dreaming on

Okay, hurricane canceled! I have found the most amazing thing ever.



This will solve all problems, everywhere, forever.

You're welcome.

See, this is the kind of my person I am: I spend thirty seconds sobbing, hating my life, hating my luck, hating everything, and then I tell myself that I am going to stop and I do. All better.

Well, I still hate everything, but I'm not crying anymore.

On a related note, I recently purchased a new desktop computer and a new soundcard to use on it. When it arrived, I attempted to install the soundcard and it did not work. So I attempted to install my wireless card, and it did not work. After speaking with tech support, we concluded that it was a motherboard issue, and they sent me a new desktop.

The new desktop arrived. The soundcard and the wireless card just will not work. Either I don't know how to install hardware, or I have the worst fucking luck. And either way, I have to just return everything and ask them to give me my money back.

I'm so bitter and angry and hateful right now. Why can't I have nice things?

TV Links is gone forever.

This is a black day indeed. ;_;

I need to just stop going to my LIS 460: Nifty Gadgets Technology and the School Library Media Center class. Every time I go there I find like, four or five new shiny things to take home with me and destroy increase my productivity.

As an example, I left class at 4PM and decided to post in LJ about it when I got home.
98 minutes after getting home, I pried myself away from the shiny long enough to write about it.

Ta-Da List: to-do lists. I'm trying desperately to organize my life, because I have no discipline. I've found that to-do lists help me, but I can rarely convince myself to maintain daily logs with to-do lists for more than two weeks, and if I write my to-do lists in anything less impressive, I never find them again, or never get around to visiting them. This is a very simple and shiny program that will help me.

Joe's Goals: DISCIPLINE. I add goals (write Last Dreamer every day; don't snack often) and every time I make a goal or break a goal, I put a little mark on the calendar! I hope looking at all those glaring red X's will keep me from eating my third snack of the evening, even if I'm only snacking on fruit. Very simple, very shiny.

And the wealth that is Google:

Writely: Online word processing. For storing RP logs, in-progress writing, and notes. Eee!

Google Spreadsheets: Online Excel spreadsheets. Please, Kay, keep track of your spending. You want to so badly. Find the discipline. *adds a log to joe's goals!*

Google Reader: Best online RSS aggregator I've encountered yet. However, this has eaten the last 98 minutes of my life. On it I have discovered:

• Sony and the PS3: still out to alienate every potential consumer they can think of.
• Hand-holding is considered to be much more intimate, and more meaningful, than sucking face (which never fails to make me want to slap people who do it, including my roommates, and they're doing it in the privacy of their own home. Unfortunately, it's also my home.) I support hand-holding.
• Craigslist is an excellent resource for getting ignored if you're a straight male, and for getting spammed with 300 pictures of penises if you're a straight female.
• 13-year-old Amish girls can give me hope for the human race despite all the horrible, horrible things that keep happening in this country.

Edit for awesome: Also, insults used to be cooler.

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

Edit for awesomer awesome: I'm still staring at Google Reader, but on the bright side, I'm supporting an exceedingly right-minded organization.

The NY Times reports Google.org is "aiming to develop an extremely fuel-efficient, plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline". Current goal: 100mpg.

As of today, I no longer have a laptop.

As of two weeks from now, I will have a laptop again. A Vaio FE, with a 2Ghz processor and 1GB RAM, with a 60GB HD and an NVidia GeForce graphics card and a webcam I will never use but the case was a required update to accomodate the graphics card. With a two year warranty and a high performance battery. I'll have free shipping, the tax refund, and the credit for my Toshiba.

Her name will be Namine, and she will be engraved with a line from a Riku/Namine drabble I haven't yet written for lazulisong:

the stars fell like snow
on that night that never happened

I considered naming her after a Last Dreamer character, but Maris didn't fit, and almost all of the rest of the cast would just be asking for trouble -- like, Law? Graham? Remington? I don't think so. However, I have a standing tradition of naming hardware after other people's fiction. My HP laptop was ZERO, after the gundam from Gundam Wing, which explains why it was so evil and eventually exploded. My external hard drive, bought in ZERO's hayday, was the corresponding Wing, only like Gundam Wing to Gundam Wing ZERO, not evil.

My desktop succeeding ZERO was Ceiynt, after a Rosemary Edghill character, and like his paladin namesake, he has been faithful and devoted and a little underhanded. My Toshiba laptop was named Melior from the same source, and like his namesake, he has been clueless and unhelpful and high-maintnenace and inexplicably lovable, so I am sorry to see him go.

And now, a Namine.

Please live up to your namesake's creativity and gentleness, and get along well with Ceiynt and Wing. ♥

(Oh! I forget what name my little Sony Clie might have, because I haven't hooked it into my computer in about two years, but my iPod is Ruth! Named after Ceiynt's charge and Melior's girlfriend. omigod if hardware could be sad--

--wait! she did run out of batteries inexplicably shut down on me when I turned him in. oh! I'm sorry Ruth!)

Even my grandmother is making an AIM client these days.

Important Edit: This post was made from LJ Talk.

..........

Oh god, it's a whole thread in CFUD where people are doing that thing I desperately want to know how to do. XD XD

The laptop, my poor Melior, went into the laptop service center on December 2nd.

20 days later I called them to tell them that I was taking it out for Christmas.
(Of course I called them in between, asking them what the FUCK was their problem. They told me there was an increase in turn-around time for the holidays. Although I can't imagine why this would be the case, I told them that I understood that, but people need their fucking computers. The last time I needed service on a laptop it took three days -- AND that included the time in which they ordered the part.)
They told me that they hadn't looked at the laptop yet. It was still in queue.

So I told them, very simply, that my roommate would be coming to pick up the laptop. If it hadn't been looked at, would it retain its place in the queue? No, they said, only if it had already been evaluated. It would go to the back of the line. So I told them, very simply, that if they hadn't looked at the laptop by the time we came to pick it up, they would never see it again.

They added, by the way, we don't... seem to have a problem description here. And I went, WHAT? I described it over the phone to your technicians twice. They shrugged. I asked, well, do you want me to give you the description of the problem? No, they said. We'll look at it and make our own diagnosis.

By the time Lucinda picked it up, it had been looked at. They had called me again to ask, hey, what's the description of the problem? You didn't put anything down. The moment I described the problem, they recognized what was wrong, and told me they would need to order a new motherboard. I told them to order it, and by the time they got it back from my Christmas vacation, well -- it would be in and they could just install it and everything would be GREAT.

Lucinda picked up the laptop and was given an ultimatum that if my machine wasn't back in the shop within a week of their receiving the motherboard, they would send the part right back! Because they're in a position to give ultimatums. How dare I require my computer once in a goddamn month.

We brought it back to the service center on January 2nd -- maybe 3rd.

Today it is January 17th. I called them, twice, in this intervening time to complain. Last Tuesday they told me they had the laptop... they had the motherboard... "but the technician isn't in today". So I called on Wednesday. The technician says he'll put in the part today -- tomorrow at the latest. So I say, then my roommate will pick it up on Friday, is that okay? They said sure.

Lucinda forgot, so she went in today instead. She came back with no laptop, but the phone number of the district manager and the owner.

It's not ready.

It's been 35 days and I am going to tear this guy a new one.

I don't know why it is that I'm easily the most technilogically competent person in my entire household -- so to compensate, every piece of equipment that I touch has roughly 500% more errors and more complex errors than they do for normal people, causing even the retarded members of my family to mock me for being "bad" with computers.

I was going to post the last part of my Monster Maruma fic today... but John's computer ate all the modifications I made to it over the weekend. Now I'm going to be 24 hours late to posting it, and feel like a schmuck for gleefully promising everyone who expressed interest in it that I would have it to them on Christmas Eve Day.

24 hours ago the file was working FINE, but 6 hours later, it had collapsed in on itself, creating a black-hole-like void where it used to be on the computer, with no trace of the file remaining anywhere on the active HD except unopenable in Word's memory and nothing of it in the Recycle Bin.

Merry Christmas, by the way.

Dear folks at the Laptop Service Center,

I know that December is a busy month. I didn't expect a turnaround of five days for my laptop. (Although when I brought my laptop in to the service center in Albany, please note, I think I had a turnaround of about five days, and they had to order a part.) But you have had my laptop since December 2 and it's ridiculous that when I call today to find out why my laptop has vanished into the ether, I get "So what's the problem again? We don't have your description written down." Nobody has even looked at my laptop yet, it's "still in queue".

You've had it for almost three weeks. What do you people do all day, sit on AIM and troll LJ like I do? That's not acceptable in people who have actual timely work to do.

Now, shockingly, I need my laptop because I'm going to travel for the holidays. Who would've thunk it?! And if someone doesn't diagnose it by the time it gets picked up on Wednesday, it'll go right back to the end of the goddamn queue when I get back, just as if I hadn't spent a month waiting for you jerks.

Or it would, if I were going back to you. But I don't plan to. If my computer is returned to me having not even been touched in the three weeks I went without it, I am going to pack it up and send it somewhere else. I mean, hey. If I'm going to start fresh, I might as well do it with a company that hasn't already given me a bad impression.

No love,
Kay