The Great Computer Upgrade Debacle
Alright, you’ll have to excuse me for today’s post, but I need to complain.
For about 5 months or so, my computer has been complaining to me that it cannot install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or Internet Explorer 9. These are two huge updates that are very important, but in particular Sara has some major, major problems with Internet Explorer 8, so I would love to get the new version for her. However, my computer cannot install these updates, no matter what I do.
It’s embarrassing. I make my living on computers. I have a Master’s Degree in Software Engineering. I pull the strings and the computer dances. And yet, I just can’t do it.
Every month or so, I would roll up my sleeves and say, “That’s it, this is not going to beat me. I am going to do whatever it takes to solve this problem.” After a day or two, I go down in flames and give up again. Rise, wait a month, repeat.
I have googled, I have downloaded, I have installed for hours and hours at a time. There is a specific “System Readiness” program that I run every time I see the version change. We’re on something like version 22 now. It doesn’t fix my problem. From all my googling, I know that this is a common problem that many people have. Why can’t Microsoft fix my problem??
So the other day, I rolled up my sleeves and said, “That’s it, this is not going to beat me. I am going to do whatever it takes to solve this problem.” I got down and dirty. I was looking through Microsoft support posts, I was looking in obscure log files, I was installing, downloading, uninstalling, and rebooting for hours on end.
I seemed to make some progress. If I am understanding properly, the root of the problem came down to this:
Failed to parse package manifest: \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy3\Windows\Servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-Client-LanguagePack-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~nl-NL~6.1.7600.16385.mum
Now, as you can clearly see, that means I didn’t have the Dutch language pack installed (obviously). Why would I need the Dutch language pack installed? Your guess is as good as mine. Nonetheless, I found some illicit tool to install the Dutch language pack and cleared that error. Lookin’ good, but no installation.
That’s okay. The instructions told me to expect that. Now I simply have to try to install, check the logs for errors, and clean those errors up one at a time. You simply scroll through for obscure log syntax, see which Knowledge Base article had a problem, then uninstall that update and restart. What could be simpler? The people in the forums had to do this once or twice, and eventually they were able to install.
I did it for four hours. FOUR HOURS, and I didn’t get to the bottom of it. Eventually I had to go to sleep, so I had to give up. Maybe I could devote another day or two to trying to solve the problem. But wait: while I was sleeping, Windows RE-INSTALLED all of the “important updates” I uninstalled trying to get this to work. As far as I can tell, all of my work was undone by my super-helpful Windows 7 installation. Thanks Microsoft!
If I can’t figure out this problem, who is going to be able to solve it? Do you think Average Joe Windows User is going to dig through logs and install Dutch language packs? Is he going to spend 20 hours trying to solve this?
No, he’s not.
But I am, because if I allow a computer to beat me, then my whole life is a lie. Besides, I think if I just solve this *one last problem*, it’s all going to go smoothly…
I am a programming god
I understand that most of you won’t understand this, but that’s okay. This post is for me!
At work I was put in a rough situation. If you tried to dream up the hardest, most ridiculous scenario for a programmer to be in as some kind of thought exercise, it would probably be better than what I had to deal with.
- The bug dealt with a goofy setup of a program that is pretty bad to begin with. So dealing with the program itself would be bad, but it was made worse by having the most counter-intuitive setup you could think of.
- The program has a huge history to wade through, with tons of legacy databases, none of which I am familiar with. So the tree sort of gets lost in the forest.
- The program uses abstract terminology that I’ve never encountered.
- The API to the program is in a proprietary language which I don’t know.
- The person who wrote the original code now lives in a different country.
- I was working under a deadline, namely, the end of the day. No pressure.
- I don’t have the program to interface with here at work. The guy who does have access to the program, doesn’t have a debugger. So neither of us are really in a position to debug.
- Did I mention that the program I’m supposed to access is in a different state? So, we are trying to work via a web conference. I can see his screen, but he can’t see mine. I basically send him files to try, which inevitably doesn’t work, rise, repeat.
- The guy on the other end of the web conference with the access to the tool isn’t a programmer, nor does he know anything about the program to interface with. So we are like the blind leading the blind.
So, to summarize, I have one day to fix a bug in code I didn’t write that interfaces with a horrible, backwards, customized, proprietary program which I’ve never used and don’t understand, and also which has a lot of history and obscuring details. On top of that, I don’t have direct access to the program, but I’m using an intermediary to type things for me in a different state, which I watch through a web meeting.
And I did it, baby. I did it. It took like 6 hours, but it got done. Booya!
And you reading this, much like my boss, probably had no clue how hard it was. Oh well.
An ode to my crappy laptop
Oh laptop, how I hate thee! Let me count the ways:
- The way the “t” fell off your front cover, making you a “Gaeway” laptop
- The way some of your keys don’t work every now and again, forcing me to hit them a few times to get them to work
- The way you somehow ruined not one, but two mice, which no no longer work in any computer
- The way you were not Windows Vista compatible when I bought you, even though you came pre-installed with Vista
- The way you always used to get blue screens (though, to be fair, this seems to be fixed now, after a year or so)
- The way you occasionally randomly shut down for no reason when you are left alone
- The way you take 48+ hours for virus scan
- The way you are unable to do anything while virus scanning
- The way you take ten minutes to start up or shut down
- The way I had to re-flash your bios that one time, just to make you work like a regular computer (see #5)
- The way your tiny hard drive is 98% full
- The way you somehow destroyed your own power cord
Between #3 and #12, I’m kind of worried the poor thing has Lupus. In regards to #6, and maybe the whole list in general, I think that the little devil just wants attention. Hey laptop! That’s not the kind of attention you want, buddy!
Baby Smash
First off, happy Labor Day!
This post is for all you readers out there with young children. I know when Evie was younger, she would see us on the computer all the time, and want to participate. She spent a lot of time smashing on the keyboard and doing all sorts of interesting things I never even knew you could do with key shortcuts (in other words, she taught me a thing or two about computers).
It’s not that I minded her playing with the computer, it’s that I was worried about her messing things up on the computer. Enter BabySmash, a program for “baby proof computer fun”. Basically, it locks out the keyboard so that all those extra keystrokes don’t accidentally change your password or something. Instead, they bring up fun animations and sounds. So put it on and let them smash to their heart’s content. You can see a couple of demo videos on the website. Did I mention it’s free?
Oh, sweet internet
Our DSL modem inexplicably quit working Sunday night, so we have been incommunicado for a few days. After dealing with AT&T’s phone system and tech support for a frustrating but acceptable amount of time we got a replacement modem and everything seems to work okay now. Unfortunately, since I had Internet at work and Sara has been cooped up with no contact with the outside world, I think the Internet is still inaccessible to me at home. 
So last weekend we went to WI because my uncle was visiting from CO and my grandma had a get together. So Evie got to meet her great grandmas as well as many great aunts and uncles. More importantly she finally got to meet her uncle Nathan! I want to put this down here so that it is forever recorded in history; despite being like 2 1/2 hours away, uncle Nathan didn’t meet her until she was about 2 months old. I guess that’s why he’s the bad uncle (he is, ask him). Although, to be fair, he doesn’t have a car.
Speaking of my brother, I don’t devote enough time to him here. Certainly there are more good stories to tell about him than anything that happens in my life! Maybe I will write some of the classics in here sometime if I haven’t already.
So my brother went out to the bars with some of my uncles when they were visiting. When it was time to go home he walked out to the bus stop and my uncles all left. After waiting for awhile, he realized that the buses stopped running at midnight and he didn’t have a ride home. So he called a cab and he told the guy, “Look. This is all the money I have. Can you just start driving in the direction of my house and stop when my money runs out? This is all I have, so don’t forget to tip yourself.” So the guy started driving and when they were about 4 blocks from my brother’s apartment he stopped and said, “This is as far as you get.” So my brother at some point realized he had in his pocket a snickers bar and he says to the guy, “If I give you this snickers bar, will that get me 4 more blocks to my apartment?” The guy thought about it for a while and then he took the snickers bar and dropped my brother off at home. That’s good bartering!
Okay I found this a very interesting theory. It is from Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a weekly article that is about football and a lot of other things. It is a very long winded column, so you might just want to read the excerpt:
“The apparent absence of artificial radio transmission in the galaxy suggests that intelligent life, at least in its technological stage, might be rare. Regardless whether we owe our existence to divine offices or natural forces, if there are millions of Earth-like worlds, you’d think either God or evolution would have put thinking beings in many places. Have other intelligent beings come into existence, only to wipe themselves out with war or evolve beyond the physical? Perhaps intelligent life takes a very long time to arise, then rapidly either destroys itself or ascends to a higher plane. After all, it was 3 million years from Lucy in the Olduvai Gorge to controlled agriculture, then 7,000 years from controlled agriculture until Guglielmo Marconi sent the first high-powered, long-distance radio signal, then a mere 60 years ’til the United States and former Soviet Union possessed doomsday arsenals sufficient to end human life. Perhaps across the vastness of time there are only brief intervals in which civilizations exist in the technological phase — transmitting radio and television signals, launching spacecraft, and searching for others who are doing the same. Right now, we’re transmitting like crazy and firing rockets as fast as they can be built. Maybe a thousand centuries ago another civilization on a nearby world was doing as we do now, then either destroyed itself or evolved beyond such concerns. Maybe a thousand centuries hence, a civilization will arise in the Gliese 581 star system but find no evidence of us because by then humanity will either be extinct or have chosen to leave corporeal limits behind.“
It is interesting to think about, I don’t know why I’ve never seen that mentioned as a possibility before.
Anyway, I will leave you with a Leno-esque slide show of reasons not to hyphenate your last name, courtesy my first name is not Dabu.
Coming soon
Got the DSL modem from UPS today! A week and a half with no Internet (at home) seem like a long time. Internet should be hooked up tonight (assuming AT&T did their part) and then you can expect a very, very long update about everything that has been going here.
Stay tuned…
Weekend
Went to MI this weekend for Sara’s sister’s birthday. Pretty low key, we didn’t really do much. Actually I feel like I slept the whole weekend! Must be the allergy medicine or something. We went to bunch of baby stores. I’m kind of baby-stored out, I have to tell you. They’re all pretty much the same with the same brands and items for about the same prices. We did eat some good food though, including a trip to Olive Garden. I don’t think I’ve been there for about 6 years! Too bad too because I love that place. I ate 7 bread sticks. We played 1 game of Acquire and I came in 3rd out of 5. So not very good, but I beat Sara so that’s all that counts! 
In unrelated news, I have had nothing but headaches with my new laptop ever since I bought it. Vista is so terrible. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. To be fair, I don’t think it is really Vista’s fault, I think it is the fact that there are no good drivers available for most of my hardware. I’ve tried everything under the sun to keep the thing from locking up constantly until Thursday I actually re-flashed my BIOS. But the good news is that so far it hasn’t locked up since then! So keep your fingers crossed and maybe everything is okay now!
I probably have other things to say, but I just couldn’t be bothered.
Vista and Mooninites
Who’s got Vista? This guy!
So I bought my new laptop and it’s pretty awesome. Here I am posting to my journal in front of the TV! I’ve only had it for a couple of days, so I haven’t gotten it all set up yet. I’m really enjoying the wide screen so far. Even though I have more RAM and dual processors, it doesn’t seem any faster…I think it’s because Vista is hogging up a lot of resources.
Speaking of Vista, its pretty cool. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that it’s not totally revolutionary. I remember going from 3.1 to 95 and 98 to XP and just being completely lost. I felt like I needed to re-learn everything. With Vista I was able to dive right in. The transparent windows with the glowy buttons are pretty cool. Probably my favorite new feature is hitting win-tab and cycling through the open programs (similar to alt-tab, but cooler)(incidentally alt-tab is cooler now too)
In other news, I assume you’ve heard about the Boston Bomb Scare. At first I was like, “How could anybody be so dumb as to strap fake bombs to bridges and think that would be a good idea for advertising!” Well that was because the news was sensationalizing like it always done. For example, the article said “Photographs of the devices show several tiny light bulbs protruding from a circuit board that houses wiring and at least four batteries.” Okay, that’s one way of saying it that makes it sound very scary…another way of saying it would be, “Photographs of the devices show a litebright shaped cartoon character giving you the middle finger.” That’s right, it looks nothing like a bomb, and Bostoners should be absolutely ashamed at themselves for over reacting. And who should that light up cartoon character be? Why, none other than Ignignokt from Aqua Teen Hunger Force!
So then, the guys responsible held a press conference:
At a news conference after the hearing, Stevens and Berdovsky stepped to the microphones and said they were taking questions only about 1970s hairstyles.
When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, “We’re taking it very seriously.” Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.
Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, “That’s not a hair question. I’m sorry.”
So not only are they advertising a totally awesome show (and upcoming movie) but they’re obviously awesome as well. Another interesting piece of fearmongering:
Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards “bomb-like” devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city.
Okay, and if they had been actual Mooninites invading from the moon they could have taken over the whole country! It should be noted that these devices were in place for 2 weeks before being reported as bombs and also that they were in 8 other cities where there was no panic.
I don’t know man, must be the cold up there…
Now this is useful!
There were so many good links in here I gave up trying to keep track of them all!
PC Magazine’s Top 99 Undiscovered Websites
Oh sweet internet!
Oh Internet, how I’ve missed you! Actually, probably the worst part about no Internet is that the TiVo was all messed up and didn’t have any channel information! The other problem is that when you first move somewhere and don’t know where anything is, the Internet is VITAL! Don’t take for granted how easy it is to go to Target’s website and do a store locator and then hop on Google maps and find out how to get there. We actually considered using the phone book at one point! ::gasp::
So I have TONS to blog here about in the past month or so since the move, I think tonight I’m just going to focus on venting my Comcast problems.
So, without further ado…
Let me just start off by saying that I’ve been a loyal Comcast customer for years and I’ve *NEVER* had a problem with them. I know lots of other people that have, but I’ve seriously always had good service from them.
So where to begin. Okay, so first off they said it was going to cost $60 for my cable modem installation because you can only get the do-it-yourself installation kit if you are already a Comcast customer. So what they made me do was get my cable first and then call back the next day and order Internet so that I could get the free installation kit. Then we had to pick it up which was like 45 minutes away in some bad neighborhood in the city (Sara did that part). So we got the cable first and it was kind of fuzzy, but I didn’t know what else to do about it, so we just figured we were going to have to live with it. The only jack in the living room was in the stupidest possible place so we had to run a cable across the middle of the floor, which was annoying.
So we finally got our cable modem we plug it in and none of the lights come on on the cable modem. I tried like every possible combination of wall jacks, splitters, cables, etc. and I just couldn’t get connected to the internet. But in the living room I was going through 3 consecutive splitters, so I figured that had a lot to do with it (and the fuzzy cable). So I went to Radio Shack and bought a 4 way splitter and a female to female connector and replaced those 3 splitters, but still no dice. Also around this time we noticed that some of the T.V. stations weren’t coming in sometimes, such as NBC. Finally I admited defeat and called Comcast, so they sent a guy out on Saturday. He took a look and said we weren’t getting enough signal strength and they would need to run a new line. He said he couldn’t do it, that was a different crew and the other crew doesn’t work on weekends. We told him we had to work during the week, but he took the name of our landlord and called his disbatcher and they said they’d work out a time so he could let them in.
This was really the begining of the problems.
So they called me on Monday at work and said, “We’re at the door, let us in.” and I was like, “Uh…I’m at work. You were supposed to call the landlord…” and he was like, “Oh okay, we’ll call him now.” So they called him and he wasn’t there, so I got a call back from an angry disbatcher saying that I would have to reschedule. Now at this point I actually felt bad because I wasn’t there to let them in. So they rescheduled for Thursday and this time I wanted to make sure somebody was going to be there. So I got ahold of the maintenance guy and asked him to be there and also both my landlord and wife work about a 15 minute walk away. So I had them all on high alert and I figured I was pretty set.
Now this is really what put me over the edge with them.
I called them and said, “Hey, can you call me like before you get there just in case I need to have my wife walk home from work?” and the lady was like, “Oh, that’s our standard procedure, but I’ll put a note.” So Thur. rolls around and aparently when they got there I was walking through the building at work and I didn’t get cell phone service for a few minutes. So when I got back to my desk I got a voicemail and so I listened and it was 3 minutes after they called me! So I hurried up and called them back and they were like, “Too late, this crew isn’t going to sit around for you, they’re already gone. You’ll have to reschedule.” So I was like, “You have to be kidding me, I only missed them by 3 minutes!” and the lady like wasn’t sympathtic to me at all. Her tone of voice the whole time was just like “this guy is giving me a problem.” So she was all like, “Look, we called your phone number and rang your doorbell, what else do you expect us to do!?” And I was like, “Well I thought they were going to call before they got to my place?” and the lady was like, “Oh they don’t do that.” So my temper kept rising and by the end I didn’t even want to have Comcast anymore. It had already been a week with out it working.
Now here’s the kicker.
After I got off the phone with them I called the maintenance guy to tell him he didn’t have to wait any more, but he told me that he saw the Comcast guys and tried to let them in, but they refused to be let in because they couldn’t get a hold of me! OOOOohhh I was so mad!
So I had to reschedule again until Monday and take work off because I absolutely had to be there this time. So finally I get an actual honest-to-god Comcast guy here. There were apparently lots of problems. First off, we didn’t have our own line into the building; we were just split off another line in the basement. Also there was a bad connection from where that split was to the line that ran into our apartment. It took a long time to run the line because he had trouble fitting the cable in the hole in the wall. He said anybody on our side of the building is going to need a line run like we had and that he was glad he got here first because the next person who did it was going to have to drill a hole to fit another cable.
After he got that all hooked up he was ready to leave but I pointed out that all the lights on the modem still weren’t lit. So he tested the line coming out of the wall by the fireplace and said there was something wrong with it because the signal was really weak. So then we had to figure out where the central line was coming into the apartment. Now here was the one bright spot of the whole thing! The central line comes into the apartment directly behind the T.V.! So now we have the cable connected there and we don’t have to run a line across the living room!
So then he noticed that 1 line came in and there was a 3 way splitter, 1 line to each bedroom and 1 to the living room. So he tested that and found out that splitter was bad. So he replaced that with a new one and plugged the modem into that directly and the lights came on. So he was going to close everything up and I was like “wait a minute, you have the modem plugged directly in but you don’t have the TV plugged in anywhere!” So then he said, “This is too many lines to run from 1 line, you’re not going to have a strong enough signal.” Now I think the correct solution to that problem would have been to run us another line, but he wasn’t going to do that! So what he did instead was to disconnect the line to our bedroom and the line to over by the fireplace.
So anyway, as he was packing up his stuff I tried to get on the internet and still couldn’t. I told him that and he said, “Oh, that’s because you’re trying to do wireless. You have to call them because they have to set up your modem differently for wireless.” Now I was sure he was talking crazy talk there, but I didn’t argue with him. So I called Comcast and was on the phone with tech support for a long time, maybe a half an hour. They said there was nothing different they had to do with the wireless, but they couldn’t get it working. So they had me plug the laptop right in to the cable modem and we were never able to get the Internet working that way either, however, I was able to ping yahoo. That meant that the connection to the internet was there, even though I couldn’t bring up webpages.
So, of course, the Comcast people said it’s not their problem and gave me the phone number for Compaq and said I’d have to call them. They said the internet was there so it must be something in my computer stopping it from connecting, although they didn’t know what it could be. So I had to go to work at that point and then when I got home I worked on it for awhile and didn’t get anywhere and then I called the Comcast tech support again and got a more helpful guy who at least got the laptop on the internet when it was directly connected to the modem. Then from there it took me a simple hour or so to get the wireless router connected.
::whew!::
That took even longer to tell then I thought it would. But the good news is, it’s working now and Comcast is refunding like $28 for all the cable and Internet that wasn’t working.
Freeware
Here‘s a good link to keep around. It’s a list of 450+ freeware programs to solve common computer problems.
It will be sad when the Olympics are over
I can’t say enough about how awesome it is that CNBC is showing curling every day. I love curling.
But more importantly, holy crap, have you seen snowboard cross? That’s my new favorite event, replacing short track speed skating. I wish that was on all day.
I know everybody likes figure skating, but I don’t. And I hate how I can’t watch any olympics without seeing it. If everybody is so keen on the figure skating, the I wish they would put that on one channel and everything else on a different channel so I could watch that other channel.
This works for Netscape too. If you type “about:config” in the address bar, it will open up a page that contains every option that is set for your browser. If you double click on any of the lines you can edit the value. This is particularly useful to edit options that you can’t get to any other way, but good luck finding them in the huge list. Good to know though.
Pirate mouse
I was walking in the grocery store today and I saw the coolest thing of all time!
Too bad it doesn’t have a scroll wheel or anything, but I still thought it would be cool to bring it to work.
Talk to the Hand
The internet says:
Did you bring what I asked?
Puny human says:
Yes, here is some lip balm
The internet says:
Apply a protective layer of our Lip Balm, and your dry or chapped lips will certainly agree.
Puny human says:
Okay, I will. Wow, I can feel my lips being soothed as we speak!
The internet says:
Wow me can feel my lips being soothed as we speak.
Puny human says:
Wait, that’s what I just said, except without the pirate speak.
The internet says:
Do you like it when a girl makes the first move.
Puny human says:
Yes
The internet says:
Whether you agree fully, partially, or not at all with the the book, .
Puny human says:
What book?
The internet says:
World Book Online Reference Center: Core refernce collections; documents, selections, online reference books in major subject areas at the World Book Online .
Puny human says:
Oh, I agree fully with that book.
The internet says:
The big surprise for me was that the answer isn’t just that there are too many .
Puny human says:
I didn’t think the Internet could be surprised by anything
The internet says:
And I wish you could have been there with me, but you gave me enough confidence that I .
Puny human says:
I would have been there, but my router went down. Why don’t you finish your sentences?
The internet says:
There are a few other books which I have set my eyes on but I figure it .
Puny human says:
Talking Internet, you talk too much.
The internet says:
you are right, if you say you talk too much.
Puny human says:
Buuuuuurn!
Okay, time to just get caught up on this
Okay, I’m going to bring this thing up to speed in one big blur, because that’s what the past 3 weeks have been like anyway!
Hmm, think back, what happened. Mostly it was just working all day and then coming home and putting things away like mad. We had so much stuff to unpack it was rediculous. Sara got a bad cold and was miserable for the last few days she was here. We got all of our considerable amount of pictures hung up. I love our apartment. Sara has such nice things. The things of mine that we kept meshed well with her things. I’ve never had a super nice apartment before…this is the first one that really looks like a real person’s apartment, not some college appartment. Basically, I’m in love with our new place. I also really love that we just have tons and tons of things to hang on the walls from when we were in Italy, pictures either taken by us or bought while we were there. I think it’s so much better to have things hanging up that are unique and mean something, rather than just something we bought at the store.
Anyway, when we were walking around in our apartment barefoot, the bottoms of our feet turned black! How gross is that? So after Sara left I put away all the rest of the stuff that I could and then I rented a steam cleaner. I wanted to use it on the old apartment before I turned in the keys, but those carpets weren’t really that dirty. The ones here though? Filthy!! It was so gross emptying out the water…it was pure black. It was kind of hard doing the carpets here by myself because I had to keep emptying the stuff and moving everything around, but I’m really glad it’s done.
Nothing else really big happening I don’t think. The wedding is just CAREENING towards us (two weeks from yesterday)!! Not a day goes by that I don’t have at least 5 wedding related things to do, and the same from Sara. She’s in MI staying with her parents until the wedding so that she can be closer to deal with things as they come up. We’re firing like 10 emails a day back and forth with important information and questions about all the different phone calls and stuff. The good news is, I think we’re going to be good on money…we might be flat broke afterwards, but I don’t think we’re going to have to go into debt at all. I think everything’s coming together well.
I bought a wireless router. It is SO SWEET having wireless access in the apartment. I got the card for Sara’s laptop before I had my router and we found out that someone else in the building must have one too because we immediately got internet from their network!! Of course that would be dishonest…. O:-) When the wireless router came it worked great, but then it went kaput like 2 days later. I went through the whole song and dance with tech support and they eventually decided the router was defective and they told me to return it to where I bought it. Unfortunately I bought it from Amazon, so I was going to have to ship it back and all that stuff. I couldn’t be too upset about it though, because Amazon was FANTASTIC about it! They emailed me a form to print out to get free shipping to return it and within like a day they had already ordered my replacement and sent it to me. I got the new router the day after i dropped the old one in the mail! They were super helpful, not to mention quick and efficient. Sadly, that’s a lot to ask for now a days. Unfortunately, I now have the new router but Sara took her laptop and the wireless card home to MI.
Me and Dawna and Jeff and Tony have been playing poker like maniacs. I got Dawna and Jeff hooked on Celebrity Poker Showdown so that’s why they always want to play. Tony had never really played poker before but he’s pretty good. Jeff’s major flaw is he’s a terrible bluffer and yet he tries all the time. Dawna is a little better, but she gets impatient and doesn’t pay all that much attention to the game. She’s also a big risk taker and most of the time it doesn’t work out for her. Tony is really hard to read, I haven’t picked up on his tells yet. They’re giving me a big head about poker though because I’ve won all the money 4 out of 5 times and the one time I lost I had a straight and the other guy ended up having a straight flush…what can you do?
Alright, that’s good enough for now. I’m sure there were 100 other little things I could have put in there during that span, but I’ve been SO BUSY and probably will continue to be until the wedding. Don’t expect too many updates!
Another weekend comes to a close…
Way too short, as usual.
Finally finished Wolves of the Calla. It was magnificent! I wish I could read the next one, except it will probably be 3 years before it comes out. 
Spent like 8 hours this weekend working on my stupid paper for class. Here’s the thing, it’s only the second week of class. If this slave driving wench in my group keeps this up, we’ll have the whole paper done in week 3! And I think she’ll be pissed that it took us so long! She already sent her 1/3 of the paper out for approval. Keep in mind we have 5 more weeks to do this. She wants us to get it done early though because she just wants to rewrite it. Grrr.
I couldn’t help out with her problems installing her scanner tonight, which I feel bad about. It’s just so hard to help someone with something when you can’t see what they’re doing and they’re trying to describe it to you and you’re not even at your computer as a frame of reference. She was upset at me for not being able to help, but I know it was mostly just because she was frustrated, as I would have been. Oh well, I’m used to that. People wouldn’t have to get upset at me for not knowing these things if they didn’t insist on calling me in the first place!! Just because I’m a programmer doesn’t mean I know shit about how Windows XP handles device drivers. I have my own problems with stupid ZoneAlarm that I still can’t get working. I just gave up on it. Boo ZoneAlarm! >:o
Funny conversation from tonight:
John: “Oh my God, are you crying over Sopranos?”
Melissa: “It was sad! He was crying at the end!”
John: “Jesus Christ, I hope I never grow a vagina.”
Melissa: “Me too babe.”
I’m very sad that they’re moving to South Jersey in a week and a half! ::pout::
SO frustrated
I accidentally downloaded the trial version of ZoneAlarm Pro rather than the actual free version of ZoneAlarm, so my trial version expired. I uninstalled it and installed the free version instead. I then proceeded to spend 2 1/2 hours trying to get internet on my laptop. Everything seems to be working fine on my desktop (the machine running ZoneAlarm) but no matter how I try and set things up, my laptop is just internet-less. If I turn off ZoneAlarm, my laptop instantly has internet. If I set it so that programs have to ask for access to the internet and then try to bring up IE or AIM off my laptop, ZoneAlarm instantly tells me, “Hey! Someone’s trying to get on the internet!” to which I obviously reply, “Hey that’s great, why don’t you let them!” Of course it doesn’t work though. I have nothing else to try.
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