DLand - Possessed PCs and Pleasant Postal Proficiency

in ,

Never reboot your machine before you leave for five days. The results could be catastrophic.It seemed simple enough. I couldn't burn these three files to a cd. I was just going to reboot and see if life would be happy again. Not only could I not burn the files, but I couldn't even eject the blank cd from the drive or open Windows Explorer without the entire machine locking up. Gah! Kevin called for some tech support during his training session and I couldn't connect to anything. Took three minutes for a browser to open and five minutes to get my icons back on the desktop. That was all fine until it spontaneously rebooted again. What the hell? Tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment here and I couldn't get where I needed to when I needed it. And as soon as I hung up with Kevin, life was great again. Machine purred along like nothing happened. Fascinating. Bossman facetiously remarked, “if this were Linux, you wouldn't have these problems.” I scanned the desk for something to throw at him. I heard enough of that on our listserv the other day. On a cheery note, the man at the post office knows exactly where Joe lives since he grew up in Toronto (go Leafs, yo!). He even gave me the name of several coffee shops I should check out when I'm ever there (most of which I can't remember now). What is it with Canadians and coffee, eh? So unless customs finds my package too dangerous to enter the Great White North, be watching your mailbox, Joey. And cross your fingers that my machine will stay in one piece while I'm gone. I'm looking forward to a sort of vacation after all this prep work for the conference.

Safe and Sound

in

You know you're going to have a good view from your hotel room when your ears pop in the elevator. 42nd floor, man. I can see half of Atlanta from here. Flight was pleasant and I got a lot of writing done on the planes. This guy next to me in Charlotte's airport had a teeny tiny remote control car. I must have one. It was like a remote control Micro Machine. He was driving circles around my computer bag and weaving in between the chair legs. I kept expecting a tiny little James Bond to hop out of the car after it spun out at my feet.