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Simone noted the humor/frustration level I was having with Dell this week at work. Of course, anytime I mention "Dell" around her she shakes her head in disgust, so perhaps she's not exactly the most objective observer. :)

What happened was, at work this week one of the newish Dell PCs started making a high-pitched spinning/whining noise. At first I thought it was a fan, so I opened up the box, eliminated the fans as a source of noise, and quickly concluded it was the hard drive. Sounds emanating from the hard drive are, generally, a Bad Thing. And sure enough, when I tried to boot the machine up again in order to copy the data to the network (most of the user data is already on the network, except for a few things like email and some accounting data), I got the Windows blue screen and problems booting.

So I got the person set up with a temporary PC (an older one), pulled the hard drive, and called Dell.

(Let me disclaim in advance that in fact all the people I talked to at Dell were very professional and helpful, and the overall service they performed was very good. It just turned into a minor comedy of errors.)

First of all, the machine's out of warranty; it was purchased one year and one month ago. Of course! Even assuming I'd bought the one-year service plan warranty with it, it still wouldn't matter.

Nearly 45 minutes later, after talking to three different people (a woman from India; some fellow with an unidentifiable accent in Tech Support; and a woman from Roseburg, Oregon in Sales), I was finally able to get the order placed for a new hard drive that matched the specs of the machine and drive in question: 80GB Ultra ATA, IDE interface. Pay attention, that's an important detail.

They tell me that yes, even though I ordered the drive with Next Day delivery, it still may not even ship out until Friday the 14th. That's fine, I say, just get it here ASAP. And guess what? They surprise me by delivering the hard drive the very next day! Woo-hoo!

Open the package, mount the drive into the PC chassis, go to plug everything in... and it's the wrong type of drive. They sent me an 80GB Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, which is incompatible with the IDE interface in this computer.

So there's not much else to do but get on the phone with Dell again, spending exactly 31 minutes on the phone this time (our office telephones have a call timer). I spoke with the Customer Service department (again a woman from India, as near as I can figure), got the return processed (UPS would pick it up in the next three days), then transferred to Sales, where I made sure to order exactly the right type of hard drive. I hope. This was Thursday.

The new drive hasn't arrived yet, so the speedy Next Day delivery that accompanied the first hard drive hasn't recurred. Hopefully Monday? But, the UPS guy did pick up the return Friday morning, so that's something.

Simone did warn me.

Okay, this is fun. Our two-year old eMachine keeps periodically freezing up, typically at least once a day or more, and I was hoping someone might have some ideas as to what to do about it or what's causing it. I can't seem to ferret out the problem, but it often seems to freeze when doing something graphic- or sound-intensive (playing games—even Flash games, or using the scanner), or when using SpyBot, for instance (though other spyware killer software runs fine). It just freezes up, non responsive, nothing gets written to the event logs or anything like that. I've seen it do this in normal mode and safe mode. Often after a freeze, and a hard boot, it will freeze again while booting, right after the Windows XP splash screen and before the login screen—when the mouse pointer appears on a black background.

It's an eMachines C2160, running XP Home SP2, with an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ chip running at 1.72 GHz, and 256 MB RAM. Some thoughts I've had are problems with USB (the mouse was on USB, the scanner, printer, digital camera are all plugged in), or low power issues. Needless to say, I haven't had any luck.

Any ideas?

A co-worker who's moving was telling me today about finding a dusty box in his attic that turned out to be an original Atari 2600, and for some reason that made me want to blog about it. Instead, this turned into a list of all the various computer and video game systems I own that I've accumulated through the years—all in the spirit of blogging useless lists (like I did the other day with the books left on my bookshelf).

It's pretty geeky. And probably a little sad. Reading over the list, it highlights that I'm often behind the times when it comes to hardware. I'm retro-geeky. Read on if you dare.

More...

Here's an intersting site I stumbled upon today: The Degree Confluence Project. From their homepage:

The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.

Sort of like a blog post for every latitude and longitude intersection on Earth (well, every one on land, anyway). Cool idea. Here's the nearest confluence to Bend.

This reminds me of another idea I had along these lines after reading an article in Discover Magazine: geographically-based Web browsing. It's not a new idea, I can't claim it, but here's the gist: You have a portable device that's connected wirelessly to the internet (laptop, PDA, whatever) and is GPS-enabled, so you have realtime GPS coordinates for wherever you are and a live net connection. Then, you browse pages that aren't accessible via a Web address, but accessible instead based on your current location—tagged by the latitude and longitude fed via the GPS. These "pages" can be like standard Web pages—ads, for instance, for stores that might be close by—or they can be more interactive—forms for users to enter notes tagged to that location that can be read by others. Virtual graphitti.

So, there would pages and content that you could only access while sitting at a certain bench in the park, and totally different stuff that could only be accessed in front of the shoestore downtown, etc. etc. Sort of a cybergeek way to "map" the Web onto the real, 3D world. To find pages you'd have to navigate to the corresponding real-world location. I like the user interaction part of it, too, the thought being that anyone could leave those "notes" for others. That's pretty key. The term I had at the time for all this was "geosurfing."

Imagine some of the cultural weirdness this could engender: most content would be tagged to "people-safe" areas like sidewalks, parks, buildings, etc., but there would always be daredevils who would tag a geosite corresponding to the middle of a busy city street or freeway, accessible only to those brave or stupid enough to try. Or horny teenagers (or porn entrepreneurs) would have cached geosites of porn in secret or obscure places (creepy thought: like the end of the pew third row from the back of the local church), or in bars to help enforce adult-only sites. Geosites near movie theaters could have user-posted reviews of what's showing, or spoilers, and restaurant sites might have similar notes—need to figure out a good wine or recommended dish when on a date? Check the local notes discreetly. It goes on.

The main drawback? No ubiquitous WiFi. So while this might be a cool application to build (the data model and concepts are sketched out pretty well in my head), and might work in a large, well-wired city like San Francisco or New York, it really wouldn't work at all here in Bend, and that's obviously where I'd most like to use it. So, filed away for the future.

I couldn't even get myself to post yesterday, I was just done. This last week was the shit week for computer troubles. After spending the first half of the week struggling over my wife's computer, and Thursday reformatting and reinstalling Windows on a coworker's computer, Friday was the kicker.

The hard drive in the boss's computer at work died. Yeah, the Boss. I get to work Friday morning, find a note on my desk: "Computer says 'Disk boot failure, insert system disk' since last night." Ohhhhhh, how I hoped the problem was simply that there was a disk in the floppy drive.

There wasn't.

Nope. Machine won't boot; hard disk clicks when it has power. That's never a good sign. Can't usefully boot to the floppy; the bootable floppy disk I have is for Windows 98 (yes, almost all of the computers in the office are still running Windows 98), and this is a newer eMachine running Windows XP, so the Win98 boot disk can't recognize the NTFS partition. Contemplate for a moment running the restore CD, but that will wipe out all the data on the drive, and that can't happen.

Of course, like all good, responsible IT persons, I make sure any critical work and files in the office are on the network, right? Right. And the network data is backed up to tape every night, right? Right. So, there really should be no problem, right? Just restore Windows XP (though it's a bad drive, remember, and really should be replaced), and all the data is safe, right? Well, almost.

Friggin' Microsoft Outlook stores all of its data—emails, contacts, events—in a single .PST file on the local machine, not on the network. Uh-oh. And for the Boss, email is the lifeblood of communication in the company; he'll send out 40-plus emails in any given day. Double uh-oh.

But no, wait, hold on: like all good, responsible IT persons, I have batch files running on individual workstations that back up the Outlook data files to the network daily, so that they'll be backed up to the tape each night. This was instituted months ago, after the CFO of the company suffered a major email loss and we identified Outlook as a Major Point of Weakness in the company's data integrity.

Whew! Run to the network, open up the appropriate user folder where the Outlook data file should be, check the timestamp on the file.

Time freezes.

Somewhere nearby, a cat meows in slow motion. A trillion water molecules in the Deschutes River ricochet off one another in a brilliant cacophany of sound not unlike that of billiard balls on the break. Deep in my brain, a synapse fires and a single drop of sweat languidly rolls down my spine.

January 30, 2004.

Not April 1, 2004. January 30. I have never in my life wished more for something to be an April Fool's Day prank.

So what happened to my carefully crafted plan of a batch file running at a scheduled time each night?

The Boss shuts down his computer each night before it can run.

And that, of course, is the punchline. The rest of my day at work—literally, all but about an hour of it—was spent trying in vain to access the hard drive, just to pull the email from it. No love. A computer place in town that does data recovery was able to see the drive, sort of, but were unable to pull anything from it. The only option left is to shell out up to two grand and have a professional data recovery outfit like Ontrack retrieve the email. I don't know if we'll go that route, though.

By the end of the day, I felt I was about to stroke out. Visions of myself convulsing on the floor seemed oddly appealing. The saving grace of it all is that it was Friday, and the kids were being watched so my wife and I were able to go out to dinner and a movie. We saw "Secret Window," which was pretty good.

I'm hoping next week will be better.

God damn the computers are pissing me off tonight. All evening our broadband cable connection has just been running slower than molasses, so it takes forever to accomplish anything online. And then I'm trying to get my wife's computer fixed up, it's been running really slow lately and locking up a lot. So I rolled back the Windows ME that was installed on it (have I mentioned before how I hate Windows ME??) to Windows 98, which by and large worked well enough, but now can't get the blasted TCP/IP to work properly.

It tells me it's assigned to some 169.* address, and the DHCP server is "255.255.255.255" (yeah, sure), instead of being sensible and using the perfectly acceptable DHCP server and IP address assignment that has worked with every other computer we've had in this house. And the worst part is, I'm sure I've encountered this same problem at work, and solved it, but I can't remember what the solution was. I've already tried uninstalling and re-installing TCP/IP, so I don't know. Maybe it's just time for the straight low-level format route. Son of a bitch.

Routed via Slashdot comes the story of the disposable paperboard computer, which can "can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data." It even has a generous 32KB of memory.

After reading about this, I couldn't help but thinking that we've already had disposable, paper-based computers around since, well, forever. It's called pen and paper.

And hey, if you throw in one of those sweet old-school PeeChee folders (why the hell can't I find a web page for those things?? Other than online school supplies lists, I mean), you've instantly upgraded: not only your storage capacity, but processing power because you've got all those conversion and multiplication tables and various references at your fingertips!