Pilot's Log

Just before Seven this evening, an electrical spike hit Rather Manor and both Mum's office and my own. Mum's computer got through okay, but Precious took it on the chin. There was a strong smell of burnt circuitry coming from it when it was all over. So I get to go to Knoxville and Computer King for the bad news tomorrow. At least Precious is still under warranty.

This is the Eff Pilot, y'all got your ears on, good buddy?

(This is for the benefit of my Facebook account, which for some reason has not received my latest posts from here.)

Just making sure that you can Now Hear This!--Klinger on M*A*S*H after he repaired the camp's PA system.

Just got the phone lines back. A cable somewhere burnt out in the switching unit that serves Rather Manor, so the repairman from AT&T told us.

The trojan spammer who has somehow hacked into my mail account struck again this week. I'm still trying to find ways to undo the damage.

In the meantime, I threw a new signature on my account. I repeat my "Dadah Means DEATH" line from my User Info here and go on to say that I don't approve of on-line medicine commerce. Messages that come from me with a sales pitch should be pitched.

I hope this irritates the spammer and he decides to move on to greener pastures.

But I want to counter-attack him more directly. Wish I knew how.

Not only was Maeflower (Mum's computer) on the rocks, but Dissected Cow (the one my friend game me) was also past its prime. So both of them are history and Computer King is assembling a custom system for Mum. It's only costing us $300, but it had to happen.

Mum's computer is on an enforced vacation, thanks to Microsoft. Because of a hardware glitch/incompatibility issue, I had to re-install the compy's WinXP OS a couple weeks ago. Tried to activate it, and evidently not only did the activation fail, so did my further attempts to work around it. Now the OS is locking us out and we can't even boot her computer in Safe Mode. Tonight I pulled out the hard drive, piggybacked it into my own compy, and saw that the data is safe (so far) but I still don't know how I'm going to adjust Mum's hard drive so the computer can boot again. I won't do any more work on the problem tonight because, well, it never is a good idea to do tech support after midnight if you have the choice. I'll probably do some more piggybacking, pulling data out, putting data in, and trying other methods.

If we had the money, we'd have upgraded BOTH computers to a more modern version of Windows and not have these problems.

I still haven't gotten Mum's e-mail back for her--or even her "Bejeweled 2" for her!--and I'm not liking myself for having this slump happen at an unhelpful time.

Consequences of one spilled glass of iced tea...

Over the weekend Mum spilled a glass of iced tea on her twelve-year-old keyboard and killed half the membrane in it, so today we replaced the keyboard with a new one...

...Which her OS didn't recognize. So we upgraded her OS...

...Which made her computer forget the distinction of its own modem from a hole in the ground. And other sundry talents we find useful. So Mum's out of (online) circulation till we can sort this stuff out, and I accomplish the necessary troubleshooting.

Got my not-fixed digital camera back from Olympus. Going to see about getting it to a shop in Asheville that was recommended by a family friend.

As in...the water heater in Rather Manor burned out, yet again.

I'll try to stay downwind from everybody else.