2009-10-20:

Rather a sad commentary if you think about it. So on my way to my 9:30, a tragedy to balance yesterday's success, I pulled into the street at house number 1. My destination was number 22. From 1-22 I saw no less (and no more) then four "for sale" signs, including #22 where I was stopping. And this was Fairport. Okay, maybe life isn't worth living there like it is where I live, but they were nice houses, on a pretty nice street. Wild. So her problem (which of course was not explained correctly to me at all) was my mortal enemy, the BSOD. (You thought I was going to say shark, didn't you? That joke was yesterday) Sadly, this story does not have the fairy tale ending of yesterday. First thing I did was run a memory check, because the error message was one I hadn't seen before. Something about a process trying to terminate a thread that didn't belong to that process. So a new one on me. Well, no matter what I did, swapping the RAM, changing the CPU, pulling out the PCI cards, MEMTEST 86 would hang before it had gone 40 seconds. Originally I thought it might be dust, her heatsink was clogged with it. But cleaning it gave no better result. But her data is safe, just her machine is toast. The HD was from 2002, meaning the machine has been around awhile. Still, I hate telling people there's not much I can do. Came home, had one call. Colored the comic from yesterday and ate lunch. It's now 1:00, I'm bored. Oh yeah, a call! And he's only 10 minutes away, and he's there? I'm gone. Kind of an odd problem there, too. In Vista there's this "security feature" called UAC or User Access Control which basically pops up a dialog box saying "are you sure you want to do that" for pretty much everything. Yes, this is Microsoft's idea of "security". Anyway, when his machine booted it just booted to a blank screen with a mouse curser. Hey, that is more secure, right? I could start the explorer.exe process with task manager, but trying to explain the task manager to a couple of 80 year olds wasn't my idea of the best solution. So I messed around, and searched google, and tried various things, when it hit me. Stuff run from the task manager runs with administrative privileges. Maybe, just maybe, UAC has gotten messed up and is preventing it from running somehow. So I just plain old turned it off. And what do you know, it booted fine after that. So I guess in a way it was working "as designed". Windows itself is the biggest security risk of windows, after all. Still not sure *why* that worked, I'll have to dig deeper into UAC sometime. Came back home at 3:00. My GPS is still falling off the windshield, so I thought maybe the seal wasn't strong enough and slapped a bunch of scotch tape on it. Didn't have any bourbon tape. Gin tape would have worked okay too. We'll see how it holds. Wanted to get the maps loaded into it, don't know why they weren't, the software, if I'm reading it right, is there. So I have this crappy WinME laptop a customer gave me because it's busted so I thought I would reload it with 98 and try downloading the maps. The thing was this laptop has no CD drive. So I challenged myself to load Win98 on it with no drive. Fun? Are you mad? This IS fun! Must be something hardware wise wrong with it. Got Win98 setup all happy, but it still crashes on boot. Sigh. Oh well, there's another train, there always is. Went to my 5:30. On the way there I saw a large flock of wild turkeys running around on both sides of the road. Cool. The GPS didn't stick, but at least with the tape it didn't fall down either. So that's still a problem. All kinds of things to do at the 5:30, none of which I had been told about, of course. First her internet wasn't working. Took about five minutes or so to get the cable light, and then it didn't provide an address. Called Time Warner, they'll come out. Then there was a mini laptop to clean out she had bought from someone else, and her boyfriend? (he didn't live there, don't know what relation he was) was there with his mini (the one I had cleaned out a couple of weeks ago) with a BSOD. Great. Talking about how user32.dll was missing. Right. Had to hook up an external CD drive to boot it, but it did and chkdsk seemed to put it to rights. Then sold her a router to use with the mini and I was done. Naturally it was dark out so it took me a bit of creative driving to get home. (That means I kind of got lost) No problem, I knew the area, just in daylight. No problem. The GPS isn't backlit, I guess they never expected you to use it in the dark. Or maybe I just missed that feature. It's possible, you know. Two more calls, total of four. Got to spend an hour on the phone with a lady trying to use facebook, who basically didn't know what the heck she was doing. I want that hour of my life back. Got to eat at 9:00, sigh. Didn't actually book a darn thing for tomorrow? Well, the hotel wants their two machines to print, while they only have one printer. My advice, get a second printer. I can't set up sharing, the machine that's plugged into the printer has drive protection software on it. I spoke about it earlier, but for those just joining us, (welcome!) it basically tricks you into thinking you're making changes by writing them all to a virtual partition, which gets wiped out when you reboot. And of course the password to turn it off was lost in the mists of time. I suppose I could put it on the other machine, but sharing a printer? Well, I'll talk to them and see what they want to do. Guess it's back to the bleak, lonely, pointless emptiness of my hopeless, futile predicament. (Yes, I watched a Red Dwarf episode last night) Current Lyrics: I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly, I'll do what it takes until I touch the sky! Sean called! Oh Dea Es Tea time, oh yeah!