Black Saturday (the crash of Inspiron 8600), Bids and Rebuttal, and Noteworthy Items

Well, I'm really not doing so good with the one-a-day post thing. Here I am at work with not so much to do that I can't blog it up a little but, alas, notes that I need to finish one blog are sitting at home right next to my camera, which is needed to finish some others. Sigh......

One reason I'm so far behind these days is the result of a crash. I was pleasantly working away on a project at home when my laptop b e g a n.......t o................ w o r k......... v e r y............. s l ooooooow l y. Then there was the groan, rattle and finally the dreaded BSOD. That's blue screen of death for all you non-I-Technical minds out there, and it refers to that lovely blue screen that pops up to tell you that your computer has experienced a fatal error and is indeed no longer functional. Subsequent reboots yielded the error message; Hard Disk not found. I began to hear a consistent, very loud thumping noise that went on for a few minutes before I realized it was just my forehead banging on my desk repeatedly. I then resorted to weeping, wailing, and finally the all time champ, gnashing of teeth. Luckily I have a nifty little device that I can insert a laptop drive into and read it on my desktop computer through a USB cable. After some patience and care I was able to get no results trying to read the drive this way so I went to more wailing, and then banging of hard disk on desk before giving up. After some time to cool off I started over and went through all the steps again, patience, wailing, banging, and was finally able to read the contents of the drive. This kept me from losing all of my information, in fact in the end I only lost most of my information, say 98.5% instead of 100%. So I was lucky there. After a few minutes of copying, the drive again groaned, (its last groan) and produced this error; unable to read disk: all contents have been lost.

So then, one quick e-chat with Dell and a new drive was on its way. To the wrong address. So instead of working one day without my laptop it was more than a week without it and it was just miserable. Fortunately, the majority of the files that I was able to save were files for work and I was able to continue fairly smoothly. I did have backups of the files I needed but a lot of them were older and not up-to-date, which made life interesting at work. If you have, or are going to have a Dell laptop, get the completecare warranty, it's sure worth the money when it comes to repairs. Anybody need a hard drive shaped coaster?

Chara has blogged lately of her and Josh's house hunting experiences. Fortunately I don't have to hunt for mine, I've already found it. But, I am experiencing the joys(?) of the other side of house buying, which is selling a house of course. After weeks of hearing how much so and so "really likes the house", (which means nothing, nothing at all), I finally heard "so and so wants to make a bid on the house." To which I replied of course, "I want to let them make a bid." This is the week before the wedding, the week of the crash, (see above). The bid was low so I countered. Meanwhile someone else wanted to make a bid (which never actually happened), and then the counter offer fell through. Ups and downs. Well the next week, wedding week that is, someone came and looked on Monday, liked it and wanted to come back on Tuesday with spouse, then the first lady called back and said I'll take the counter offer if it's still good. So after giving the others a chance to make an offer, I accepted the originally declined counter-offer and now my house is under contract. That's one hurdle, now if the appraisal comes in at the right amount all I have to worry about is what the inspector will tell me I have to fix. Oh, and how to pay for it.

Speaking of Chara, and I did (albeit briefly), apparently she has news. Wonderful news. Non house hunting related wonderful news. Tandy and I found out by the addendum to their signing of the guest book at the wedding and what a great surprise it was for us! I won't give it away here, as I don't know if she is ready for the entire free world to know yet. Those of you that know, already know and don't need me to tell you, and those that don't know will know when all is made known by Chara and Josh. It was so cool that they made the long journey from Tennessee for the wedding. I mean, I'm just an uncle after all. Good luck with your offer on the house Chara, and congratulations!

Mark asked me on Monday, "So, how's the married life?" "Better than I remember it." I replied. I think Tandy might say the same.

Cheers,

Craig