Terminally Incoherent

Oh boy… My home PC did a number on me once again. I’m currently confined to the laptop propped up on the nightstand next to my bed. Yeah, I can’t even sit at my desk, because I have a CRT which is obscenely long in the back and takes up 85% of my desk space. Typing from my bed can be done in two positions: uncomfortable, and fucking uncomfortable. The laptop is kinda big to actually be a lap-top.

The desktop was working just fine for the most of the day yesterday. In fact, I only did two changes to the system in the last few days. First one was installing the intelisense drivers to support my brand new Microsoft Sidewinder Mouse that I got for Christmas. I will write a review at one point btw, but seeing how my desktop is out of commission right now that post is on the back burner. I restarted the system after the installation and it was fine. The second change was a Windows Media Player update. Recently I noticed that I was experiencing weird discoloration when playing WMV files. In hindsight, I think this issue started when I updated by graphic card’s drivers but initially I thought it might be a media player or a codec issue. I usually use VLC for most of my media but for an obvious reason, WMV files sometimes work better in the MS player.

Since I hardly ever use Windows Media Player, I figured I might as well update it. So I hit the “check for updates” menu item, and allowed it to pull down and install required files. Oddly enough it asked me to reboot afterwards. So I did, and as windows was shutting down I went to grab some food. When I came back, I was greeted by a blank screen with a single dash blinking in the upper left corner.

So here is the situation: when I power up the machine I can see the POST screen, and I can access the BIOS as normal. Right after the POST the screen goes blank and I get that damn blinking dash. I can boot from the CD normally - and in fact, when I booted Knoppix, I was able to access and back up all my data on the C drive. It doesn’t seem to be a hard drive or a controller failure - it even passed the quick built in Dell IDE diagnostic test available from the F12 boot menu.

I ran CHKDSK on the drive from the recovery console and it said it found and repaired some errors but this did not fix my issue. I even ran FIXBOOT to write out a new boot sector, but that didn’t help either.

My next step will probably be FIXMBR, but I don’t want to do that just yet. As far as I can remember, this would always hose the partition table and make the problems worse. So I want to make this the very last step, before formating and reinstalling windows. If I hose a partition or two then, who cares. Before that I want to make sure my backups are working, and uncorrupted. Since I was using Knoppix to write to a NTFS partition, I want to test the backed up files and make sure they are ok before I do any irreversible changes to the master boot record.

Anyway, did anything like this ever happen to you? Any suggestions on how to fix it without killing my current windows install?

Sigh… At least this didn’t happen yesterday or on Christmas Eve. It would surely ruin the holidays for me.

If you celebrate it, Merry Christmas! If you don’t happy whatever you celebrate, be it Chanukah, Kwanza, Festivus, winter solstice or whatever!

Btw, you should know where is the Robot Santa from. If you might be reading the wrong blog.

And yes, this is my way of saying I have nothing today. We will return to our usual content tomorrow. In the meantime, have fun and safe holidays. Now excuse me while I go play some more S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

I came back home yesterday to find out that my cable was down. This meant no TV, and no internet until Saturday. Yup, you heard it! Saturday! Why? Because Shitcast Cable does not have any openings tomorrow and generally they don’t fucking give a shit. In my town, you can either have Comcast, or go fuck yourself. Those are pretty much the two alternatives and that’s how they treat the customers here. And, of course the technicians they hire have no higher brain function.

I mean, I could say they are all legally retarded, but that would actually be offensive to people who have actual mental retardations. And I’m serious - there were two mildly retarded kids working in the local Taco Bell at one point. And I have to tell you - that was probably the best customer service in this while fucking county. They were fast, they rarely made mistakes, they were hard working and very serious about their job. People call them “slow” but you don’t know slow until you have met the Comcast technicians who service my town. The fuckers move slow, think even slower and have absolutely no clue what the hell are they doing.

For example, one time two of these guys were doing some service call in the house and they decided to completely disconnect all the cables and connect them back. Unfortunately we had both a VCR and DVD player in that room. The setup was something like this: cable box connected to VCR, VCR connected to the DVD player, which in turn connected to the TV. Comcast monkeys #1 and #2 connected the cable box to the TV, and then hid the spare cables under the rug and claimed it was always this way. When we insisted that they connect everything the way it was they said they have to get something from the truck and then drove away. Calling them monkeys is actually doing disservice to our primate cousins. I seriously think that the fact those people have opposable thumbs is just a fluke - some genetic mutation in the pile of shit that they crawled out of.

Anyway, I have no TV and no internet for half of the weekend, because Comcast doesn’t fucking give a flying shit if I cancel or not. My dad walked outside and noticed that there are two cables running to our house. One is actually connected to a splitter, while the other one is just dangling next to it. Why?

Ok, remember that whole rant about Comcast technicians in this area being worthless sacks of horse shit? That’s precisely why. At one point in time some genius decided that we should put half of the house on one line, and the other half on the second one to improve signal strength and connection speed. So he actually pulled a second cable from the pole to the house and set it up that way. We were actually pretty happy, because he actually *gasp* did some actual work to help us. And as we all know, this only happens once every few hundred years on a full moon when all the planets are aligned. The neighbors actually came outside and started gawking. I also heard them whispering about the age of Aquarius, Cthulhu, end of times and etc.

The next guy that was fixing our connection decided he doesn’t understand what the other guy did. Then he decided it was stupid, retarded and the other guy was an idiot. He seemed shocked and disgusted that his predecessor would go to so much trouble - that he would actually even consider helping the customer. So he disconnected one cable (possibly out of spite), put in a splitter. Naturally he didn’t remove the cable - so it was just dangling there in the wind, making strange knocking noises in the night until we clamped it down.

So for shits and giggles we decided to check if the dude ever bothered to actually disconnect that 2nd cable. Remember, these dudes are breed and intensively trained to avoid any kind of work and be as rude to the customer as possible. Sometimes they may even spew corrosive venom at your face just like Newman did in Jurassic Park. And no, it was not the lizard who was spitting the venom - you are confusing the movie with the book. :p Also note that we had no TV or internet. And when we don’t have those two fundamentally essential things, we get restless and get interesting ideas. So shits and giggles were imminent.

So we went outside, disconnected the regular cable, and plugged in the dangling one into the splitter. Lo and behold, our cable was back. No one ever bothered disconnecting that odd cable. I mean, climbing the pole requires that you have… I don’t know - life force and motivation? The walking zombies of Comcast have neither. All the have is deep, unexplainable hatred for the customer and absolute lack of understanding of anything related to technology.

Apparently something happened to that wire during the thunderstorm today. For once, I’m actually grateful for the inborn laziness of the Comcast drones. Thanks to their complete lack of attention to detail, I had my TV and internet back on the same day and didn’t have to wait till the fucking Saturday.

Question is - is this legal? I’m pretty sure it is, because I’m still paying them, and they are the people who put that wire there. It’s not like I randomly pulled a rouge wire from the pole. They did that - all I did was to swap the two wires outside my house. I don’t see anything wrong with that and if they say anything about it on Saturday I will fucking kick them in the balls.

My primary HD on my Windows box finally died. We had a power outage when I was at work, and when I came back the machine would consistently boot into BSOD claiming that “boot drive is not mountable”. The drive was acting funky anyway, so this is not a huge surprise.

So the machine I use at home the most is temporarily out of commission till I reinstall windows on the new drive. In other words, I’m windowless for today, and probably tomorrow until I get everything back in order. Fortunately I still have my laptop so it’s not the end of the world.

I booted Knoppix on the machine and I can still access the drive so I should be able to restore everything as needed. I was also pretty good with backups - but of course, the power outage happened on a backup day so I have no clue if it finished. I do have a 60 GB file on the external drive which was last modified at 3pm today, but it might as well be corrupted. The earlier backups are from April and May which is not so great.

But, again - since I’m able to access the drive from Knoppix I should have no problems pulling the data off of it later on. Most of my important stuff was on the secondary drive anyway. So I’m not panicking just yet. At most I will loose my Firefox preferences folder, and some saved games, and whatever crap I had thrown onto the the desktop.

So my plan for today is:

1. Pull the band HD
2. Install Windows
3. Go through the usual post-installation tasks such as hunting down drivers, installing applications and etc
4. Check if the latest backup was ok, and try to restore the most crucial files.
5. ???
6. Profit

Whatever I planned to blog about today and tomorrow is going to get pushed back, because this crap will likely take me a while.

My brother’s girlfriend decided that she will buy her man a shit-brick for his birthday. I tried to intervene and explain to her than she should buy him an iPod instead. They are in the same price bracket, and the iPod is about septillion times better, cooler and more awesome. I tried to explain that giving someone a Zune is highly offensive, and in some states it is considered as legal grounds for divorce. I tried to tell her that US intelligence in Iraq uses Zune as a torture device which was reported to be more effective than water boarding and reality TV. But it all seemed to fall on def ears.

Then it turned out that my brother has some deep seated hatred for everything Apple, that he flat out refuses to use an iPod, and he actually doesn’t mind using a Zune. And yes, he is somehow related to me by blood. Don’t ask me what happened here.

Don’t get me wrong - I can totally understand baseless hatred toward a specific brand. I don’t mind that. He can hate Apple all he wants. But there is just no reason to turn blind hate into willingness to use Zune. That’s just not right.

I probably should mention that his girlfriend actually likes Vista. Of course her system is already horribly broken, infected with all kinds of trojans and rootkits, and basically past the point of repair. But of course she blames Dell for that. Which kinda makes sense in a weird way.

Only person who blames software issues on the hardware vendor would actually consider using Zune.