Wednesday
Called in to temp job. Camera arrived! PC fan (on the board, not the case one) died that morning and thought no biggie, my Love would fix it when he came home. (The irony of course being that I had a new camera and I no longer had a pc to upload the new pics to.) Turned out that we had to go buy a new fan. Went out, did that, came home put it in and suddenly the pc wouldn't boot at all. Seems like either the motherboard or the processor got fried, dead or otherwise kaput. So, no computer for me. Bah.
Watched the last episode ever of Angel. Very sad. Only an hour and a damned cliffhanger ending. People are idiots if it doesn't get picked up by another network. Morons. Also watched the season finale of West Wing - with another cliffhanger but that's ok, because it'll be back in the fall.
Thursday
Turns out the boss was gone until next week from my temp job. Came in the office and it was dead. Besides me, there's only two other people even working on that side. Car was overheating on drive in to work. Let the car cool down and got some antifreeze at the Walgreens just up the road and added it that morning.
No spare parts that Love could get from work (they often have old parts they don't need/can't use anymore that he can get to fix problems with either of our pc's) so didn't have any way of fixing my computer. No computer for me.
Friday
Love decides he'll sacrfice his own pc so that I can have one still. I use mine more plus I have the new camera (and only a 16mb starter flash card so with no computer to upload to, I can't really use it). We decide that while we're at it, we'll go ahead and finally make the jump for me up to WinXP. I was still using Win98SE. Problem was that my harddrive was full (just around a gig left on it) so we had planned on adding a second hard drive and making that one the new primary and install XP on it. So, he took his hard drive out of his case and put my new one in, got it ready and installed a fresh new copy of XP Pro. Put my old hard drive in (with everything I ever owned from photos, to music, to html, etc.) as the secondary. I have long needed to go up to XP (errors and bugs on my very old and outdated 98) but long dreaded having to get my pc all configured again. There's nothing worse then a new OS that needs to be completely broken in the way you want it to be. It's like the old pair of shoes that you love. Has holes in it, but dammit, they're a perfect fit and worn in just the way you love. The new ones are all wrong and it takes forever to get them right.
Well immediately I had problems. My trackball - my beloved Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan suddenly wasn't working right. Even after downloading updated XP drivers for it. It just controlled like shit. Felt VERY glassy (despite being MUCH slower then normal) and I was utterly fumbling around with it. You have to understand, I've been using trackballs for like six years. And this one for over a year. I'm an utter pro at it. I fly with my trackball with the utmost of percision and I never funmble and miss menus. But I could NOT get it to configure the way I wanted it to. So I tried to install the older version of the drivers from my cd (9.6 rather then 9.79 which I had downloaded). Windows in it's infinate wisdom kept preventing me from installing those drivers because I already had newer ones detected. 'Round and 'round we went - all three of us trying to figure the damned thing out: me, my Love and our friend Rand (both of whom are major tech guys) - trying to uninstall the 9.79 drivers, install the 9.6 drivers and get it to work. Each time we uninstalled them, we had to reboot and then upon reboot, they'd be there again. Suddenly, after about an hour of the most absurd headache you can imagine, the pc decided it wanted to crash. The second I touched my trackball, we'd get a flicker of Blue Screen Of Death and the pc would reboot itself. The guys then spend another half-hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong - booting it up in safe mode and all that - but to no avail. Finally, they gave up. By this point, I was so upset I was crying. I don't take the frustration of trying to get my system working on the best upgrade well (I was having problems getting Netscape configured, windows itself configured and I couldn't maneuver around at all even before the driver and BSOD problems so I was at my breaking point of frustration.) It didn't encourage me in the slightest. I who was already disgruntled about needing to move to XP facing crashes within the first 30 minutes of using it.
Left, went to Costco and used the birthday cash I had gotten from my mom and nanny on getting a memory card for my new camera. (It was supposed to be for clothes which I really need, but I'll get that out of my check from the temp job two weeks from now.) The 16mg card (13 shots) just wasn't going to cut it and I wouldn't be able to do anything with it until I got a larger one. Made me feel a bit better just because I now can use my new camera.
That night, my Love took the new hard drive out and just set up his case with my old hard drive and good old, shabby Win98SE installation. Worked right away. *sighs* Ok, so problem is that he has no pc now at all (at least on XP, he could have a login and so could I giving him some pc usage), and I am still out of HD room, can't seem to get a clean, fresh copy of XP to work, can't have the dvd-rom that he had (because of OS issues) and don't have my burner drive either (because of open bay issues). But, I have my files, net settings, mail and for the moment, a pc.
Saturday
Went and saw Shrek 2. It was funny but not as fresh as the original. Puss stole the show. He was so hysterical when he did the big cat eyes thing. Cracks me up just thinking about it. The theater was showing it literally ever half-hour on the hour and each showing was literally selling out.
After that was the NHL Eastern Confernece finals, game seven. Awesome. Bolts of course won it. They're going to play for the Cup now against the Flames. I'm so thrilled for the Bolts because they're a good, young, talented team and they've worked really hard the last couple years. They deserve the recognition they're finally getting.
Today, Sunday
Went and had breakfast (ok, lunch) at Cracker Barrel. It's good food and it's cheap. Which is good. Then we wandered around Best Buy a bit, just window shopping.
My hand is really killing me so typing this all up probably was a bad idea. I have problems with the fingers on my left hand (my non-dominant hand). The joints ache sometimes, get stiff and generally just really hurt. I think I might have a low-level arthritis in it. There's just no reason that the joints on my left hand would hurt. Most days it's ok, but somedays - like today - it's just hell. Started with the index finger, but has since seemed to spread to the other fingers as well. It often hits my ring finger the worst, which really leads me to believe it's a joint problem. What in the world would you do to your secondary hand's ring finger to make it hurt? Nothing, so guess it's just a fun health quirk. What worries me is my mom has connective tissue disorder (including lupus, sclerederma, raynauds and a few others) which seem to be genetic in nature and things like joint problems are some of the first signs. It's in the same family of conditions as rheumatoid arthritis for example. Hopefully, it's just a very minor arthritis that I have and nothing more. I try not to worry about it too much, but every now and then I have a bad day like today where it really bugs me. (And yeah, that includes typing.) It's one of the reasons I insist upon a natural keyboard and trackball; it helps minimize the pain. When I used to have a regular keyboard and mouse, I'd have pain in both my hands and both my wrists. Now I generally only have the pain in my left fingers and very rarely my left wrist. So that's better anyway.
Hrm. Well Love just came by and wants to run out to the store in search of a food item for dinner. Guess I better close this up. That's my crazy week update for now. I need to install my camera software and upload a few pics to show off still so maybe I'll try to get to that this evening. If not, then I'll do it tomorrow after work.
Ciao.
~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream
at 5/23/2004 06:09:07 PM ~
~
