Tag: computer

living on small tragedy street

Word of the day – Gesamtkunstwerk: the total work of art, or rather, the idea of design for the totality of an object instead of individuation of its parts

How do you tell when you’re overly tired? I have certain mental tics that arrive, stupid songs that play in my head, this shit is bananas, simple, repetetive lyrics I would never otherwise be conscious of knowing, b-a-n-a-n-a-s, and I hold little conversations with myself, dumbed down to the point of ridiculousness, where the words like “yo” and “dude” and terms like “for reals” feature heavily. It seems that on the point of exhaustion, my brain dissolves into a ten year old internet pixie, the sort that spells “you” with only one letter. Not quite lolcat, but something similar, insidious, and slightly worse, as if a children’s television show producer has snuck into my skull and started scribbling on the walls in mile high luminous letters completely devoid of meaning.

I have so reached that point. In fact, I reached it a couple of hours ago, back when it was still yesterday, but instead of curling up in my giant cozy bed like a person who has good ideas then follows through with them, I have been fighting with my printer. My amazing, life changing, totally bonzo photo printer. That I love. When I do not hate it. Like I do right now. Because the damned thing, (though I coddle it as if was alive and cute, squalling like the useless infant it so obviously is), ran out of gray ink and will not go.

If it was only the printer that was giving me a hassle, I would have simply gone to bed upon this discovery with the full intention of getting up tomorrow, purchasing some ink, installing it, then letting it all ride wild, but no. My computer, as well, is refusing to run. I spent four solid hours using it yesterday, and let me tell you, it’s a freaking joy to work on, that screen is like staring into the caring eyes of some technocratic deity, and then it asked, ever so nicely, for a reboot, as there was some update that required such and oh, won’t it be sweet when I restart and everything is shinier? I figured, alright, sure. I need to pop out and pick up a tuxedo anyway. So I saved everything, hit restart, and head out the door. Upon my return, what did I find? A dead black screen.

My body, at this point, actually filled with dark, cold dread.

It seems that it did shut down, but failed to properly restart. Trying again begat identical results. Awful, terrible results. Running all the diagnostics possible brought me to the same dead screen, without even the comfort of a useless blinking cursor. Rolling back the boot failed, the memory test failed, the safe start failed, the whatever that other thing I found that I guess comes with Win7 failed. Everything. Failed.

So that was three hours of my life.

At which point, I finally turned to my laptop, though as photo editing goes, I’m not sure if there’s anything worse to colour correct with than a laptop screen. I figured, ah well, I will do my best, and my best will save me, it will be enough, and this project will lift from the ground and soar, even so. Hooking it up to the printer proved a bit of a chore, as at first it didn’t want to take directions from such a paltry machine after knowing the full glorious might of my desktop computer, but after a bit of a wrangle, I won, and it submit to my tender ministrations, as gentle and pure as a metaphorical lamb. By midnight, I was ready. Course, as soon as the pictures were all settled up, the printer joined in the technology hate party, mocking me with a dull red refill light, even after I was so damned nice to it, head cleaning, running a re-alignment, all of those things you do when you’re starting up such a beautiful machine after a sad month of sorrowful neglect. Which leads me to now, after two a.m., deciding upon the third recitation of the stupid banana song, (who is responsible for that terrible thing, anyway? I refuse to look it up. Or know.), that it is time to abandon my original plan, and instead go tomorrow and pay filthy dollars to some dime store clerk and have them do all my printing for me. Out of spite, you ask? No, out of worn to the bone exhaustion. It’s the wedding rehearsal tomorrow, the wedding the day after that, yet my rent needs be paid, and so I stay up and up and up, though I don’t have time for this. I don’t. Nor do you, probably, so I wish us luck and good night!

wtf computer problem

I just got the weirdest error message of my life. I just unplugged my computer and all of its components and moved my computer across the room to my new desk and attempted to turn it on after plugging everything back in. Instead of booting up, a pleasant woman’s voice said SYSTEM FAILED DUE TO SYSTEM OVERCLOCKING. I replied, “buh?” and tried again, to the same result.

Please, internet, explain this to me! Talking computer? What the heck!

sing!

Oh My Lawless Mercy, MAH COMPUTER HAS BEEN SAVED!

We stayed up until four o’clock this morning duplicating my data to the super amazing off-board drive of terabyte awesomeness that Ray gave me, wiping my computer clean, then installing everything fresh. My computer is a jewel again, sparkiing in the sun, flawless and beautiful. He even whished out all the cat furred dust bunnies that had been clogging the fan. It’s not even plugged in yet, I got in too late this morning to spend the spaghetti time, but I already feel reborn.

You know what this means? This means I can bloody well work on my photography again!

I didn’t dare, before, at the risk of losing anything I opened. It was terrifying. Mail archives going back to 1992, phone numbers, music, writing, media.. everything was at risk, held hostage. (“Fuck the cloud“). My computer was in that dire a state. First it stopped seeing my disc drive, which meant no more burning DVD back-ups, then my photoshop wouldn’t save, then nothing Adobe would even open, then I couldn’t open any files from 2006, then, worst of all, if it froze while I was copying/moving anything, anything, whatever I was trying to back-up would vanish into the ether, never to be seen again, not even in DOS. It plateaued there for a few weeks in that purgatory land of uncertain files while I desperately ran malware-security scan after malware-security scan, purging the evils as best I could, before finally hard crashing so violently it would take out the internal clock. I’d have to reboot three times to get through my mail.

Curator Michael Wright with the first fully functional working model of the Antikythera Mechanism.

burning my eyes out at work

My computer died and was ded this week. Terrible thing. All of my phone numbers, addresses, appointments.. all locked in a little metal box. And broken. Cats lost the ability to taste sweetness as part of the evolutionary process. It streamlined them, made them a better predator by keeping them from foraging. Apparently I have lost the ability to put anything at all worth knowing down on simple wood-pulp paper.

Eventually the big guns were called in and my friend Frank spent up an entire night reinstalling the OS, so now I’m in the midst of rebuilding my computer into my home. I’m not attached to any place, you see, only people, and the way I speak with them, well.. here’s Johnny!

It’s liberating to have a keyboard again, to be able to write and upload my photos. Something’s wacky with the soundcard though, which, gee whiz, is sending me around the proverbial bend. No music! I slept on the couch last night because there’s a stereo in the living room. I find myself singing like a wind-stranded sailor, as if somehow that will bring signal back through the wires. Silence makes me strange. I can’t stand it. I’ve even dug out the radio, brain damaging pop-tart advertisement machine it is. The local stations are all either Guns & Roses style “classic rock” worship, bitches in da’ back hip-hop, or aggravating schmaltz dipped in bleeding violins, but I seem to have found a good (accidental) halfway point between a candy coated station and some local ethnic signal that’s leaking into it. It was a little hit or miss – when I started it was a reggae spanish-guitar Jesus Jones, and somewhere in there something really fascinating happened to Beck that I just can’t pin down, but right before I left the house it gives me Kylie Minogue with bouncy bollywood sitar all through it. It sounded strangely like a really cheerful chinese re-mix of that Disney song, “We Are Siamese If You Please”.

Terrifying.

That said, my game-designer friend James will be staying with me a couple of nights still before he jets off to the GDC down in San Fransisco, and as he’s the one who gave me the computer in the first place, I’m sure he’s more than qualified to fix it. Thank goodness for small mercies. It’s a comfortable couch, but not half as much as my bed.

doom, gloom, windows xp

Something has gone terribly, wretchedly wrong with my computer. No data’s been lost, but it can’t boot out of anything but SafeMode. (And even that has been rife with sketchy moments). We’ve been trying a little bit of everything to fix it, (bare minimum start up sets, system rollbacks, etcetera), but nothing so far has worked, instead the errors grow more esoteric as we continue.

Thankfully, my friend Frank is bringing over a system disc for a fresh OS install, but as that’s going to be at ten tonight, if you need to get a hold of me today, call.

my ex is in the show tonight, maybe I’ll get to meet his wife.

My computer snapped yesterday, a nasty electrical crack that tells of either a power source or a motherboard. The acrid scent resulting leans me toward thinking it was a power source failure. I suspect that my power bar doesn’t have the surge protector I assumed it did and the fridge turned on at an inopportune time. I live in an old building. Currently I’m thefting minutes on my roommate’s computer until I can get it fixed. It’s a highly unreliable way to stay in contact, but feel free to continue sending letters, I will eventually get them, though I won’t be reading my flist at all. Also, all of my phone-numbers are now inaccessible. You have to leave your number when you call, else I have no way of getting ahold of you unless Andrew has your number in his phone.

I plan on sending Ryan out today, in fact, to see what can be done about fixing my quiet machine. I can only twitch on without it for so long without a base madness setting in. Today after work, the distraction is to the THE PARTY NOT STARRING PETER SELLERS, the 10 o’clock showing.

oh for effing fecks

My computer is officially dead. The machine passed away sometime in the early morning hours of last night with not a whimper but an acrid smoky bang.

Most of my life remains trapped, screaming, on the C: drive, and I am sorry to say that to get at anything, it will have to be opened up and examined, as the power button no longer functions in any useful way. It is now decorative. As is the monitor.

I don’t know enough to slice it open for repair.

Are there any willing to help ease this pain?

trying to make tinsel with forks in a blender

I thought it was a helicopter but it turned out to be my hard-drive.

My computer is officially going to explode. My mouse is wire-short suiciding in sympathy.

This is more than slightly worrisome. There’s no more pretending that a full wipe is going to fix it. Anything that grinds that loud, enough to give the illusion of blades chopping the air thirty feet above my building, is on its way out.