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Drama Galore

30 08 09 - 21:07 For a quiet weekend...

Did I mention I hate windows? Yeah. And PCs in general, too. Especially if they are ancient. But let's start at the beginning. Thursday.

I was putting in this 80GB hard drive for a lady and I formatted it here and cut it into two pieces. The smaller piece I used to store her data, thinking that I would just install windows on the larger and copy it over. No. This bit was my fault. When you format a drive on the Mac you have to specify the type of Partition Scheme, be it GUID, Apple or Master Boot Record. This is for booting intel, ppc and windows machines, respectively. I forgot about that, so it didn't show up as formatted when I plugged it in. My bad there, I fully accept that. So I take it home to get the data off, again, and formatted it right in the windows installer. But no, windows installs the first part of itself, goes to reboot, and "error booting operating system." Huh, guess I haven't seen all the ways windows can fail, because I just found another one.

Forum advice was to change the bios settings (because we are stuck in the 80s) between LBA, Large and whatever mode. I try all three, reloading windows each time (having so much fun but nothing works. Keep in mind this a 700Mhz machine, it's OLD. So I grab a 2000 era HD out of my stack, a 30 giger. It works fine. Guess 80gb was just TOO much for its little brain to handle. Dumb thing. I didn't have much else to do, thank goodness, got that back to her pretty late. Later then I wanted to be out that evening, anyway.

So Friday. In the morning I went out to Victor to get Snow Leopard, yea! Oh, the "genius bar" isn't open? Uh huh. So I can't ask about my iPod. "What the heck" I figure, "Dad must have some tools for opening watch cases or something, I bet he would have something to help." So I get the case open and magically, the reboots stop! Turns out there's this complex little circuit thing in place of an actual power button inside touches. There's the plastic-y button itself, then a small knobby that's the contact, then this little board, then a conductive strip, then a copper contact to another copper curly queue and into the thing. Right. So it must be that little circuit board thingy that's the problem. It's been three days, no reboots since I took the back off. Only thing is, now I can't turn it on or off. Not that I probably would need to. But I think part of the antenna system for the wi-fi is there too, there's this other little copper contact point on the other side and an aluminum strip. I'll see if it makes a difference, maybe I can just pull the little circuit board thingy off. Or find a dead one on ebay I can use the back cover of, or get a replacement power button, or something. But it works again, and in its snug little plastic case it's no worse off then it was for not having a back.

I renamed him Donald, another famous figure who wears a top but no pants.

I head out to Jean's, set up her netbook. Back home and install Snow Leopard, grab the CD out of the tray and I'm only 10 minutes late for my 2:00. Whoops.

Grandma, Sean's for the Dragon Wars movie and some Left 4 Dead. Not too bad a movie, though it was obvious the guy directing it (korean) didn't speak English.

Saturday, more drama. I was actually taking the day off, as I had made no appointments for the day by thursday, but Sean calls me and says after he loaded Mizzy's Mac up with Snow Leopard, it was doing some crazy jive, mon. Turns out she likes 'customizing" things, (as evidenced by the glittery jewels she has stuck all over her xbox + controllers) but apparently there was some crazy hack she had installed that was lousing it up. I offered what advice I could, but they finally got it up to uninstall the hack and it worked fine after that. Whew. Pro Tip: Don't install hacky stuff into your machines, Mac or PC. Especially when it installs a totally recoded window manager.

More Last Remnant. I almost threw it down in disgust but both Mizzy and Abel said that saving after every battle was pretty much the norm and getting slaughtered by random enemies who turn out to be "special" was part of the experience. Great. I mean, really, there's no way to RUN from a losing battle? No retreat option? I just have to stand there and get slaughtered? Really?

And the battle system sucks. You command people as "units" but lets say unit 2 goes, and person 1 of unit 2 smashed through enemy defenses and took them out. Sorry, person 2 and 3 of unit 2, you just lost your chance to act. Nope, you can't run over and help your buddies standing not a foot away you just have to stand and watch. And slowdown? Really? In 2009? How many games have you made, Square Enix? About a billion? Have you suddenly forgotten how to program, or did you enable the "emulate an NES option" in your compiler?

And let's not even get started on the load screens. Walk two steps? Load screen. Open the world map? Load screen.

You don't "play" last remnant, you watch a somewhat interactive movie called Last Remnant: The Loading Screens of Doom, and every once in awhile, you press a button. It's like a play, where the scenes are twenty seconds, and the curtain goes up and down, somewhat slowly, between them.

Oh, and I can't hand someone a better sword? Really? They have to get "components" and update their weapons themselves? Okay, that makes sense.

Anyway, don't get me started. But since I figured out how to avoid the "special" monsters and not die every two minutes, it's been going better.

Today, cleaning, more game, made some rice to eat, you don't care.

Almost September, and you know what that means!

i'm not telling you if you don't. You'll figure it out.

Shopping and four appointments tomorrow. Already booked half of tuesday. Gonna be a great week, I can feel it.

Just like every other.

Current Dread: Winter coming on.