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A strange couple of days...
Jun. 29th, 2006 12:49 pmLife is difficult when you've become used to having the Internet "on" and available all the time and go "cold turkey" without. Activities that seem about as natural as breathing - looking up information on shuttle services between Hobby and International airports here in Houston, for example - are no longer possible without going to a noticeable amount of trouble.
Anyway, I'm at the Atlanta airport right now, waiting for my flight to Moscow, and was despairing of finding a connection (necessary to activate some of the software on the new VAIO, but I'm getting ahead of myself...)
Yesterday, Galina and I went around town in the empty U-Haul to take care of some personal business. Talk about using a sledgehammer to swat a fly! Between going up to Natalie's neck of the woods (and back) on Tuesday night to pick up and bring back some stuff from storage, and the stuff yesterday, we blew about $30 in gas doing not a whole lot of anything, not to mention a lot of nervous energy maneuvering that elephant of a vehicle among flocks of cars.
We stopped by the local Verizon office, where I tried to combine Galina's prepaid plan with my monthly plan, which turns out to be impossible (I notice Verizon employees seem to be very good at telling you why what you want to do can't be done.) I experienced another moment of technolust as we passed by the Motorola "Q" display, but I have to keep firmly in mind that the reason for having a cell phone is to be able to speak with people, and not play games, watch videos, or write e-mail.
We then went to Kinko's, where I planned to hook up my laptop and get some needed information. Everything went well until Outpost (my firewall) asked what to do with the new connection, whereupon I selected the default action, and the process stopped dead. Outpost could really use a "undo the last decision the user made" feature, as I've been bitten by this in the past. At any rate, I sat down and used one of the Kinko's house machines (20 cents per minute), to little effect (one of the reasons for connecting was to find a shuttle to take me to IAH this morning; everyone still doing this charges a lot of money, so Galina said never mind, we'd rent a car).
Anyway, I was using a new "lightweight" nylon backpack for my laptop, and neglected to zip it shut after returning the laptop inside, so when I flung the bag over my shoulder, the VAIO went flying through the air, landing on the floor with a crunch. I sort of lost it for a few moments, though I thought I did remarkably well by not expressing myself loudly with liberal profanity. It did not help that the unit refused to boot into Windows afterward, either. I had visions of having to retranslate a bunch of the document due in a couple of days, not to mention the loss of the other data on the machine.
What a marvelous event to occur on the eve of a Kazakhstan assignment, nie?
The knee-jerk reaction was to go out and buy a new machine, which I did. Another VAIO, as it turns out. Bigger, faster, etc., for less than what I paid for the one I've been using the past couple of years. (Maybe if I had the luxury of time, or mney, I'd have bought one of those new dual-boot Apples, whoi knows?)
Upon returning home, I unpacked my desktop and fired it up to get at my itinerary, only to find it would not stay stable for more than a few seconds before showing the BSOD (a problem with the FAT_FILE_SYSTEM). Now, this is the first time something like this has happened, over many, many moves, but that was little consolation, under the circumstances.
I figured something may have worked loose, but didn't have the time to fiddle with it. My problem was as follows: Do I take only the old laptop (which will boot, apparently, if you take out the PCMCIA card and don't plug in any USB stuff), or only the new machine (no time to figure out how to reinstall stuff), or both (not really enough room to take everything with me on the plane).
I selected the second course of action, staying up until about 3 am to copy all of my old D drive and most of my C drive to the new machine (I left out the Windows directory). To make sure I didn't oversleep this morning, I set three alarms; the funny part is that the cell phone went off first, and despite the fact that it was set to vibrate, it did the job.
In other news, I just activated the 60-day "trial" of Office 2003, so that ought to let me work on files until the end of August (though I brought my copy of Office 2003 Small Business Edition, too). Apropos of which, I need to go install Wordfast and try to retrieve some install codes for other programs.
I expect my next post will be from Moscow, probably on Saturday (unless I luck out at my sister-in-law's).
Cheers...
Anyway, I'm at the Atlanta airport right now, waiting for my flight to Moscow, and was despairing of finding a connection (necessary to activate some of the software on the new VAIO, but I'm getting ahead of myself...)
Yesterday, Galina and I went around town in the empty U-Haul to take care of some personal business. Talk about using a sledgehammer to swat a fly! Between going up to Natalie's neck of the woods (and back) on Tuesday night to pick up and bring back some stuff from storage, and the stuff yesterday, we blew about $30 in gas doing not a whole lot of anything, not to mention a lot of nervous energy maneuvering that elephant of a vehicle among flocks of cars.
We stopped by the local Verizon office, where I tried to combine Galina's prepaid plan with my monthly plan, which turns out to be impossible (I notice Verizon employees seem to be very good at telling you why what you want to do can't be done.) I experienced another moment of technolust as we passed by the Motorola "Q" display, but I have to keep firmly in mind that the reason for having a cell phone is to be able to speak with people, and not play games, watch videos, or write e-mail.
We then went to Kinko's, where I planned to hook up my laptop and get some needed information. Everything went well until Outpost (my firewall) asked what to do with the new connection, whereupon I selected the default action, and the process stopped dead. Outpost could really use a "undo the last decision the user made" feature, as I've been bitten by this in the past. At any rate, I sat down and used one of the Kinko's house machines (20 cents per minute), to little effect (one of the reasons for connecting was to find a shuttle to take me to IAH this morning; everyone still doing this charges a lot of money, so Galina said never mind, we'd rent a car).
Anyway, I was using a new "lightweight" nylon backpack for my laptop, and neglected to zip it shut after returning the laptop inside, so when I flung the bag over my shoulder, the VAIO went flying through the air, landing on the floor with a crunch. I sort of lost it for a few moments, though I thought I did remarkably well by not expressing myself loudly with liberal profanity. It did not help that the unit refused to boot into Windows afterward, either. I had visions of having to retranslate a bunch of the document due in a couple of days, not to mention the loss of the other data on the machine.
What a marvelous event to occur on the eve of a Kazakhstan assignment, nie?
The knee-jerk reaction was to go out and buy a new machine, which I did. Another VAIO, as it turns out. Bigger, faster, etc., for less than what I paid for the one I've been using the past couple of years. (Maybe if I had the luxury of time, or mney, I'd have bought one of those new dual-boot Apples, whoi knows?)
Upon returning home, I unpacked my desktop and fired it up to get at my itinerary, only to find it would not stay stable for more than a few seconds before showing the BSOD (a problem with the FAT_FILE_SYSTEM). Now, this is the first time something like this has happened, over many, many moves, but that was little consolation, under the circumstances.
I figured something may have worked loose, but didn't have the time to fiddle with it. My problem was as follows: Do I take only the old laptop (which will boot, apparently, if you take out the PCMCIA card and don't plug in any USB stuff), or only the new machine (no time to figure out how to reinstall stuff), or both (not really enough room to take everything with me on the plane).
I selected the second course of action, staying up until about 3 am to copy all of my old D drive and most of my C drive to the new machine (I left out the Windows directory). To make sure I didn't oversleep this morning, I set three alarms; the funny part is that the cell phone went off first, and despite the fact that it was set to vibrate, it did the job.
In other news, I just activated the 60-day "trial" of Office 2003, so that ought to let me work on files until the end of August (though I brought my copy of Office 2003 Small Business Edition, too). Apropos of which, I need to go install Wordfast and try to retrieve some install codes for other programs.
I expect my next post will be from Moscow, probably on Saturday (unless I luck out at my sister-in-law's).
Cheers...
