chuma.org

This. Weekend. Sucked.

Well, to be fair, only Saturday sucked. Well, it sucked, and then for a brief, shining moment, it was good again, but then it sucked again. Let me explain.

On Friday evening I was installing my company’s VPN software on my home PC, so I can attach to the corporate network and use such wonderful software as Microsoft Outlook. Well, actually it was so I can work from home a day a week. So anyways, I run the installer with nary a hitch, it says to reboot, so I do. After said reboot, I try to run the software, at which point instead of the login screen, I get a message from Windows Bloody XP that says that there is a known compatability problem with this application, and I can’t run it. Please go away.

Oh joy. Once again, the vagrancies of changing APIs rear their ugly head. Pissed off, I go to uninstall the software, but right in the middle of uninstalling, my computer decides to reboot. Oops. Now thoroughly pissed off, I glance at my watch, realize the time, and just hit the power button with the intent of fixing the infernal device in the morning.

Morning rolls around. I hit the power switch on my PC, and nothing. Well, almost nothing: there’s power, the fans are spinning, but the board won’t self-test, and there’s no video signal. Normally I would panic, but this has happened with this machine before: it don’t like to wake up. So I try, and try, and try, and try to get it to boot. Same crap. Despair starts taking over. Even if I unplug everything except for the motherboard, video card, and a stick of RAM, the system still won’t POST. Bad. So I call Michael, Sandy’s brother, who built the machine for me in his computer store. Tell him what’s wrong, he suggests the power supply is toast. Out I go to grab another (higher rated) power supply to try. Still no go. I call him back, tell him it’s not the PS, and his immediate reply is “OK, I’ll come over”. He lives 2.5 hours away by car. Uhm, okay, he’s a really nice guy, so I guess it’s not that strange, he’s been here before. It’ll be just like another visit, but with a purpose.

A few hours later, he arrives with four friends. Hey, the guy hates driving alone apparently. Sandy is back home by this point. Him and his friends have brought me a new motherboard and CPU, and go to replacing my (most likely fried) one. To summarize:

Good things that happened:

• My computer got fixed, and I even got a faster CPU (but I did have to re-install Windows)
• We sold our old PS1 system
• We were having a good time

??? things that happened:

• Uhm, Mike told us that his girlfriend is most likely pregnant

Bad things that happened:

• One of Mike’s friends (accidentally) shattered a flourescent tube in our living room, resulting in an hour and a half of clean-up.
• We didn’t go see Bowling for Columbine like we had hoped.

Yeah, that’s about all. Yeah. I got to spend the rest of the weekend rebuilding my computer (with Win2000, thank you very much, WinXP can bite me) and generally not doing the things we had planned. Argh.