Recent Updates

Right when the Mariners were about to come back to beat the Giants, my computer picked up a nasty a virus that decided it was going to take over. Of course, this occured just past midnight, so there really wasn’t anything I could do about it until the morning. I spent literally all of Saturday at the library chatting with HP support trying to get this thing back up and running; I ended up having to run a System Restore, a process with which I am sadly very familiar.

My computer comes up with a major issue on a pretty consistent 6 month schedule. I got lucky last time; over Christmas break, it picked up this cool new trick where, as fas as I can tell at random intervals, my screen would turn a solid color. Normally it would black out, put I also saw different shades of blue, purple and yellow, which I can only assume were indicators of my computers mood. Now the reason I say that I got lucky, was because this issue was very isolated; it only affected the visuals. Jane and I nicknamed it “going blind,” because everything else kept working, my music would keep playing, and I found out I could even still send IMs if I that window had been open. A quick restart would fix the screen and it ended up being only a minor inconvenience.

Well this time my computer’s biohazardous clock apparently had to make up for lost time, because I had to restore everything to factory settings in order to get control back. So now I’m busy reinstalling, reformating, and updating every application I had before the roll back.

Aside from the fact that the Mariners went on to win that game, there are three positives of this situation:

1) As far as I can tell I didn’t lose data. My papers, spreadsheets and music are still here.

2)  I got a brand-new 30 day “trial” of Scrabble that came when I first got the laptop.

3) My computer no longer goes blind.

In unrelated news, Pandora, the site I use for internet radio has just this week changed their limitations on how many songs can be skipped while listening. This sneaky little change reduces the number of skips I get 12 fold. That’s a pretty big restriction to go unannouced. I’d go into more detail, but I know that Pandora is going to win this battle. It’s just a bummer.

To answer the obvious question: Yes, this is the most eventful information I have to share at the moment.