You know you don't want to hear it. Onward to the complaining!

 

Right, so last night I'm talking to this lady who says the laptop is "doing the same thing" it did before, and of course this helps me to know exactly who they are. So I ask "is this the laptop I put linux on because I couldn't get windows to load?" Rather then give me the correct answer of "No, you replaced the hard drive in it" or "What's linux?" she answered in the affirmative. So I dutifully rolled my "research check" and figured out the ways the GRUB bootloader can be rewritten and how to repair it. This I believe I'm fully prepares me for my trip into Victor where the laptop is.

As I get closer, I realize, wait, this isn't the route to take to linux laptop kid, what the?

 

Thanks for wasting my time lady.

 

Turns out it was the laptop I replaced the HD in less then a month ago, it wasn't booting. It wouldn't even boot in safe mode, after about three seconds of trying it gave up. And of course with no more "repair" like XP had, it was reload time. Woohoo.

 

So I was late to my 11:30 by half an hour, and was greeted by a "you need to reactivate Vista... for no reason" screen. Oh, and you can't use that so called "internet" activation, no. You have to pick up a PHONE, and slowly, slowly type in a 45 digit number into your phone keypad. Then you get read back out another 45 digit number you get to punch into a bunch of boxes. There's a fat man doing a monkey dance I'd like to punch out. Because this method is so much more... something then the two machines talking to each other, rather then me cursing out a robot voice and wishing dizzying scenarios of violence and destruction upon certain individuals which thought up this "activation" crap in the first place. That was their major problem anyway, so then it was goodbye again.

 

As the next one was 5 minutes away from grandma's house and 2 hours later, I went over there and got the steps painted. And they look pretty good if I say so myself. They were scraped, swept, sanded, washed, painted in forty five minutes. How about that? I could have done some scraping of the garage, but I would have to get tarps out and set them all up and that was just not going to happen so I just read instead. 

 

Then to a Mac user I didn't realize was a Mac user or I would have done most of what they wanted over the phone. Somehow he had plugged in his fax machine to the ethernet port of the Mac. And the keyboard was dead, and I was like, did you change the batteries? Which seemed like a startling revelation to her to say the least. "Oh, batteries?" like "Oh, a byakhee has just descended from space and eaten me?" Whatever.

 

Then back home. I think I have the laptop done, finally, after reloading SP3 to get the network to grab an IP address again. (hate windows) Then I had a Mac dropped off with an odd problem. New stuff written to a flash drive was getting corrupted. Well, after a bunch of testing I finally worked out the flash drive seems to be fake. It reports 2GB of space, but anything past 500MB just sort of gets lost. So I think he got ripped off. At least your Mac isn't broken!

 

(not that it would be)

 

Been watching an anime I heard about recently, Toaru Majutsu no Index, to see how his power worked. He can basically cancel any supernatural power by touching it, be it magic spells or ESPer abilities, both which exist in his world. Thought it might be an interesting "touched" character for Demongate high. 

 

So three for tomorrow, all in the morning. All three which are not very... deep? The first, says Vista keeps saying her backup failed. The next, a noisy fan. Then that stupid scanner thing over at the mortgage place. Hate that thing. As I then have the afternoon free I'll probably set up tarps and try to get the garage doors scraped off in one go. We'll see how it works out.

 

Otherwise, looking forward to the beat down on Friday at Sean's (Carlita beats down everybody, that is) oh, and before that I'll be over helping clean out the garage as my Mother's Day present. Yup, don't even have to pay me for that one, Mom. Ivy? Oh yeah. Painting. Yup. But this, nope, no way no how. Mizzy is back to her studying :-( so it'll just be the three of us guys, how boring. Don't worry, all the violence will cheer me up.