Support fun...

I called Acer yesterday to get some clarity on the failed hard drive, and was stymied from the very beginning. Their automated system requires you to "say or enter" one of two numbers, the first of which I could not find, and the second of which consists of 20+ numbers and letters.

After a few tries, the system finally said it had understood what I said, and then proceeded to read back a number where "B" was replaced with some other letter, and then again with some other letter.

At this point, I began to repeat "representative!" rather loudly, whereupon the system basically told me that I would have to go online to get support, and then hung up on me. I tried calling again, but apparently the system uses Caller ID to cut the transaction short, and I was again told to go online.

In the end, I was able to engage in a chat session with someone from Acer, whose position basically was that a hard drive could not fail the way mine had (loss of partition table upon power-down) unless the system had been improperly shut down. And while I admit to having pressed the on/off button for the requisite four seconds to shut the system off instead of doing it through the network, it occurs to me that four seconds is plenty of time for the hardware to move the hard drive heads out of harm's way before power is lost.

Anyway, based on my experience—numerous computers over the years that have lost power under more egregious conditions resulting in data loss, but never in a trashed disk—I now look at the easyStore hardware and wonder whether it's worth trying to recover the system at all.

Cheers...

Work and play (sort of)...

A fairly large job hit the inbox this morning, with a request for an ASARP (As Soon As Reasonably Possible) turnaround, which I accommodated by sending the 4,000 words back by 1 pm.

Then I went to Durango, for a number of reasons, chief among them to get some pet food (and yes, even with the 120-mile round trip, it's cheaper to buy the stuff in Durango than in Pagosa, if you throw in bulk purchases and the buy-a-dozen-get-one-free deal at the store in Durango). I also stopped by the health food store to pick up some tabouleh and some black rice, and at the Wal-Mart to pick up some roasted Hatch peppers.

There are two things I really enjoy about this time of year in the Colorado Rockies: mushrooms and peppers.

The mushroom season was pretty much a bust (not enough rain not soon enough, in my opinion, at least around these parts), but the New Mexico pepper harvest is something you can fairly well depend upon.

I picked up a few of these peppers a couple of weeks ago, out of the "hot" pile at the City Market, and they didn't seem all that hot to me. Spicy, yes, but not hot, not like, say, a jalapeño.

So today, I picked out a box of hot peppers, paid for it, and had the crew outside the store roast 'em for me.

I had two of them with dinner, and these bad boys delivered quite a bit more heat. Also, even rigorous washing of the hands after handling only two peppers was not enough to prevent subsequent discomfort when handling sensitive areas of one's body.

I can just imagine what it'll be like tomorrow, when I go through the rest of the peppers and decide what to do with them.

Shiloh enjoyed the trip, for sure; especially the part where I pick up an extra treat for her while shopping at the pet store. Today's fun involved an ox-tail that was devoured in short order (making me happy I had brought water for her to drink, as I suspect the dried treats may have a lot of salt on them, along the lines of what passes for "jerky" that's sold for human consumption at gas stations, for example.

Apropos of which, I managed to cover 388 miles on one tank of gas (16.7 gallons), which puts the van in the better-than-20-miles-per-gallon category (heck, almost 25 miles per gallon, which is not bad for a vehicle built in 1998 and 225,000 miles on the odometer).

Promising news from Galina, more about which if it comes to pass.

Cheers...