I broke Laura's laptop

My work day got off to a very late start on account of me taking care of the battery all morning. I originally intended to take it into Sears, but I looked at all the corrosion on the negative terminal and I decided perhaps that was the source of my problems. So I spent a while cleaning that up. All I can say is baking soda and water does really cool things to battery acid. Our driveway has this really cool looking green spot on it now.

Work was, well, work. Finished up the newsletter articles and started playing around with the 6.0 restructuring.

Then it was Frisbee time. First of all, I should mention that I found out what city league team I'm on. I'm on Neal's team, and we have a lot of the Randalls again (third season in a row for me, it's like I'm adopted). That gives me two really great targets downfield in Matt (Chunky) and Neal. We also have another handler who's name is Mark. Don was telling me that when I got drafted, he was ticked off because only two more picks and he would have had me. Guess he got the last pick or something. Most of the captains I've talked to let out a big sigh when I talk to them about what team I'm on. We are apparently the stacked team this season. Myself, I'm not entirely sure yet. I think it will all depend on how well this Mark guy and I can handle the backfield together. From talking to Neal, one things for sure, we're probably the only team where everyone has been cast typed in positions already. And it's a good thing to have an understanding of your role on the team.

Also, I signed up for an intramural team. It was the only team that asked. The team's probably not going to be good enough to win a championship (teammates include Jared, Spack, Abe, and a lot of other decent players, but no stars and no real experience, per se). But it'll be fun. It'll be interesting to see how well we mesh together. We've got 5 games to figure it out though, since the only schedule they could get was in the lower division.

But back to the pickup. It was crowded. Lots of people back to school, and lots of them new. We really needed to set up two fields. A couple of guys went off and started a hot box game. I lost my keys on the playing field and had to go kicking around the grass in the dark for 15 minutes to find them.

So I went home, showered, changed, and went to visit Laura. Her laptop screen was blinking funny, so I offered to fix it. Now this where things start to get funny. I was doing a windows update, and it was taking a long time to reboot. So I figured it had hung up or something, so I turned it off and back on again. This time, Windows ME (what a lousy operating system...and a really don't see too much a difference between it and Windows 98) had a critical error and asked me to reinstall Windows. Well, at the time Laura was playing a game of chess with her friend and so I'm trying to act all casual about it (I get this all the time), trying to recover things. First of all, I figure, I probably turned off the computer while it was updating things, and corrupted the file system. So I'm trying to fix that, but the .dll files are all corrupt, so then I try to use some of the Compaq CDs to do a system restore. Except about the only thing these CDs do (because the computer hadn't been setup for a restore) is completely wipe out your hard drive, or split the partition and create a backup. There was a significant lack of "Are you sure?" prompts, so I ended up doing the latter. This took forever. The entire time I'm talking to Laura of course, and explaining that first of all, I'm an idiot, and that second of all, I can fix it. I think, though, that my problem began with thinking "oh, there's a problem and it needs to be fixed."

Anyways, about midnight, I told her I could fix it tonight, but would have to take it home to avoid Honor Code problems. Besides, I couldn't even run a scandisk because Windows ME makes things so damn inaccessible. I needed some of my troubleshooting software. So I brought it home, promising to return it tomorrow afternoon. I was going to take it apart, back up her files, and reinstall Windows ME, but stupid Compaq put the hard drive in a really weird place and also uses proprietary screws, so I couldn't get the hard drive off. So instead I got to thinking that ME is very similar to 98 and I wondered if I could use the libraries off of an existing Windows installation to replace the corrupted files. To my surprise, it worked. Well, at least got things to a more bootable state. Then I got to looking at the sys.ini file, and remembered the shell setting in there that was pointing to explorer. It was just a hunch, but I wondered if I could use a regular program as the shell—in particular the ie6setup.exe file (all of the corrupted libraries were related to ie6, which I had been installing in the Windows Update). To my delight, it worked, and so after I ran setup, everything worked fine. Almost. Right now I'm running a scandisk to fix a few other problems, and I'd also like to merge the partitions again. And of course, if possible, I'd like to fix the screen glitch. But it's late and scandisk is taking forever. Maybe I'll do that at work tomorrow morning.

Posted September 02, 2003 (11:08 PM) | Comments (1)