Well, THIS is fun.

My laptop has gone crappers. Guess where I was doing a ton of my coding of the geo work? Yep. Guess what's not backed up because it's not in the LAKEOSWEGO domain? Yep.

Fortunately, its problem involves the video drivers being worthless. Which is funny; it ran fine, had a nasty Explorer crash, and on reboot the video was garbage.

Why is this fortunate? Because I can save my files. I blind-navigated until I figured out what was going on, got it OUT of scandisk, got it OUT of starting in safe mode (I think - I'm not quite sure WHAT it started in, but that's okay), got it to a DOS prompt (start key - R for run - command - enter), and began copying files off to floppy disk.

Blindly. M. says this qualifies me to be a tech god of some sort. I thought it just made me a weird geek-type.

Wow, this is fun. Really, it is. Honest.

Erg. BUT, I may or may not lose a little email (probably not - it's just unreachable, not damaged, after all), but the source code is coming over to my desktop now.

Mmmmf. Laptops.

Gah. Well. I got the screen on my laptop back. (Fixed by the mighty repeated reboot. Heh. I have GREAT confidence in this...not....)

Checked on my IBM order. Says it's being packed for shipping. Yay! Scroll down, confirm address...not yay. Right address, no apartment number. I'm sure they could probably figure it out in time, but ugh.

Call IBM. Friendly-bland girl tells me my address is right - she reads it back to me, with apartment number, before I say my apartment number - but the web site is broken and is being worked on.

Yay, I say. It also shows an estimated ship date from a week and a half ago, I point out, so could she give me a revised estimate?

Well, they have to configure your system....

They have BEEN configuring my system for TWO DAMN WEEKS, according to the web site, now it says it's being packed. Well, her screen says 'ready for assembly' which could mean configuration or packing. (I'm guessing the latter, given what their web site says and what I had previously been told. I'm also guessing she doesn't entirely know what's going on.) So I ask, if it's being packed, when would I see it.

She doesn't know. Probably next week. It will probably ship Friday. Maybe.

Great.

I hope that I never need tech support, or that it's better than the rest of their phone people.

Ooof. Hey, I'm alive!

I got some work done at work today; and then I took off to get things to fulfill kids' Christmas wish-lists.

I've got all but one item I need for four requests. That one item is, of all things, a package of hair ribbons. ("Hairbrush, ribbons, etc." - the ribbons got a specific mention, darnit, and apparently they're Not Popular this year and NO ONE has them. Augh! I've got a few more places to try before I give up in despair, but I've done everything from the dollar store to the mall, for pity's sake, with a good range in between.)

But it was much fun shopping for that and the other requests.

And I've been being useful in support (at least to my mind - I seem to be answering people's questions correctly, at least). That's an awfully nice feeling.

Clipboard.

Idea shamelessly stolen (er, borrowed) from asciident, because it amused me a great deal.

Please post a comment to this showing what's in your clipboard right now!

Mine is: http://www.livejournal.com/logout.bml