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Predictable errors and no identity October 26, 2006

Posted by Keiran in : Ramblings , 3comments

My computer is failing. Little by little it has been going bad; a long slow painful death. At first it was little things. Nothing too obvious that it was the hard drive. I started having problems viewing files. If a webpage has an embedded file, I can't watch it. But if I go directly to the source, I can. That started in one browser, then another, then another; each collapsing over time. More recently, I lost the ability to use the center mouse button. It's still set up in the system to work — it just refuses to. From time to time, my ability to right click will disappear. Normal tasks that used to operate at a reasonable speed has started slowing down and freezing up my PC. I had defragged, virus checked, removed ad/spyware, and nothing was helping. It's been incredibly frustrating because I knew something was wrong, just didn't know what.

The day I left for Canada (Oct 6), the cable internet went out after I left. At first, mom somehow expected me to be able to fix it from 1100+ miles away. My brother showed up, and he helped her call the cable company and deal with them to find out what was going on. (Later we discovered it was actually the electric company's faault. They were having issues and sending intentional power surges down the line to diagnose their problem. Those surges kept messing up the modem since I had forgotten to put it back on it's surge protector when I rehooked up the PC a in September. Oops. Thankfully the rest of the PC was shut down AND protected. Evil power company.) While mom was on the phone with the cable company, they dialed into my pc. The tech asked mom "You know there's something wrong with your PC, right?" To which my mom told him I did know. He told her that we could call Sony and they would help us with it. If *I* had been home, I would have asked him WHAT was wrong with it, since I knew it was messed up, but had no idea HOW. But, at least him saying that verified to me that there was indeed something wrong, and I wasn't just hallucinating things.

When I got back home, I was told to run a drive scan. I did and sure enough my main hard drive has bad sectors. I'm installing Seagate's desktop drive scan (but this process is taking multiple days because of the hard drive issues) to do a better scan and see what's wrong with it. It's starting to get a little worse, freezing up more. So, while I'm still running pretty well, I'm also burning CDs of important things so I don't lose them. I've also uploaded a bunch of stuff onto my websites for storage purposes. I am trying to sign up for the free trial of the Spare Backup service, so that I can protect as much of my data as possible. Unfortunately, I'm having problems with that as well. Grrr.

Just don't stick me with a label October 25, 2006

Posted by Keiran in : Me, Memes , 2comments

It's a given that I like doing memes. And this one is scarily accurate. So, if you want a good idea of my personality and how to deal with me, pay attention.

The Quick & Painless ENNEAGRAM Test
You chose BY – your Enneagram type is FOUR: The Romantic.

"I am unique"

Romantics have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive.

How to Get Along with Me:
What I Like About Being a Four:
What's Hard About Being a Four:
Fours as Children Often:
Fours as Parents:

I am your music and I am your song October 24, 2006

Posted by Keiran in : Entertainment, Ramblings , add a comment

When I buy a new country cd, I have a tradition I follow. The first thing I do is read all the song titles. I want to know the name of every song before I listen – I'm weird that way. ;) The second thing I do is crack that open and search the CD booklet for song writer information. I scan the writers for familiar names to get an idea of how the cd will sound. If I see certain writers, I know I'm more likely to like the song when I hear it; and other writers are a flag I won't like it. Then with all the writers I don't know, I know those songs can easily go either way. For example, If I see Jeffrey Steele listed in the credits, I know there's a 50/50 chance of me liking the song. I always either absolutely hate or love his songs – there's never an inbetween for me when it comes to him. If I see Neil Thrasher in the credits, I know there's a very good chance I'll like the song.

Case in point. I bought Lonestar's brand new cd over the weekend. I popped it open and started looking over the credits. I spotted Neil Thrasher on 2 tunes, and was pretty pleased. Then I saw Jason Sellers' name and was VERY happy. I knew I would love that song. Sure enough, after listening to all the songs on the cd, the one Jason wrote is by far my favorite, and I did like both of the ones that Neil wrote. With the exception of Richie & Dean, I didn't recognize any of the other song writers names off hand, and some I liked, some I didn't. No big surprise there.

And yes, if you haven't guessed, there's no real point to this post other than that I needed to ramble. I'll be writing more – hopefully soon – about Canada. Things have been just crazy enough to keep me from writing any more than a few sentences at a time.