Month: February 2003

I’ve been waiting so long…

I took next week off.

Vacation! WOO!

(Alternative title: “Uhhh….. crap?”)

Short version: Someone may have hacked into my eBay account.

Long Version

I’ve recently had two very odd convergences. First, on Monday I found that one of the people I play M:tG with every week is in the same online sealed deck league (which in itself isn’t too odd, they hold 256 people each), but then last night we ended up playing each other.

Also, yesterday at lunch, completely randomly, I saw someone I thought I recognized someone out of place. It turns out it was one of the people that I play Netrunner with every once in a while. (Note to Frisco: Mark Davis) I ran over and said hello.

Online and real life worlds overlapping. This puts me in the perfect mood to start playing .//INFECTION.

So anyway… PowerBook still in the shop. Still on hold “awaiting part.” My car smells like it might be burning oil, but it’s very faint, I’ll be taking it into a mechanic on Monday, hopefully it’s nothing serious… I was planning on driving down to L.A. next week. It figures that something like this would start happening. I only have three car payments left. It seems that my computer jinx isn’t just limited to computers. (Although I did a pretty good job at causing a kernel panic on my BSD machine at work…)

Just before I wrote my previous entry, I ordered Zelda from ebgames.com.

Today, I received the bonus disk. Yes folks, that’s one business day later.

Back in November, I pre-ordered the new Legend of Zelda game for the Game Cube from IGN.com (store services provided by GameStop.com). Part of the fun in preordering this particular game is that it comes with a free bonus disc. Now… this disc has been out for a while, and I haven’t gotten mine yet, I started to get worried. So I wrote an email to gamestop.com. They didn’t respond. I wrote another one yesterday:
the email said…

I got my PowerBook back on Friday. It worked all day Friday. It worked all day Saturday. It worked all day Sunday.

On Monday (say it together, everybody!), it stopped working!

It just won’t turn on. I went through the whole rigamarole (resetting, zapping PRAM, all sorts of junk), but it’s getting shipped back off to Texas tomorrow. Again.

What did I do to earn so much bad computer karma?

I’m so happy right now. A week ago, I mentioned finding Warren Ellis’s mailing list (which he’s written in at least once a day since then), and not to long after that I found Dave Barry’s Weblog, which amuses me to no end, especially this recent entry, which actually had been sitting in my mind. (The column in question is in one of the collections I own.)

Also, today, there was a link to Peter David’s weblog on MetaFilter. It’s true, I am now capable of reading the thoughts of three of my favorites authors multiple times a day. I love the Internet.

Current Status:

• Linux machine took a few recompiles and some yelling, but masquerading is working. Samba was an easy fix, just copied old config files over and *boom*.
• PC doin’ fine, although I didn’t get the blazing speed increase I would have hoped for.
• Cube is … cubical.
• PowerBook is probably somewhere on its way to Texas. *sniff*

I’m cleaning out the box of stuff in my cube that’s been building up… it’s mostly old papers which are getting thrown out, and old notepads which have incomprehensible notes from some meeting that I don’t even remember with people who don’t work here anymore.

Nestled into one of these notepads is the following paragraph, copied down from a diatribe I wrote on the common whiteboard just over three years ago:

I have now determined that the term “Millennium” has become overused. Thenceforth, the word “Millennium” may not be used in any context as to imply that any item, concept or person is the most exemplary of the past one thousand years, for it is most decidedly impossible to compare all such things over such a large span of time. Furthermore, there has been a great deal of attention to the new millennium, most likely caused by the “turning over of the odometer” effect, but, in fact, the third millennium does not start until January 1st, 2001. From this day on, all media alluding to or making direct reference to something being the “Best of the Millennium” will be met with extreme prejudice and disdain. Thank you and enjoy the last (475) days of the second millennium.

(This concept also applies to “X of the Century” and “X 2000”.)

Current Status:

• Linux machine has to boot from floppy, but I have control of it now.
• PC boots, uses video card, everything seems happy… at least hardware-wise.
• Cube is fixed! Easiest fix ever! I plugged it in!
• PowerBook is shipping off tomorrow (most likely) to Apple repair. (again)

How things were solved.