Ah, the waters are receding

Whatever torture I have so richly deserved for the past weeks (and months, and years, but who's counting?) has thankfully begun to subside these last few days. My laptop is still wheezing but working, the Dell CDs came next-day via special delivery, and my DSL guy finally came out and put my signal back on its feet and off of its knees. It's almost like I can breathe again.

The upside is that I had begun to find things to do in the analog world: my wife re-upped my subscription to a real, ink-and-paper newspaper service, I cleaned up the place, and some other stuff that was worthwhile and non-digital. Maybe now though, I can meld the two, or at least read my little daily list of bookmarked pages with my morning coffee, as God intended.

Whatever sentence I've been serving in digital limbo/Hell, I am glad to be at least on probation. Let's hope I stay on the Digital Deity's good side. Amen.

Rick is the best friend I never met

Rick at Dell, now my most faithful reader (certainly among the most helpful) has left another comment, this time explaining that Dell has resumed the normal and ethical practice of providing the reinstallation CDs for paying customers. Thank God for that.

Thank Him/Her also that Rick let me know, as I have been unable to access the Dell website to research for myself my previous assertion that they just don't send them anymore. I'm glad Rick set it straight.

"Be cool, dude..."

My laptop continues to subsist on quasi-life support. It works, but every boot-up could be its last. Preceding each boot is an error message warning that hard drive failure is imminent, and I should back up my crap and get a new hard drive. Better advice was seldom given.

The thing reminds me of the friend we all had (or were) in high school, who no matter how loaded he was, no matter how slobbering, falling-down wasted he found himself, could always pull it together for the 35 seconds it took for the cop or school administrator to walk by, before degenerating back to the stumbling, poorly arranged mass of cells he had worked so hard to become.

Here's hoping my laptop can hold it together a while longer...

Dell - savior or Satan?

Dell doesn't send Windows software CDs with new systems

After my desperate, blogged complaint of my Dell laptop succumbing to the forces of entropy, I received an unexpected note from a Dell representative, advising me that I can contact Dell to get copies of the WinXP OS that I so badly need. Come to find out that the reason they'll happily send them to me is that they never sent them to me in the first place!

Oh yeah - apparently, it's policy. What the blazing Hell...? When you buy a new machine from a big, reputable name, you also buy the OS. How the bleeding Christ can you justify not sending the CDs with the new system?

Now, somewhere out there is a Dell guy surfing blog entries - it must be how he found the last one, and so-generously left me a helpful comment. And I appreciate that. When he finds this one, I would like to explain the previous, rabid paragraph thusly:

When I got near the lowest point a computer consumer ever hopes to get to, on the brink of total system failure, I reach for my magic bullet. During digital freefall, I reached for the ripcord on my silicon parachute, and I found absolutely nothing. I thrashed around the house like a blinded ape for two hours, racking both my brain and my evermore-cluttered home office, looking for software that just had to be there. Looking for software that I had never needed before, and so had never searched for before.

Reaching into the abyss and pulling back nothing, I was quite upset, and instantly deluded my guilty conscience that I must have misplaced the CD's that I lacked. Why, it must be the only answer, since it would be hideously unorthodox to not include them with a new machine. Only software pirates need fear this type of inconvenience/gripping terror - I paid for my shit! What is this, "Bargain Bob's Big Box Computer Warehouse??" No, no, certainly this must be my error in losing the disks, and what a fool I am to have put myself in such a position!

And so it was a relief but still jarring that I found I hadn't directly caused myself all that torture, but that it was provided to me by a wrong-headed corporate policy. Yeesh!

Your name isn't really Phillip, is it?

Following that revelation, I got to spend over 90 minutes on the phone with "Phillip," a very nice gentleman from east Asia who either due to language skills or lousy intercontinental phone connection took no less than five tries to collect EACH discreet piece of contact data. I had to spend several minutes stating, repeating and even describing ("no, there are five digits in my zip code...") my street name, telephone number, zip code, city name, e-mail address, etc. Frustrating for both of us, I'm sure, but shit, at least he was getting paid to do it.

Then he called me back to tell me he won't be sending me the CDs for the older Dimension system, because it's not under warranty. Madness! I rebuked his attempt to snatch away my just-won CD, and told him that they were never sent in the first place. After a brief discussion with his supervisor, he advised me he'd send them. I'll feel a lot more secure when they are actually in-hand.

So I must say thanks to Rick at Dell in Texas, for going the extra mile and clueing me into the fact that my OS CD's can be found somewhere, anywhere. That's just the kind of thing that keeps a customer loyal. And big, hairy bollocks to Dell for disincluding said CD's as a matter of course. That's just the sort of thing that scares customers away.

At long last, my video interview project is finally taking shape. I put together a decent intro animation and some subtle but attractive graphic and video overlays that add both utility and gentle pizazz to the end result. I still want to add music to the intro and some respectable credits. For taking as long as it has to get this far, having the end in sight is a pleasure.

Laptop down

My laptop is seriously troubled, possibly boned. It spent about 5 hours running a hard drive scan, dispatching bad sector after bad sector. It seems to be working now, but my faith in the thing is shot.

Even worse, I don't seem to have the Dell/WinXP disks I thought I had, with which to mop up this impending mess. This surprising lack of media strikes at my very core, and I had to take a deep breath, step back, and crack a beer before I put something through the nearest wall. The rest of the day has been salvaged, but only as a result of fastidious control of nearly uncontrollable rage.

So, that's how it's going... I am so disheartened.

Testy dispatcher

I took a 3-hour test today for a gig with the county Sheriff's department. It was a tough test, timed and unforgiving. My reading comprehension and note-taking are strong, and they helped counteract some drawbacks from some skill sets that were maybe a little less robust than I had hoped.

The test was pass/fail, and I am confident that I passed. I should know for sure within two weeks. I gave it my best, and I feel pretty good about it. The time-sensitive nature was a bit of a surprise, but after the first five minutes, I realized what pace the thing demanded, and rose to the occasion.

There were about 12 other applicants testing. I am surprised how many people show up to this type of thing looking... well, pretty casual. No flip-flops today, and it wasn't like it was an interview, but some people didn't show up dressed to play.

Big props to Grandma for helping with childcare and transportation, or I woulda never made it.

Easter laughs

My Dad and his fiancé Denise came over last Sunday, and we had a good time. Some of the laughs:

Brian, carrying a plastic hog to show to Grandpa, the former peace officer: "Pig?"
Tom, to Brian: "No son, he's retired."

Grandpa, to Mackenzie, defining sleep apnea: "That's where a fat person goes to sleep, and the fat from their neck slops down over their throat, and they can't breathe."

Both those exchanges still crack me up.

jogging

I went for a jog last evening. I saw 2 jackrabbits, navigating the natural channels of the foothill brush. I still get a kick out of random wildlife sightings.

Preaster

We're rolling to Mountain Ranch, for a day-before-easter egg hunt, pre-Easter. "Preaster," if you will. My dad was to attend, but we got our Saturdays & Sundays mixed up. We hope to see him & Denise tomorrow, at our place instead.

Inspiration

I like to watch survival shows - shows like "Survivorman" with Les Stroud, and "Man vs. Wild" with Bear Grylls. They are enjoyable to watch, as they mix education, adventure and often beautiful scenery. Bear Grylls did a show from the Sierra Nevada that I could watch over and over, even with the sound off. The place is just that gorgeous.

In that vein, a news story out tells of two Frenchmen surviving a terrible ordeal in the wilds of French Guiana.

"He was infested with worm parasites that had burrowed into his flesh and had trouble speaking and moving after swallowing venom from a poorly cooked giant spider. He was covered with bites. His brother, Gilles, said he looked like "he'd just come out of a concentration camp". His blood pressure had plummeted and doctors said that without proper nutrition he would have died within three days."

Wow. Seven weeks in the jungle - refutes the slanderous myth that the French are all a bunch of wimps.

I feel like a dinosaur

I have been trying to put more workout days on the calendar, and three days ago, we did legs. Two days thereafter, the pain fairy arrived, leaving my legs tender. My gait closely matched that of the velociraptor from Jurassic Park, as I pick my knees up a little too high with each step.

I picture myself in 5 years, just as pudgy and weak, but having spent the intermittent years beating the crap out of myself; knees aching, muscles scarred internally, I will continue my piecemeal, ignorant quest to, as Lester Burnham put it: "look good naked."

Meet the new blog, same as the old blog

New place, new delivery system, same old blog.

I've been blogging for years at my domain, tombickle.com, using handwritten code and DreamWeaver, which has come to strongly resemble the ease with which Daniel Lewis wrote and painted in "My Left Foot." If the technical equivalent of my left foot was the only avenue available to me, this might make sense. With other means at my easy disposal, however, I feel more and more like a wingnut as I struggle along with this odd and unnecessarily difficult method of blogging.

No more. I've stopped hemming, and slowed precipitously on the hawing, and chosen a dedicated blog forum on which to hang my yammerings. I researched it myself, and couldn't find a significant difference among the choices available. Thanks to Greg Crist for his Google-based opinion that blogger.com is the way to go.

Trust me to listen to the opinion to one of the few people I know who doesn't have his own blog. This oddity is precisely representational of how I make all my decisions - badly.

So, on with the show. My goal as I strike out in this new area is to blog at least once daily, aiming for at least one post that is of interest to the world at large once per week. Blogger promises to facilitate with entry methods including text messaging and audio blogging - how exciting.