Mmmmm.

Sex is good and fun.

Missing

After getting my laundry done last night, I went over to Adam's place. I got home early this afternoon, just in time to snag myself some lunch.

Had a chat with Bald Guy. Results: just about what I thought would happen. Slight disgruntlement, understandable but *sigh* not excusable by "adult" rules for relationships. Why is it that we're always attached to the emotions that we know we shouldn't be feeling?

Halfway Sane

Decided to do the dishes to make the kitchen livable. There were only a washerload sitting there, and half them were already loaded. It's so nice when the house decides to keep itself. I should put away laundry.

I'm very tired. I think it has to do with the fact that I stayed up so very late (almost midnight!) last night, and then did not have a very restful morning of sleep after that.

I did have a dream about being in someone's vacation mansion on the beach, and being in bed with him, having sex. There was coffee attached to a plant, and the plant had to be repotted so the coffee beans would grow back. There was a butler? It felt like Guide Dog Aunt's vacation cabin at Lake Tahoe.

Oh yeah.

And my Zip drive isn't working. I think the concept of four removable drives, all different, with at least five different potential names between them, is too much for Tigereye's poor little mind.

I must straighten this out at some point. Is that a hickey?

List

I really hate whining.

Just in general.

I can't stand it in kids. I can't stand it in adults.

I especially can't stand it in myself.

Water!

Went swimming. Much fun was had. Votania had a near-miss with my foot underwater. There was much jumping and splashing. I'm hoping that the chlorine won't do the thing it usually does and fuck with my face.

I took the break from homework happily. I finished and sent off the chapter of Science that's due tomorrow, and am partway through the next one. Not very far, but far enough to have a small but significant start.

You know you're a Vorkosoverse geek when:

You're going through your Ecological Science book defining words, and keep having trouble dropping the 'e' off the end of certain words:

Carnivor
Omnivor
Herbivor
...

Amusing.

*Hissss!*

So, I was happily working on my homework. Guess what! My computer crashed! (I'm typing this from Enki.) Upon restart, \winnt\system32\drivers\isapnp.sys was missing or corrupt.

I could, of course, repair from the original CD, though...

...except for the message that filesetupdd.sys could not be loaded. The error code is 4. Cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

...on both the original product recovery CD and the burned backup.


Called Evil; got Malfoy Senior, who asked me if I'd done a backup recently.

I laughed at him. He scolded me.

Actually, everything on there is backed up. It's just that installing everything takes such a long time... I would have to rewrite a few pages of my book...and oh shit, I would have lost...

Nevermind.

But some of the things are backed up. The important thing, my book, is backed up to fairly recent.

I'm just stressed. Malfoy Senior said that he'd have Darkside call back.

Meanwhile, I think I'll prepare to call Dell.

Gods, this is going to be a long night.

Thankfully, my homework was on the zip disk, and already got e-mailed to Bird.

(no subject)

"Mmm, grilled Power Rangers. But wait -- I don't eat pork." --Votania

She's also trying to get the secret chicken weapon in Dracon, as Nephew's discovered it...

this did *not* just happen.

My error message upon startup was this: "Missing or corrupt: \winnt\system32\drivers\isapnp.sys", and it told me I could repair the installation from the recovery console.

Upon hitting the product recovery CD, starting from it, however, I got the message that "filesetupdd.sys could not be loaded. The error code is 4. Cannot continue. Press any key to exit."

Exiting, of course, would start one into the missing or corrupt file error.

I managed to start her in safe mode, and called Dell. The nice guy on the other end of the phone sounded like he had a clue, and sounded happy to be talking to someone who was at least clueful enough to be writing down the problems.

We searched for the appropriate file on the w2k CD, but found no such thing. The Dell guy looked up the problem on the Microsoft website, but surprise of all surprises, the page wouldn't load for him! Naturally, lacking a cordless phone, this meant a bit of juggling around of cords and going and hanging up the red phone in my room. I kicked Votania off Enki, telling her that actually, this guy wasn't a Bastard Operator from Dell, he was a nice one.

The tech support guy told me, based on what was in the article, that we should replace said file. Only because evidently I'd installed a service pack at some point or other, my original product recovery CD might not work; the only way to fix that was to either remove the service pack so the original filesetupdd.sys would be current, or use an up-to-date w2k CD, like the one I'd gotten from DeVry.

I ran back to Tigereye to try starting in safe mode and attempting to follow some of the instructions in the Microsoft article. The phone hung up on the nice Dell guy, unfortunately. I made noises, then realized that Safe Mode with Command Prompt was not what I wanted. Enki closed my browser page with the article while I was away from him, when I went back to check my details. No one had touched him. Fortunately, I had written down the number, so it was only a few moments' work to look it up again. I set Tigereye to restart, and then had an inspiration.

Instead of attempting to expand isapnp.sy_ from the product recovery CD, I could just go and find an already expanded, working copy, on another machine running Windows 2000.

I had already backed up the current file of ectogenesis when I discovered that Tigereye would start in safe mode; I was not worried about fucking up my computer. ectogenesis is my only important file.

Enki is running Windows 2000 Professional.

I went over to Enki, floppy in hand, to get the file, found it, and copied it to floppy.

I returned to Tigereye.

I saw the "Login as administrator?" dialog box, the same one I saw every day logging in. I entered the password, then thought about the implications as I heard the "Microsoft sound" play.

It wasn't starting in safe mode. Tigereye was working again, for whatever unknown, unknowable reason.

I'm feeling very brave.

I think I'll go restart my computer now. Just to be sure.

Restart successful.

My gods. My computer must be terrified of me now.

I'm burning some incence and have a candle lit. Perhaps I'd better go to bed soon.