Divisions and Precisions

Can I Be A Neo-Luddite?

This has been an INSANE day. Good god.

Well okay. Let me qualify that. The middle part of the day was marvelous. I woke up, and discovered that my laptop didn't want to start up at all. I let it go, cause I had stuff to do.

I discovered, chatting with some folks this morning, that there is such a genre as fantasy romance. As in, romance novels with faeries and dragons and such. I so want to write one. Just because it'd be funny. Brand suggested the title "The Sword in the Mound", about a faerie princess and a barbarian. It makes me giggle.

Then this afternoon, I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts with Dawn and Jason and Justin. I love that place. I haven't been there in ages. The best thing was that I got to see one of my most favorite paintings ever. I can remember the first time I saw it back in high school. I just stopped and stared. I still do. It's not a huge painting, but it's good-sized, and the colors just leap at you from the wall. And Justin did remarkably well for an 18 month old. He seemed pretty fond of the Italian Renaissance art.

And then I came home. I sat down to log on to check email and such before doing homework. No internet connection. I messed with the network, rebooted, walked through a bunch of stuff. Nothing. So I call tech support. Everything's fine on their end. Good to know, but it still doesn't work. So he suggests connecting a computer directly to my cable modem instead of to the network router. Great. I could do that, if my laptop was working. I hang up, and call Gateway support.

I'll spare the details of all the people I talked to, but in short, my hard drive crashed. I had to completely reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. I AM SO GLAD I just backed up all of my writing files to the desktop computer last night. So, I lost no writing, but I lost tons of MUSH scene logs, all my notes for my Exalted game (and character sheets for my NPCs), email, addresses... you know, the usual stuff. Still, it could've been worse. I would've died if I'd lost any of my writing.

So, after three hours, my laptop is working again. Per my ISP tech support, I unplugged my modem to reset it, then plugged it directly into the laptop. No internet. Of course. Sure. I call tech support again. He says, "How many lights are lit on the modem?" I tell him two, for the PC and the cable. "Okay," he says, "I'd like you press the power button." The WHAT? Uh, yeah. So I turn the damn thing on, and lo, the internet exists again! I felt like such a moron. No worries, says he, the guy who told me to reset it should have let me know that the lights didn't mean the power was on. Whatever. I'm an ass. But I have internet again. And a laptop.

Did I mention that I came home early to study? For my test tomorrow? And to work on my paper for Monday? Yeah. Now it's quarter to eleven, and I'm brain dead.

I hate computers.

Posted by Lisa at September 26, 2002 10:04 PM