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Shoot me now.
Feb. 21st, 2013 06:40 pmAfter writing this post, I'll be returning to a cheery article from the most recent New Yorker about a recent mass murderer who, it turns out, shot and killed her brother in 1986.
Pity my own sisters didn't have such good aim.
To put it mildly, February has sucked a coop full of eggs. At one point, I wrote, if it got any worse it was bound to jam into reverse, crash through the back wall of the garage and start fucking up January. It hasn't done that, yet, but there's still a full seven days of this month for it to make mischief with. Today will be hard for it to top, though.
----
Last night, I finally got home with my beautifully restored, data-saved, functioning computer. By 9 or so this morning, I'd succeeded in getting all the part two weeks of data restored from the various backups, flash and external drives that had cobbled together to enable me to work. I even got my phone properly synced to it and all my tunes back on it. Portlandia awaited tonight- two episodes worth!
And then I saw the lights go out on Broadway.
Computers are pains in the ass when they've been out of commission for even a week or two. They insist on taking forever to seek out, download and install All The Things you missed while you were away. And so, my noontime virus scan rendered the thing virtually (virally?) useless for any other open program, until in the midst of it all, it just shut off. You know, like it was doing when it was hanging by a thread three Mondays ago and led to the repair.
The desk under the laptop was red hot at that point. I realized that I'd only heard the fan come on once the whole time after I got it back- and it didn't sound the least bit good- more like a stalled engine.
I gave it a bit of a break and it rebooted, but in the process of downloading/installing the essential two weeks worth of Windows updates, it blinked off again. Three tries later (with a good hour-plus trip to the gym in between), those were finally onboard, but I still had the minor issue of my printer/scanner driver having disappeared during the two-week hiatus (as they always do a few times a year, HP's Vista patches never really working well with its XP-designed hardware), and four times now, that download/install has killed the thing again.
So I'm back on the Stone Knives and Bearskins Express, and have my third trip to Rochester of the week in my future, to see if this beast can be saved or not. Why did it not do this until today? My working theory is that I'd left it out in my car for a whole afternoon and only ran it a couple hours last night, ensuring it never got especially warm. I'm testing that hypothesis now by putting it out in the Deep Freeze of our garage for the night, so I can once again try to backup my today's worth of work back onto this beast while I say goodbye to it for either another week or a forever or two.
----
And the gremlins weren't only kicking me in the shins.
One thing I did get to do during the coolness of this morning was try to restore our 2012 tax returns. Emily's seemed the easy-peasiest, since she has just one W-2 and is destined to get all her federal withholding back. Just one little problem: RIT got her social security number wrong on the form. (I had to have her check the actual card, lest I find I'd encoded it wrong on 20 straight years of tax returns ourselves, but no, it's on them.) That means she can't file until they issue an amended one, and who knows how long that will take.
So back I go now to tales of murder and mayhem. Can't get much worse, huh.
Pity my own sisters didn't have such good aim.
To put it mildly, February has sucked a coop full of eggs. At one point, I wrote, if it got any worse it was bound to jam into reverse, crash through the back wall of the garage and start fucking up January. It hasn't done that, yet, but there's still a full seven days of this month for it to make mischief with. Today will be hard for it to top, though.
----
Last night, I finally got home with my beautifully restored, data-saved, functioning computer. By 9 or so this morning, I'd succeeded in getting all the part two weeks of data restored from the various backups, flash and external drives that had cobbled together to enable me to work. I even got my phone properly synced to it and all my tunes back on it. Portlandia awaited tonight- two episodes worth!
And then I saw the lights go out on Broadway.
Computers are pains in the ass when they've been out of commission for even a week or two. They insist on taking forever to seek out, download and install All The Things you missed while you were away. And so, my noontime virus scan rendered the thing virtually (virally?) useless for any other open program, until in the midst of it all, it just shut off. You know, like it was doing when it was hanging by a thread three Mondays ago and led to the repair.
The desk under the laptop was red hot at that point. I realized that I'd only heard the fan come on once the whole time after I got it back- and it didn't sound the least bit good- more like a stalled engine.
I gave it a bit of a break and it rebooted, but in the process of downloading/installing the essential two weeks worth of Windows updates, it blinked off again. Three tries later (with a good hour-plus trip to the gym in between), those were finally onboard, but I still had the minor issue of my printer/scanner driver having disappeared during the two-week hiatus (as they always do a few times a year, HP's Vista patches never really working well with its XP-designed hardware), and four times now, that download/install has killed the thing again.
So I'm back on the Stone Knives and Bearskins Express, and have my third trip to Rochester of the week in my future, to see if this beast can be saved or not. Why did it not do this until today? My working theory is that I'd left it out in my car for a whole afternoon and only ran it a couple hours last night, ensuring it never got especially warm. I'm testing that hypothesis now by putting it out in the Deep Freeze of our garage for the night, so I can once again try to backup my today's worth of work back onto this beast while I say goodbye to it for either another week or a forever or two.
----
And the gremlins weren't only kicking me in the shins.
One thing I did get to do during the coolness of this morning was try to restore our 2012 tax returns. Emily's seemed the easy-peasiest, since she has just one W-2 and is destined to get all her federal withholding back. Just one little problem: RIT got her social security number wrong on the form. (I had to have her check the actual card, lest I find I'd encoded it wrong on 20 straight years of tax returns ourselves, but no, it's on them.) That means she can't file until they issue an amended one, and who knows how long that will take.
So back I go now to tales of murder and mayhem. Can't get much worse, huh.