Wednesday
Today has been another mixed day; but, on the whole, I would have to give it a passing grade.

I had an interview this morning. I don’t want to make any assumptions, so I’m not going to put the cart (or even Descartes) before the horse. I had – and still have – a good feeling about the way that it went. And from there, I’ll wait to see what happens.

We also had the cable modem installed today. The installer was here at the scheduled time! I took that as a good omen. I think that the total time of install – from drilling the hole for the line to saying “You’re good to go” – was just shy of an hour. And most of that time was configuring and reconfiguring and re-reconfiguring the network settings. In the end, he just ran the line into the modem; I said that I could deal with getting the rest of the systems online. That took a little brain power, but I sussed it out.

And that’s where the day started taking a downward turn.

I decided to reboot ‘Nine. That was a mistake. Apparently, Saturday’s problem wasn’t really fixed. ‘Nine was conveniently ignoring the full scope of the problem. It powered down with no problem. On reboot, however, it would get stuck at the “Verifying DMI Pool Data……” portion of the POST.

Not good.

So, I rebooted. And got the same thing. A few times. I flashed the BIOS. “No go, Flight.” *grrr* So, I tried reflashing the BIOS…. changing settings… doing a ceremonial dance…. Nothing worked. And I wasn’t liking the thoughts that came to mind: “Either the motherboard and CPU or the drive are fried.” That’s definitely not something that you want to think about when the funding for new tech isn’t readily available.

So, I set it aside for a while and went about calling Sprint Broadband, Earthlink and DirecTV. I needed to cancel services with Sprint and Earthlink and make some changes to our DirecTV account. I figured that these calls should take fifteen minutes or so.

I was wrong. It took nearly an hour.

The Sprint call was cake. Five to ten minutes. I explained that I wanted the service cancelled/disconnected, and it was done. The CSR asked was I leaving due to cost or service. “Cost.” She said that she could lower the rate… by $10. That wasn’t bad, but I already had the Comcast installed. And I was happy with it. Even if I couldn’t use it on ‘Nine, for the time being. She cancelled the service… and said that I’ll be getting a pro-rated refund. I then asked her about charges that I’d been getting from Earthlink, who provide SBBD’s email infrastructure . She said that I should not have had any charges from them and that I should call them to find out about it.

So I did.

Three times.
Along with a call to my bank to verify the charges.

The final story: I apparently had a dial-up account with them. Since 30 Aug 01. An account that I don’t remember having ever signed up for. (NOTE: I just had a thought – Sprint might have put in the order with Earthlink, but since their partnership was new, someone might have entered the wrong information about how the account should be charged.) But, there it was. While we did have a dial-up account prior to getting SBBD, it wasn’t with Earthlink or its predecessor/partner, Mindspring. So, I wasn’t (over)paying for email service. I was paying for a complete Earthlink dial-up package. That I never used. The Earthlink CSR who finally helped me clear up the matter was very understanding of my frustration. When he asked what I thought was fair re compensation, I told him that I didn’t care about getting any money back, I just didn’t want to pay for it any longer. That caught him off-guard; I think that he expected me to fly off the handle and demand copious amounts of money. He cancelled the service, effective immediately and verified that I would not be charged for the next billing cycle.

Two down, one to go.

I called DirecTV to change a billing option and to have my information set so that I could access my account information online. From the amount of time that it took for the billing CSR to understand what I wanted to do, I am under the impression that their billing support has been outsourced. But, it got taken care of with minimal gnashing of teeth. She then transferred me to the accounts department so that I could have the online settings dealt with. That was another couple of minutes, but was also relatively painless.

The day took an upward swing around evening: Tonight was Game Night. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go, mostly because of ‘Nine‘s problems, but I did. It was apparently a good – and needed – outlet. After the game session ended, and I watched a couple of episodes of Invader Zim. I have to agree with a statement she made: “I want to meet the Jedi Master who managed to get this show on the air past the Nickelodeon execs.” It definitely wasn’t what one would expect from the usually squeeky-clean Viacom company. At least, not the Nickelodeon division. I could easily see it having aired on “We-used-to-show-music-videos” MTV, however.

I came home and stuck my head inside ‘Nine‘s case again. Persistence… or something like that. I finally had the bright idea of trying to boot the system with the drive that I took out a couple of weeks ago. It booted up immediately. *boggle* I tried rebooting, with the new HD. Nothing. I tried the old one again. Boot. I tried starting it with both drives in, using the older drive as the master. Boot.

It seems as though the Master Boot Record on the new drive has been erased. Which means that my C: partition effectively no longer exists; the other two partitions are intact. While this isn’t “great,” it is far from the disaster that it could be. This is yet another reason that I partition my drives the way that I do: If something happens to the MBR or to Windows, I can reformat the partition and go on about my business. I will have to reinstall some applications and I will lose a few settings, but that’s better than losing everything on the drive.

But, that’s a project for sometime after the sun comes up.

Stray Toaster

  • and : Given the time constraints that we’re going to be under, I don’t think that and I will be able to have our bowl-off. This time. We’ll have to arrange another cross-border excursion for that. But we shall. Oh, yes… we shall, indeed.

I’m tapped.

Namaste.