Posted

Apr 17th 2007

Let it be known that I now feel much better after spending most of the last several hours beating the crap out of defenseless (almost) NPCs in City of Heroes, but before then... Man.

After calling in for my Wednesday shift last week, that left me a nice five day vacation from work; a welcome break, though not without its price. I had a couple of nightmares that I'd return today to find every single unit I'd checked in on my last day in still there, and hordes of angry customers wanting to know why I didn't come in to fix their computers on my birthday. I am twenty-two, now, by the way. Yippee. T-minus three years to wrinkles -- six months if I keep this job much longer.

Anyway, I had a lovely Friday, the thirteenth. Matt and I went for lunch together, went to an animal rehabilitation reserve, got ice cream, and played City of Heroes until I was a decent level 6 or so -- Not bad for my first character on my first day.

Saturday, we saw Blades of Glory and had Japanese food with Jason and Maria, who not only paid for both Matt and I's meals, but got me Super Paper Mario for my birthday. We came home amid torrential storms, had cake, and went to bed for church the next day, which under any normal circumstances, wouldn't have been anything notable...

But, for the first time in my now several years of teaching Sunday School, I had a child get hurt in my class, and I didn't even notice it... I felt so bad, and now I'm paranoid, and wonder if I'm really qualified for this sort of thing...

Thus ended my much-needed break from work. And what did I come back to? Well, nothing as bad as my nightmares, I suppose one could think, but nothing a whole lot better. The scheduling's still screwed up, and I had some disgusting old man making both racial slurs and sexually objectifying comments about me. Yay.

Matt stopped off at Dairy Queen on the way home, and got me a Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Blizzard pick-me-up, which worked quite well until I turned on my computer. The portable HDD bay, which I installed a year or so ago, and that I know to be finicky had been acting up for some time, now. Thankfully, it's not my bootable drive -- It just makes it so that when Windows starts and doesn't recognize it, I can't access any of my music, pictures, games, AIM logs, or certain utilities like DeadAIM. So, today, I decided I was tired of dealing with the four-or-five-restart quick fix, and resign myself to just extract the hard drive from the rack, and install it normally, even though it's a gigantic pain in the butt.

So I do it. And in the course of removing my 250g Western Digital, I notice that the jumper settings were incongruent with what they should be for a slave drive -- It was set to "master with a slave present." "Well, that shouldn't be," I think to myself, so, verifying that the other drive is indeed set to "master with slave present," I fix the jumper settings so my 120g Seagate is master with slave present, and my 250g Western Digital is slave. I tighten my screws, arrange my ribbon cables, dot my i's, cross my t's, close 'er up, and re-hook up all my MILLIONS of peripherals.

I power on, and after displaying the "loading Windows" logo for about five minutes (a good four minutes and forty-five seconds longer than it usually does), a blank, black screen is yielded. Mie is not pleased. Restarting produced only more of the same. Mie is ready to kill something. For the hell of it, since it was the only thing she could think of that she changed, she resets the WD's jumper to master with slave present.

Lo and behold, defying just about every law of IT, logic, physics, gravity, and Murphy, Windows starts in its usual thirty or so seconds.

Go figure. If it's not broke, right?

kanjiru: Full
kiku: Sister Hazel - Hey, Hey
taberu: Edamame
miru: \"Yes. I am relieved to know that I am not a golem.\"
yomu: Understanding Your Man In The Mirror by Pat Morley
asobu: \"Hey, here's a little friendly advice from me to you: if this were a battlefield, you'd be dead.\"
hataraku: Looks Better On Me