"Computer death?" you ask. "But you've only had that computer for less than a week! You're not even connected to the internet! How the hell could you have computer death?"
I thank you for your concern and respond: I have no fucking idea. I bought PC GAMER magazine over the weekend because it came with a demo disc; I wanted to see what Max Payne would look like with my video card. I installed it on Saturday afternoon and it worked beautifully. I shut my computer down and then headed off to Manhattan to watch Game 1.
When I got home, depressed over the Yankees' meltdown, I wanted to play with my computer a little bit before I crashed. I turned it on, and before Windows ME even loaded I got an error message:
Invalid system disk
Replace and hit any key
I checked every drive about 40 times, but they were all empty. Of course they were empty - I don't have any software, and I've only used the damn thing twice. So I called up Dell Tech Support at roughly 11:45pm.
When I got off the phone at 1:15am, after fruitless and frustrating attempts to fix the problem, I was told that I'd get a call at 10am from a "Senior Technical Manager". And so I went to bed.
When I woke up, I realized that I had forgotten to set my clock back, but it didn't matter - nobody called me. So I called them, and it turned out that whoever I had spoken with the night before hadn't even logged that I'd called. No matter. After another hour of tinkering, I was told to just reformat my hard drive and then re-install everything. Which took another hour or so. THEN, after re-installing WindowsMe, I saw that none of my drivers were up; my display was awful; I had no sound; I was ready to jump out of my 2nd floor window as many times as possible until I seriously hurt myself. But then I called Tech Support again, and it only took 20 minutes for a representative to walk me through the re-installation of my drivers.
So now my computer seems to be working again (although it doesn't have DirectX 8 anymore, just Direct7.1), although I'm very wary of trusting it. I played around with a borrowed copy of Grim Fandango and it totally froze up my computer, leading to many anxious restarts.
Oh, and here's some more bummer news. I was all ready to hook up the apartment with Digital Cable and RoadRunner;
jdixon and I had printed out all the documentation from the website; we were ready to rock. I called up Time Warner Cable to get it hooked up, and the woman on the other end said, "Oh, I'm sorry baby, that won't be up in your area for another couple months." About the only good thing that happened this weekend (aside from running into the woman unexpectedly at the bar on Saturday night) was when
jdixon came home and handed me my tour copy of Death Cab for Cutie's new record, "The Photo Album". And even THAT got me depressed this morning on the subway, because it occured to me that if I ever wanted to have the kind of arrangements and "tightness" that they have, I'd have to be in a band that had a really great comraderie (sp?), which I don't think I'll have the patience to find. As of last week, I was envisioning my career as purely solo - my EP will come out in December-ish with electronic elements and sampling, I'll still be playing in my one-man-band setup, and by the spring I'd assemble a bunch of guys to play my stuff. But listening to DCfC made me think that I'd never be able to get a band together that could do what they do. I'm not saying that DCfC is the greatest band in the world - they're not - but they're awfully good at what they do, and what they do is very similar to what I do, and if I wanted to get a comparable sound, I'd have to be very lucky with who I'd hire. Gotta get back to this insanity-laden photo-archive-database ridiculousness.
