Thursday, January 29, 2004

I was wondering why you haven't written

Well, duh, Pamela.  I was wondering why I hadn't heard from you.  All my alaskapam.com e-mail is forwarded, and while I was on vacation I stopped forwarding it.  The e-mail piles up at spamcop until I get home.  I didn't set up spamcop to check alaskapam addresses because I thought all my e-mail was going to spamcop and then being forwarded when it was actually the other way around.  It's clear now?  ;)

So if you were wondering why I wasn't answering you, that's the reason.

Monday, January 26, 2004

Errors, Errors everywhere and not a place to think

Today PHP decided to revolt.  If you read any of my blogs that are on PHP pages, you'll get a whole list of error messages.  The blog is in there if you keep scrolling past the errors.  Sorry, I have no idea how to fix it, but I have posted a help request on the support forum.

Update:  Matt fixed the problem, and everything should be working okay now.

Friday, January 23, 2004

Fastest Fingers in the North

Brendon managed to send my computer to the shop for four days.

I was standing at the sink washing dishes, not ten steps from the computer when Brendon climbed into my chair to reach the buttons on the tower.  Before I could get to him, Brendon had pressed the reset button several times in rapid succession.  I quickly moved him from the chair to the floor, trying to suppress a grin because he is too cute to make me mad.

I let the system continue the last reset.  The first error that appeared was that the CMOS is wrong.  The computer reset itself this time, and besides the CMOS error, I could see the error DRAM is wound too tightly as the text on the screen quickly spun by.

I tried the f1 key and the f2 key.  One of them took me into a manual repair job.  I wasn't up to the task obviously because whatever I did there gave me the error message Invalid system disk Replace the disk, and then press a key.

From that point on there was no escape.  The computer was looking for a boot disk in drive A, and I didn't have one.  Not that I hadn't tried making a boot disk, but the procedure had gotten so lengthy and complicated at the time that I gave up.

I did try putting in the original Windows XP CD, but the computer boycotted the CD drives until its Drive A hunger was satisfied.

Since I didn't have anything to feed the A Drive, Brendon and I took the tower down to the shop.  By then it was almost 5 o'clock and any hopes of getting the computer fixed that day were slim.  I didn't mind since I don't spend time on the computer while Brendon is visiting anyway.  The computer was ready to go by the next day, and Keith picked it up after work.

After Brendon went home, I sat down to catch up with e-mail and groups, and I noticed that links to the G drive and B drive were missing.  G drive is my second harddrive where I keep all my data.  The plan was that if C drive crashes all the data is safe. I hadn't planned for the opposite contingency.  I searched the help files, and even did a Net search after I set up a new online connection.  I couldn't even work on my website because my FTP program was on the G Drive.  I couldn't even write to my blogs because my account is so close to the limit that I have to delete the logs everyday in order to add anyting.

Nothing I did helped reconnect those drives; so back to the shop on Thursday.  The computer was ready the same day, but Keith forgot to pick it up this time.  Can you blame him?  It's not that often that I need the computer picked up from the shop two days in a row.

Friday I had a doctor's appointment; so afterwards I picked it up.  The whole ordeal kept the computer out of commision from Tuesday until Friday.  So far everything appears to be fixed now.  I do plan to make some backup files on the D Drive partition of my C drive in case something like this happens again.