Black Doggerel

...so. Some people get to have beautiful space and time ships that can hold a banquet hall, three spare console rooms, a garden, a room-sized model railway set and a small lake.

Me, I have a dimensionally transcendent coffee mug. Like the TARDIS, some of its functions are less than reliable; if I'm actually drinking the fucking coffee I'll find it holds no more than half a pint. It's only when I knock the sodding thing over and a bloody great coffee tsunami washes half my living room away it reveals its true nature.

Still, it forced me to finally dejunk and clean off my desktop, and since I had to do that anyway I'd run out of excuses not to replace my old monitor with the new (to me) flatscreen one that my mother Slaighted acquired for an extremely low price from her friend Nigel. So I has shiny clean desk and shiny new monitor.

And yet another reason to think fondly of my dear old friend that sent me my washable coffee-proof bendy keyboard. I LOVE YOU.

So I'm sitting there at the computer minding my own business. I shifted my weight slightly and my chair convulsed under me, then tipped me sideways onto the floor. Luckily, there's a collie bed on the floor immediately to the left of the chair; still more luckily, there was no collie on it at the time.

My nice solid computer chair is not so solid any more, apparently. The metal pole between its seat and its feet just snapped. Oops.

Good thing I had a usable spare. Thank you, topbit!

In other news, I fixed my computer! I'd been getting these freakily varied and universally alarming error messages, boot fails and sudden blue screens of death for weeks - I finally worked out that ALL the error messages and fails could be accounted for by the system being intermittently unable to find its own hard drive. Sometimes only for a second, which was making me deinstall things and worry about defective hard drives and/or corrupted operating systems - anyway, I opened the case, unplugged the leads connecting the hard drive to the motherboard, blew on them and plugged them firmly and carefully back in.

That was four days ago and (touching wood) she's had no problems since. YAY!

Herbal teas/infusions bought today:

Lemon and ginger
Orange, mango and cinnamon
Raspberry, strawberry and loganberry
African honeybush with a hint of lavender

All by Twinings.

I feel this is a manifestation of my occasional OCDness. I now have too many boxes of assorted non-tea teabags to fit in my tea and coffee cupboard, and I'm drinking so much of the fucking stuff I'm pissing like an ornamental fountain. Only not quite so ornamentally.

They do taste nice though. I'm drinking the orange and mango one now. And the supposedly sleep-inducing chamomile and valerian one does seem to help with the insomnia, although I have to cut it with a fruity one (two bags in my big pint mug) because it tastes like fragrant pondwater.

Also, my computer has taken to teasing me with unfathomably wacky errors, like this morning deciding that Firefox had been erased from the space-time continuum. As in, I'd click the icon, the cursor would change to busy mode like it was about to start, then nothing. I deinstalled and reinstalled it twice, ran all the virus and spyware checks, had hysterics at topbit on IM, and then discovered that she was willing to admit Firefox's existence in safe mode. Then once I had checked my email in safe mode, suddenly no problem. It's running fine.

She already did the same thing to AIM, and I haven't yet solved that. But I don't need AIM to run AIM, I use a client most of the time anyway. Firefox is a little more inconvenient to do without.

I blame myself. I was the one who thought it'd be funny to name the computer Iris. Now she hiccups and periodically deletes herself from the matrix. If I'd picked Rani or Romana I would never have had this trouble.

...computer keeps exploding. Spontaneous reboots, failed reboots, error messages flashing up too quick to read, aborted disc checks, crashes every time I try and run a virus or adware check.

I'd post details but they're different every time, and I doubt it's going to keep running long enough for me to read comments to this entry. I'd give up and read a book instead but a. I need the music playing to mask what I can of tonight's fireworks and b. I can't handle life without internet.

this fucking thing is fucking new. I run virus and adware checks up the wazoo. this is not meant to happen. I give up.

...anyway, the point of this entry: if I'm not online that will be why.

I HAS A NEW COMPUTER. She is sleek and shiny and black and fast and has more RAM than anything whose knobs I have ever had the privilege to fondle - with the possible exception of topbit, who is God.

Also God, by reason of having solved the the apparently insoluble soundcard driver problem via IM, is Matt who as far as I know has no LJ. He is out of fondling distance, but you can't have everything. I do, however, have a fine working computer with fine working sound. She has a dual core processor and hence her name is Iris - I had thought of running a poll to name her, but Iris appears to have stuck, so tough titty. Anyone with any better ideas can just go name their own hardware.

driveforlife will begin to resume normal service on Sunday, and I apologise profoundly for the interruption.

And now, a meme. Because boywhocantsayno and rosemary_ca are a pair of teases, and because I absolutely cannot tolerate not knowing things, I'm stuck with posting a thirty questions about my f-list meme.

The rules: I post the answers, but not the questions. If you want to play, comment and I'll return a screened reply of the questions. Then you have to post your own answers to them. I've cheated a bit by changing some of the questions, because I'm obnoxious like that - and some of them were unanswerably crap.

( Cut for obnoxious thirty answers list )

I have now been waiting over forty minutes for my email to load.

Edited: I left it trying to load and clagging everything else up for 90 minutes and then gave up. If you've emailed me anything it's going to have to wait. Sorry.

LJ and Subeta are much less problematic, but the Doorstop (I always name anything I have to work with) seems to find Yahoo rather indigestible.

I'm not even attempting Neopets. This wouldn't be a big deal - I really only go there to keep the pets neolodged and check my stocks these days - except that I was meant to be transferring one of my labrats to someone else. That annoys me.

I am also not attempting driveforlife. I feel a great deal worse about this than I do about Neo, obviously, but it depends rather heavily on being able to access the email account. I should be able to pick it back up after the weekend, though.

I can get on IM, but only if I shut everything else down. So I am not doing that much either.

So if I've not answered a comment or communication, that will be why. I am sorry. I hope very much the problems will be over after the weekend. Also, topbit completely rules. Just for the record.

...my computer died.

Fortunately, my mother recently got a new one, so I have her old one for the time being. It is older than Charlotte was, and so painfully RAM-impaired and slow that although I've managed to install my IM client, I can't actually run it at the same time as anything else. This would be why I am not on AIM.

I don't quite know what happened to Charlotte. I got one of those spontaneous rebooting incidents last night and Windows steadfastly refused to reload afterwards. There was a blue screen and a message about boot sectors that I am too blatted now to recall in detail. I have a feeling it had something to do with the, er, unofficial version of Windows XP I had installed on Charlotte. I tried to boot her up with that version of Knoppix that I have on disc, and that worked, except that it would boot up, ask me something I didn't understand about a .JPG file, and then, no matter what I told it, it came up with a little casual message saying the system would automatically shut down as soon as it had completed that operation. I couldn't get it to change its mind about that.

The good news is that this computer has an official Windows XP, complete with automatic updates and so forth. Maybe the hard drive with it on can be spliced into Charlotte? I dunno. I guess I'll find out. I didn't get any sleep on account of having to lie there in silence and my own operating system is one flake away from the blue screen of death; don't expect me to say anything intelligent. But I am here, after a fashion.

I hope my data is safe. The most important things are all backed up, but a lot of them are backed up to Charlotte's C drive which I can't presently access, though I am sure that one is intact, and I am hopeful that her main drive is intact apart from the Windows installation. Whether it's possible to access it is beyond me, of course, and I'm in no state to think about it now. But anyway, not dead, and online after a fashion.

Cleaning several pints of liquid laundry detergent off my bathroom floor, my kitchen floor, my hallway floor and my disconsolate sticky pointer before my second cup of coffee is not my idea of a good start to any day.

Just sayin'.

Also, my biggest hard drive imploded. Or something. It's always been rather prone to take sudden temperamental fits and unilaterally wipe great swathes of data, which is why I never put anything irreplaceable on it. I R SMRT. But this is new. I tried to save something to it yesterday morning to be told it's now under the impression it has never been formatted.

This is a lie, because there was a shitton of stuff saved to it. I don't want to format it if there's any other way round it, because although all that data IS replaceable, it would be a pain and take a long time. Anyone got any thoughts?

Edited to add: Also, I am out of sugar even though I went shopping yesterday. *sigh*

Arrrgh, my bloody C drive just turned up its toes and died!

The bad news: It contained a large chunk of my music collection: all my Graham Parker, Men They Couldn't Hang, Nick Lowe, Peter Blegvad and Bob Dylan MP3s, as well as the few bits of porn I liked enough to keep on my hard drive, all my ebooks, and my chatlog backups.

The good news: All of that is backed up onto data DVDs somewhere or other.

The bad news about the good news: I have a thousand-odd data DVDs in this room and the backups are scattered over hundreds of them; basically every time I write a DVD and there's a bit of space over, I shove some music or chatlogs or audiobooks or something on it. I do not have any sort of catalogue or system to keep track of what's where, other than writing on the front of the disc. So it may take me a month to find the stuff I've lost.

The possible good news: For a while now I've been having a weird computer problem, where the entire system would reboot if I clicked certain links - notably Amazon and Wikipedia, but also some other links sometimes. topbit reckoned it was a hardware issue, but couldn't narrow it down further than that. I thought he might have solved it when he upgraded my RAM, because it happened much less after that, but it crept up on me again. With luck it will have been the C drive causing the problem and it won't happen any more.

The other good news: The C drive was the smallest of my three hard drives, only (I think) 20 gig or so. Shouldn't be hard to replace/upgrade it.

I've added the "psychic paper" tag to this entry because I haven't heard from you for ages. You still reading this? Talk to me!

I HAS A MONITOR. I CAN SEE AGAIN.

....phew.

I had a spare one all along. What I didn't find out till my old one crackled, popped and died was that the spare did not have the necessary lead to attach it to the computer. Epic fail.

Thankfully, topbit came and brought one. And gave me RAM, and the best Border Collie calendar I have ever had. He is awesome.

I really hated being all silent and switched off.