2002-01-28 - 9:34 p.m.
#104: No Need for Chestnuts Roasting in an Open Fire
Note to Self: Ever have this happen to you?: You're sitting down, munching away at your most favourite food in the entire world, when suddenly you think to yourself, "You know, this tastes kinda funny." Whatever you do next: DON'T STOP CHEWING. It is imperative that you immediately squash that line of thought and continue chewing like that thought never passed through your head. Because once you stop and think about it, you'll realise that what you're munching on is basically a random assortment of molecules and atoms which, in another configuration, could be an old, stinky, sweat-filled gym sock. In fact, it IS an old, stinky, sweat-filled gym sock! And it's in your mouth covered by your saliva and wrapped around your tongue! And it's just sitting there, a huge lump of pustulant waste products rolling about at the bottom of your mouth, just because you had to go ahead and think about why EXACTLY it tasted funny. So anyway, that's just a little heads up for all you food lovers and those eating right now. No need to thank me.
"Well, last week I did a very stupid thing." That's what I would have written anyway, if I'd actually gotten this diary entry out on schedule a week and a half ago like I was meant to. I guess now it'll now have to be "Two and a half weeks ago, I did a very stupid thing", but the whole urgency of the entry I would have written seems lost now that the disaster has passed. Well, mostly. Things are still a bit shaky (in spite of all the time I had to rectify that problem) but those after effects cannot compare to the PANIC I felt at the start of it all. But now is about the point the average reader will like at this entry funny and go, "What the heck is that boy on about?" so I shall proceed to explain. First of all.... Don't call me, "boy". Second of all.... Don't break into a hick accent or I will beat you with an ugly stick if I locate where you are in this huge global village we call the internet. And third of all.... The very stupid thing I speak of is deciding to break one of the firm tenets I had created for my life, based upon past experiences or by example. For instance, one of those tenets I have is "Never eat raw chilis ever again" which I think I've kept to pretty well apart from the occasional sliced one floating in a bowl of soy sauce, which seems to rank as the number one modified condiment amongst Asian people. Another tenet is, "Watch where you're going when running about helter skelter in an airport" based upon a slice-of-life story that I don't think I've told yet. Admittedly that rule kinda breaks down in Singapore airport (there's just so much to see and do there! And that's just the friggin airport! @_@) which, ironically enough, is where the accident that left a permanent mark on me occured. Maybe I'll tell that story some other time.
But THE tenet, the one that was broken two and a half weeks ago, was this, "Never trust a single word Bill Gates says 'cause he's a filthy stinking rotten liar who steals candy from the mouth of babes and I hate, hate, HATE him". I added that last part to the tenet after the disaster struck. Maybe I was being a little bit harsh. I'm pretty sure as a CEO of a monolith corporation, he'd at least have to bathe daily. But I digress, the wording of that tenet still stands in spite of the fact that it's PARTIALLY incorrect now that everything is up and running. I am of course, speaking of Windows XP and its instllation upon my system. Once it's actually ON the system, it's a remarkably stable and user friendly operating system. And it's quite pretty to look at too, although trying to get it out of its default colour scheme (a predominance of "blue") and still keeping that friendly "look" is quite the exercise in futility. In fact, trying to get ANYTHING out of its default scheme in WinXP is an exercise in futility but! I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's start at the beginning of this tragic tale of woe, as all great tragic tales of woe should.
It all began on Friday the 11th January, 2002. I recall that day to be dark and cloudy, a day full of foreboding and ominous foreshadowing of the events to come. Or maybe it was bright and sunny. I don't know, I hardly ever draw my curtains to look outside, anyway. Goddamn Auckland weather. Anyway, it being a quiet boring day (like all days are for me, one of the unclean and damned sections of society: THE UNEMPLOYED *gasps of horror from the audience*) I just randomly did whatever popped into my head first in order to keep myself busy. I wanted to play Anachronox. I played Anachronox. I wanted to curl up in bed and read some old Garfield TPBs. I did so. Then I acted upon a whim I shouldn't have. It was a whim that said, "Hey! Let's install that copy of WinXP Professional you have lying around to upgrade Windows 98 to the next level of operation and become one of the throng of people who get to say, 'Aha! I have installed Windows XP and since then I haven't experienced any crashes whatsoever and it runs up to 257 times faster than any previous incarnations of Windows I've had on this computer!'. And don't worry about backing anything important up, the installation process is quick and simple and completely foolproof! It certainly won't delete everything in your 'My Documents' or 'Favourites' folder, that's simply not possible! I laugh boisterously now at such a possibility ever occuring! Which it certainly wouldn't! Ahahaha! I laugh! Boisterously! Ahahahahahaha!".
In a hindsight that's 20/20, that was a stupid whim to listen to.
So in a move of absolutely foolish naivety (I seem to do those a lot), I decided to act upon that afore mentioned whim and install WinXP right on top of Win98, thinking that such an upgrade could be completed seamlessly. No mess, no fuss. Simplicity in its highest form, and certainly not at ALL of duplicity. And for a while there, that was even actually true. I just shoved in the CD, clicked on setup, clicked 'OK' and then waited while the new and improved operating system took care of its own end in the installation. There was a bit of analysing the system, a bit of checking what files to copy, all followed by a bit of the actual copying to take place after all that. No big deal, it was the kind of screen I'd seen a hundred times installing Win98 whenever I needed to (usually on other peoples computers. I'm bad at getting into the swing of that "Format C: and reinstall OS" routine that most other people get into. It's a good habit that I can't seem to pick up. Doesn't stop me from berating some other people when they DON'T do it though, heh.). No big deal at all. Absolutely none. And then..... it happened! *gasp* It.... RESTARTED! No wait, that was supposed to happen before it started into the whole file copying process. Nevermind. Moving along to the actual process of copying: It seemed to do that quite well too. 10% files copied, 20%, 30%. If WinXP could do anything, it certainly could count percentages. Or maybe it was training ME to count percentages, as I stared slack jawed at the screen for about a half hour. Yes, I was certainly stuck for excitement if I could just stare at that setup screen without moving for that amount of time.
It was only when the percentile of files copied reached the 90% mark that things started to go wrong. Not in a terrible way mind you, just a mere pinprick of doom to what was to follow. It just refused to copy a certain file. In a way, I think this was fate's subtle way of telling me of the impending doom I was about to face. That smug, anthropomorphically personified bastard. I tried restarting the computer several times (the setup just picked up from where it left off each time) in order to see if that would get the file to somehow make the transfer, as well as opening and closing the CD tray a couple of times to try and "jar" the CD-RW into reading that section. All to no avail. After a point, I simply shrugged and pressed "skip file". It didn't look important, possibly drivers for a USB port which I did not have. I think. I'm somewhat iffy on what is exactly IN this computer, sometimes. In any case, I skipped ahead to the final process of installing the components copied unto my harddrive. And lo, I saw a great field of white and mottled shades of blue accompanied by the sweetest voice of an angel, declaiming my arrival into this unearthly nirvana! And as I prepared to enter the gates of this Shangri-La.... I got a page fault error and had to restart.
That made me blink. A little.
So it restarted and brought up that funky new "Windows XP is loading" screen, then brought up the whole setup screen again, started installing.... Then reached the same page fault error with the same file and had to restart. Again.
I was chewing my fingernails at this point.
It restarted, went back to loading screen, back to setup screen, back to page fault error and back to restart. It was about the third or fourth loop of this that I threw up my arms into the air and screamed "YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! MACGYVEEEEEEEEEEEEER!". I realised then that I was clearly incoherent and deranged at this point if I was mixing up a line from Planet of the Apes with a Macgyver reference, so I turned off the computer with its incessant looping and went and lay down on my bed for a while. And I dreamed of a world wherein I did not install WinXP and lived happily in ignorance of the disaster that would have occured had I chosen otherwise. But all dreams have to come to end, and when I woke up harsh reality told me that WinXP was still broken and still refused to do anything other than loop through that error message. Not only that, it refused to let me switch back to Win98, the option simply wasn't available to switch back to the former operating system I was using. So I did the only thing humanly possible. I decided to reinstall Win98 OVER this WinXPs broken installation process over the original operating system which was Win98. To say that this would have resulted in severe stability issues is an understatement, but I had little choice if I wanted to save what was on my C drive before I decided to format the whole thing. But Fate (being the smug, anthropomorphically personified bastard that he is) had other things in store for me....
I won't go into all the details, but by the time I had something that was capable of letting me move folders and files using a point n click mouse interface I had installed Win98 TWICE (that's a Win98 installation over a Win98 broken installation over a WinXP broken installation over the original operating system of Win98. Stability had packed its bags and moved out of the country at this point) AND I couldn't view at a resolution higher than 320 by 240 with 16 colours AND I couldn't get the modem working to download the missing drivers (since the modem itself was also missing its driver and I didn't have the installation disk for it. Catch-22 at its finest) AND (worse of all) I had lost everything in "My Documents" and "Favourites" folder. Everything. In those folders. All gone. An entire years worth of unbacked up personal material and internet bookmarks all gone in a WinXP/Win98/Win98 AGAIN install. I decided to lie down again at that point until the urge to gibber and malign more classic quotes from film and television history went away. I DID manage to save my "Favourites" folder at a later date (thank god one of the installation processes backed some files up) but "My Documents" remained lost at sea. Forever as the case may be, since I did a format C: afterwards and got rid of everything that may have been on it, hidden away in some folder somewhere. Which I could have saved, if I'd looked more carefully amongst the Windows backup CAB files. I'll stop thinking that line of thought now. It's much too soon to be thinking that.
Anyway, I decided at that point (when Win98 started up and everything was gone) to ring up Kunfei and ask him to come over sometime to do a step by step walkthough of installing WinXP with me. So that if anything DID screw up the next time, at least I'd have someone who had a certified computer repair license to help me out instead of relying upon my raw instincts of a fairly adept but completely untrained computer nerd. Unfortunately, his mobile wasn't on (or it was silent) so I decided to ring him about a dozen times and hang up before it got to the voicemessage box. Just so he'd get a dozen "Missed Calls" messages and realise the urgency of my situation and come over straight away as soon as he saw them. Admittedly it WAS close to midnight by the time I called, so he'd have a good excuse to have his mobile off and NOT come over immediately. But I stayed up past misnight just in case, anyway. Plus, I was trying to drown my sorrows in an extended session of watching the anime I had on tape (and NOT on CDs which were now unviewable thanks to the funky Win98 current setup). Specifically, I was watching Bubblegum Crisis 2040, an anime about an out of control megacorporation who have monopolised the production of a breed of cyborg with a penchant for acting out of the bounds of their original programming by perpetuating chaos and destruction amongst the unaware human populace whose only saviours are an elite group of high heeled power armour wearing lady vigilantes who save the day while striking a blow against The Man. It was strangely therapeutic.
Saturday, 12th January, 2002. Day two. I rose from my bed after the all-night, partial-early morning session of anime watching to ring up Kunfei once again to see if I needed to add another missed call to the list. Fortunately, he was up. Unfortunately, he was busy for the day so I had to wait until Sunday to get my computer up and running at its full capacity again. That was okay, I could wait. Really. Just.... wait. Without a computer. No problem. No anxiety shakes or rocking back and forth in a foetal position whimpering, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home. I see dead people" for me! I was stronger than that! You believe me, right?! RIGHT???
.... And besides, I had to get out of the house for that day to (ironically enough) help someone with their computer. A errrrr.... differently abled man (ie suffered a stroke) needed help in aligning his scanner (or printer) so that what was put into the scanner would come out in the same proportion on the printer, or something like that anyway. It wasn't exactly my area of expertise or usefulness but I offered to go over and putter around to see if I could help anyway. Sadly, I couldn't. In fact, the only area I *could* help him out with was how to get rid of an "unread message" symbol he had floating next to his inbox in Outlook Express, which was a matter of finding an unread message in his inbox and clicking on it. Woo. Sometimes I really wonder about my so-called affinity with computers and computer-related products. So anyway, after helping him fix up a couple of niggly little things on his desktop that had absolutely nothing to do with the real problem he had called me out to help him fix, we kinda got to talking a bit. Well, he was talking and I was listening to him talk. Apparently he had been a real activist for disabled peoples rights in his day (I'm thinking he was in his forties now) and saw me as a kind of "brother in arms" (hey, I don't wear these goldfish bowls on my face without a reason, you know! A reason apart from, "they make my eyes the size of dinner plates not unlike an anime characters", I mean). I didn't have the heart to tell him that despite my glasses, I was most probably not judged as harshly as those with worse problems like him and the people he was advocating for. Besides, he didn't look to be the kind of person who got a lot of visitors, so I wasn't going to tell him I DIDN'T want to hear his stories. That would have been heartless. However, it was after he was done with those stories that the reason for his not getting too many visitors began to manifest. For he was none other than.... A DIRECT MARKETER! *dramatic chord*
"What is a direct marketer?" some of you may be asking? Well, it's someone who buys those crappy "as seen on TV" products (which no one ever uses) at wholesale prices, and then tries to sell it at retail price to their unsuspecting friends and neighbours as well as try to recruit them into their ranks. It's an ever expanding pyramid scheme that's doomed to failure in the long run because it depends upon a lot of exchange of money without the actual EARNING of it. Except for the people right at the top of the pyramid who'll get a lot of cash running their way from the people below, anyway. Think door to door salesmen, only right in your very own living room! Or their living room, as the case may be. As was my case when he suddenly launched into his spiel about buying a line of products from him and earning up to 20% off the savings I would have gotten if I'd stop buying retail, as well as the benefits I would have gotten being a direct marketer! And my mother, would she be interested too? Is she working? She isn't? Good! Direct marketing is the perfect job for people who stay at home! I swear Zeb, I did not truly understand your distaste for such people and their profoundly disturbing effect on their (soon to be former) friends until that point. And he had the perfect angle too, which prevented me from interrupting and saying I was uninterested. And his angle was, "I'm a lonely disabled man, so you have to sit down and listen to me because you're just too damned polite and passive to provide any word of protest". It was a flawless and perfectly executed verbal assault that left me floundering and unable to offer any form of resistance.
In the end, I *did* manage to walk out of the house without spending anything on any of what he was offering (heck, I probably couldn't afford any of it anyway with the contents of my wallet) and I'm not planning to become a direct marketer anytime soon.... But I did promise to come back the very next day with Kunfei in tow to help him with his printer/scanner problems. That was two and a bit weeks ago and I haven't been back since nor have I decided to rin him up to tell him of my tardiness. It's a bit unfair on my part and I know I'm going to call him sooner or later to tell him what happened on the Sunday I was supposed to go.... But for now I'm going to imagine the problem away. Actually, Kunfei himself gave me the best excuse for not going that Sunday, but I didn't know that beforehand when I made that promise. Besides, that's getting a bit of myself there. Actually, that aspect of the tale came the very next day, so why don't we just skip directly to that?
Sunday, 13th January, 2002. Day three. I awoke bright and early that day (well, 12PM) confident in the fact that by later that evening I was going to be the proud owner of a fully up and running PC complete with WinXP fully installed and ready for all comers who would test its newfound power! So I rang up Kunfei to see when he was available for the day. His mobile rang five times, then I hung up before it got to the voicemail box. I tried ringing again, thinking he needed a little encouragement in waking up. Five rings, no response, hung up. I tried again. Still no response. I think it was about the 20th try that I realised he was most probably not going to pick up his mobile phone no matter how many times I rang. But I had to try anyway. In fact, I tried over 240 times in total, with 200 of those calls made in a single hour wherein I sat down in a comfy chair, rang his mobile, hung up when I heard the first ring, pressed "redial" and did the whole process over and over again. In terms of crank calls, this probably crossed the border over to obsessive compulsiveness. I was later told by Kunfei he had only actually received 90 or so missed call messages, I guess some of them didn't get through and count as such. Oh well. I'll just have to be vigilant and try harder the next time (ha!).
So after that unsightly display of "When Edwyn Goes Wrong", I decided to putter about on my recently crippled computer while waiting for Kunfei to ring back. It wasn't a wholesome experience. I stayed on that computer for as long as I could (moving remaining personal files and folders from the C drive to the other 2 free ones) before the sheer nausea of having to be on a computer working at far less than its maximum capacity finally overloaded my synapses and I retreated to.... the other computer. Which wasn't a whole lot better (Cyrix-P166 with 32MB RAM. Old and decrepit are apt descriptions) but at least it could run at 1024 by 768 resolution and could connect to the internet. It could also run Fallout, an RPG that once provided me with boundless hours of enjoyment when all I had was that forementioned Cyrix and still does. It didn't have sound unfortunately (since I ripped out the soundcard from the old comp to put it into the new one. The reason why directly correlates to the reason why I wanted WinXP in the first place: "Better DOS games support". Oh, foolish nostalgia! Why do you haunt me so?!) but that didn't change it from being a great game; which translates into hours of pointless activity pouring effort into a game I've beaten hundreds of times before while waiting for Kunfei's phonecall. Yes, it all came back to that. The waiting, the hurting for the phonecall for when he would ring and say, "I'm sick, and didn't wake up until a couple of minutes ago.". No wait, he wasn't supposed to say that....
But say that he did, and at was at that point that I realised that I was stuck with a broken computer for a lot longer than I had anticipated. And with that realisation, I raised my arms up to the merciless heavens and cried....
TO BE CONTINUED!
Because I'd like to draw out this tale as long as possible. Besides, I've been stuck on this damn thing for 7 hours now, and I feel drained. I'll tell the rest of the story tomorrow. Really! For sure! An entry is going to come tomorrow! Well, maybe the day after....
