who have been hit or miss, but good enough for me to keep watching them. I'm hoping Season 2 of Deadwood will also be good. The ECW leadup has also been pretty good, and I'm hoping the actual premiere tonight will continue to hold with the quality.

So there you go. All updatified.

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Footnote 1: Strangely, I'm friends with nearly all of the Trustees in the Camarilla, but I'm not one.

Footnote 2: I basically have two "to do" lists, one on my PDA and one on my wipeboard. There's some logic in why one gets used and not the other, but it's escaped my conscious mind.

Much of this weekend was checking things off the massive To Do list:

* Finished migrating things off of my old computer and onto the new one.
* Named new computer (Jazz). [1]
* Reorganized office to accomidate docking station. [2]
* Played Requiem.
* FAILED to attend a "State of the Game" meeting for Forsaken that I wanted to be at.
* Went to a wedding for greebotrill's coworker. [3]
* Exchanged text messages with a couple of friends.
* Got my double-breasted black suit and grey sports coat altered to fit better since I lost weight.
* Got a new keyboard that works with my docking station for $20.
* Mostly caught up on massive email backlog.
* Chores around the house to get other things in order.
* Started organizing myself for my short story submissions.
* Updated my To Do list on my Palm to cover everything I have outstanding, so I don't feel like I have to do it all at once.
* Prepared to move a bookshelf into my office. [4]
* Have written in one of my journals every day thus far. [5]

This week is mostly finishing a few things I'm in the middle of, and preparing for Neglect. I'm not feeling particularly social, but we'll see how I feel when I get there.

( Footnotes )

Laptop is here, about eleven days earlier than I expected to get it.  Got it last night, and had a couple of interesting experiences:

1) I'm not used to a 16:9 ration ("widescreen") display.  Wallpaper looks a little stretched, and it's a bit shorter than I'm used to (although the width feels right).  DVDs play just fine, though.

2) In the process of getting it onto our wireless network and uninstalling a few of the preinstalled software packages (like Yahoo! Musicmatch and AOL and Netzero and other ISP offers I didn't want), the laptop started going into an endless loop of processing SOMETHING when it hit the network.  I spent an hour trying to figure it out, when garchangel was like "Call Dell.  That's why we bought a Dell computer."  I was shocked by the idea that I could ask for outside help.  I was about to call when I noticed a small icon in my taskbar that read "Dell Support."  I disabled the wireless network to break the computer out of the cycle, clicked it, and it ran a scan and said "problem fixed."  What?  I reenabled the network, and it seems to have worked.  Amazing.

It still seems to be a bit slower in places than I expected it would be, but I'm suspecting that there's a ton of programs running in the background that I don't need.  I wish I had some media for some of these programs so I could reinstall them later if I wanted to.  I'm also only using 65 gigs out of my 100 gig hard drive, probably because 35 gigs is the prepackaged restore image.  Now I'm just waiting for my old computer to move 40 gigs over the wireless network (which will probably take a day to complete).

Then, after my technological diversion of the past few weeks, I crack down and get back to my writing.

Once again, I spoke too soon.  One DVD burned does not a fixed computer make, apparently.  garchangel decided that he's sick of me having to Frankenstein my computer.  I told him what I needed in a computer, he hit the Dell website and tweaked things to get the best deals, and we all balanced some numbers financially and came out with a reasonable $30 a month.  He found a desktop and laptop that were pretty similar in specs and about the same price, so I went with the laptop as I do just enough travelling and moving around that makes a laptop worthwhile if I'm not really losing all that much and there's no price increase.  Plus, wireless networks are becoming so prominent that a laptop is really attractive to me.  So, I'll be getting the following just in time for One Night Stand (June 11th for you non-wrestling types):


So, I'll have a docking station to keep my monitor and stuff around for easier computing in my office, but when I travel I won't have to constantly upload everything to Lappy^[1] to take with me.  I won't even really need a flashdrive except for really urgent files when it doesn't make sense for both greebotrill and I to take both laptops.  I can also do stuff I've been threatening to do like write my wrestling reviews as I watch TV and use the laptop for gaming (customized music on the fly, holding my game notes, electronic dicerollers -- the laptop can basically replace my game screen).  Maybe I can even be one of those cool kids that works on his laptop during Requiem games.

I'm frustrated that the $50 for a new hard drive is basically for nothing.  I don't have to buy a new computer, but it would save me a lot of frustration and quite possibly help with my writing, as well as be extremely convenient in a lot of other ways.  We're finally in a good enough financial position to where we can consider something like this.

Footnote 1: Lappy is my original refurbished Inspiron laptop from 1999 that I bought in 2001 (and the first computer I've owned that didn't have the name of a Transformer^[2], instead coming from homestarrunner.com).  Although I don't mention it much, my current desktop has had the name "Wreck-Gar" since the late '90s, because at least one piece has always moved into a new setup.  Our wireless network is named "teletran-1".  For the first time, I'll have to come up with a new name for my machine.  I'll have to play with it for a bit and see if a name comes to me.

Footnote 2: For reference, the 286 I owned before Wreck-Gar was named Grimlock, and the C-64 I owned before that was named Optimus.

Last night I came home to find out that mrogre was hanging out, and we were soon joined by banzaigrrl.  They joined us for dinner, XBox playing (Burnout Revenge on 360 is SEXY), book trading, and conversation, which was all a very pleasent change of pace.  Good thing they came over for dinner, too, as garchangel made a mountain of food.

I had the vague idea of catching up on my email last night, but instead when I wasn't being social I toyed with (and fixed) the conflict between my DVD burner and video card by stealing a different video card from greebotrill's old computer.  So now I'm at the phase where I install a few minor programs as I need them, and tweak things like Firefox as time and workflow permits to make it more useful and faster.  There's been idle talk of buying me a new computer (since I haven't had a completely new computer in many, many years), but right now I seem to be okay with salvaging parts thus far.  Next step: swap out the DVD-ROM that's dying, so my burner isn't doing all the heavy lifting.

Good news: Last night I got my new hard drive.  After finding out that many of my reformatting problems were due to a faulty DVD-ROM drive (grumble bitter), the install went smoothly.  I should be able to catch up on a fair portion of my email and whatnot tonight, and then maybe get back to the issue of what was causing problems with my burner.

Bad news: greebotrill slipped and fell down the basement stairs this morning.  It hurts for her to walk and sit, and she was feeling slightly nauseous.  I encouraged her to go to the ER (since it's not even a block walk from her train stop to school), but I don't know if she actually went.

Update: She's out of the ER.  Her tailbone isn't broken, but it might be fractured (they can't tell for sure).  She's got some medication and will sit on a doughnut for a few days, and we'll see from there.

This weekend was pretty sedate, and I was appreciative of that.  I got a good amount of reading done, finishing up my copy of the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday today.  I also got into What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew.  So, there's an upside to not having access to a computer.  We also watched Bloodrayne, and it was just as terrible as I expected it to be.

There was a local Requiem game, which was a lot of me helping the local Storytellers out because of some changes locally, as well as building more bridges between games in Missouri.  I think a bunch of us are debating going to Columbia next weekend to continue the bridge-building process.

My hard drive should be in my hands tomorrow, so I can get things back on track.  I'm hoping to have it all in order by Thursday, so I can catch up on a stack of emails I'm sitting on, as well as stuff like the UWA and Serenity.  I would also like to get moving on editing my three short stories so I can start pimping them for publication.

I also have some more motivationsal poster silliness from Midway City.

Day 3 of computer. Long story short, after a few different tries (including a shot with a couple of Linux distros [1]), my hard drive died. I scavenged one from greebotrill's old computer that I wasn't sure worked, and sure enough, it didn't. So now my computer is dead until I buy a new hard drive. Luckily I backed everything significant up, so I'm really just out a little money and a little time. The only thing I'm really behind on at this point is some Requiem email (since I need to reference documents on my computer) and uwa_live.

I've also gotten a fair bit of reading done. I skimmed over Serenity RPG again in preparation for the game tonight. I finished 361 and have started on What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. I've also been continuing to work my way through The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes III: The Novels.

Having free time (even if it's devoured by my computer right now) is making me think about my goals for this year. After this week, now that I seem to be past my sickness, I'm going to try to get back into the habit of working out. Then, maybe in a few weeks, I'm going to start a habit of writing for an hour a day as often as I can. We'll see how it goes.

[1] And if I could have gotten the wireless networking and avi playback to work without having to learn a lot of Unix, I would have seriously considered just migrating to SuSe and being done with it, since LINUX can install on my original hard drive, but XP won't for some reason.

Night 2 with computer: still had spyware stuck on computer, decided to try an XP repair. Seemed to work pretty well, until I realized that I needed to run Windows Update. IE 6 was missing (I uninstalled it in a failed attempt to remove the spyware), so I installed 7. It wouldn't work. So I dug around and installed 6, and it told me that a newer version of IE was on the computer and crapped out. So I dug around and found a hidden little file that can uninstall 7, and did so. AND IE 6 STILL WOULDN'T INSTALL.

Because of fucking Microsoft fucking proprietary fucking software, I decided to start clean (I had already backed up my data). garchangel gave me a disk that was an "unattended" XP installation -- you put it in and let it run. Neat! I did so, and got a blue screen of death. Twice.

So, tonight, I do it the hard way. Judging by the last time I did this, it'll take about eight hours, which means that I'll be doing this all night tonight and probably part of tomorrow. MAYBE my problems with the DVD burner will clear up. If not, I might have to get a new video card.

But I've gotten a fair bit of reading done recently. So that's positive.

For the past few days, I've been trying to get my computer to resolve a minor conflict between the DVD burner and the video card. I've had this problem for some time (90% of my DVD needs aren't an issue), but now that I had the time I wanted to confront it. I have tried everything I can think of, including downloading new software (DIKO free trial), but nothing seems to work. Then I noticed that somehow a virus and some spyware got past my protections and infected my system, probably from that software I downloaded. So all last night was spent trying to resolve that, and as of this morning it still wasn't completely dealt with, so I'll probably do more tonight. At some point I also need to start working on my Serenity game which starts Thursday, and catch up on email. The temptation to just get a new video card and reformat my computer (again) is very strong right now, though.

Last night was very, very small LARP. It was entertaining and mildly productive.

Today was the format and reinstall of my computer. Having done this a few times, I expected it to take most of today and part of tomorrow, but things actually went very smoothly, and nearly eight hours later I'm pretty much done (except for the little nitpicky things that I'll uncover during my normal computer usage). Putting the second 80GB drive was an amazing help, and now I have a drive that will do a complete backup (instead of a partial backup on my slow-as-shit 30GB drive).

Today garchangel and greebotrill got sick of the carpet constantly pulling up by the front door, so they ripped it up. There's linoleum floor under the carpet and padding, a subfloor under that, and another layer of linoleum before the original hardwood floors can be seen. I expect we'll be working on the floors now for at least a few weeks.

Did a little bit of work at home (mostly editing a review, although I didn't edit it nearly as much as it needed to be edited), but didn't get much more accomplished due to the combination of an impromptu ST meeting breaking out in my house (prompting garchangel and I to haul out our old Magic: The Gathering decks) and greebotrill migrating her computer over to her new laptop and allowing me to salvage her hard drive. Now I have two 80GB drives on my computer, so I can wipe the new drive, copy all my files over to it, then reformat the old drive and do a fresh install on it, something it's desperately needed for a couple of years now. That will likely take up most of my weekend.

There's a LARP scheduled for tonight that I have no real interest in attending. I debated statting out my second primary for the game instead (Jack Spade), but on reflection it will cause exactly the kinds of problems I wanted to avoid by having two active characters at the same time. And besides, I don't have the Lancea Sanctum book. So, I'll probably drag Nick out there, and likely have an okay time anyway.

And in other gaming goobery, RPG gamers who like silly sci-fi and Iron Chef will probably appreciate Intergalactic Cooking Challenge, which actually has some pretty interesting mechanics to reflect the "cooking entertainment" atmosphere.

Felt better yesterday -- not well, but better. I was well enough that greebotrill, garchangel, and I went to be social with morningsprite, banzaigrrl, and mrogre where we hung out and witnessed, among other things, a ballet movie and acapella video games. An entertaining evening.

I also sorted out why my hard drive wasn't defragging right, so that's done. Found out that something between my master and slave drive is slow, so copying files between is a LOOOOOONG process, but that's another project for another time. All in all, things are back in order.

Got my replacement cell phone, and I now have the most annoying ringtone (to other people) EVAR: a dalek saying "Exterminate" over and over and over. I'll probably replace it when it gets annoying to ME, but for the moment it amuses me.

Tried to read "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk, and just couldn't. Talked to caillile (who loaned it to me), and it could be because of other things I've read recently that made me balk on it, but I've decided I'll come back to it in a year or so and try it again. I liked "Fight Club" and "Diary", so it's not the author. So I finished up the second book of "Baker Street" (a graphic novel series about a former C.I.D. investigator who ended up taking cocaine, getting kicked off the force, and now is a matron in the punk scene around Baker Street in London, solving crimes), and now I'm starting on "V for Vendetta."

Ugh. Back to email work.

Yesterday I woke up with some minor stomach trouble, and since I didn't HAVE to be at work (boss is out on vacation all week), I decided to chalk up a sick day and recover. Spent most of the day sorting out a mysterious computer slowdown, which turned out to be a combination of XP services I didn't need running, a program hogging some system resources, and the fact that my main drive was over 50% fragmented. Also discovered that Firefox and Gmail weren't talking, and had to redownload all my extensions to get that working right. Then went through and cleaned up the majority of my email that's been sitting for days. I'm in the process of burning some DVD-Rs so I can get enough space on my harddrive to do a full defrag. Once all of THAT is done, I will hopefully be able to get back to work on a few projects I've been wanting to get to for a month (like getting the Spectrum site completely sorted out before I transition it off to cynthiacm).

Since most of my time for the past few weeks has been sitting in front of a computer and waiting for it to do something, I've also gotten a lot of reading done, burning through the entire five-book Hitchhiker's Trilogy before diving back into my "to read" stack.

Still haven't gotten my replacement cell phone, even though I paid for second-day shipping.

Anyhow, I'm back to work now, so I should do that.

Edit: I'm starting to feel ill again. Nothing serious, but it seems I didn't shake it as much as I originally thought.

Friday night: Entertaining Wordsmiths meeting, and more mexican food. Went home to relax in front of the TV.

Saturday: Found out that Google and Gmail was down, along with AIM. Decided to go ahead and get my computer sorted out (downloading things from my laptop, cleaning up files, updated some software, etc.) as well as clean Went to play in mrogre's D&D game, a suitably creepy crawl through an evil temple.

Sunday: Got up to find that chunks of our internet are STILL down. Called Charter, and they said that they would give us a call in a couple of days to make an appointment. No, they can't make the appointment NOW -- they'll LET US KNOW when they can come over. Charming. Afterwards, we rebooted the router, and I seem to have access to things again, but it's slow. So, assume that my access will be spotty for a while.

(morningsprite, I got your voicemail. My cell phone speaker is dying, so I've not been calling people unless I need to until I get my replacement in a day or two. Looking forward to seeing you this week!)

Getting mexican food last night and getting my computer together with only the most minor of problems helped a lot last night, as well as knowing that today we'll get the car tire replaced and having some solid ideas on how to sort out our money troubles. However, I'm still just emotionally exhausted, swamped with work and Requiem emails, and too drained to really appreciate the end of the Week of Ass. Tonight is the Windows Update Game as well as the wordsmiths meeting, tomorrow is D&D, and Sunday is a classical music concert with greebotrill.