Tuesday roadkill report

[jhetley]

Bad day for chipmunks in the fields and forests of eastern Maine.  Two confirmed kills and four or five other splots of the right size and shape but no definitive features.

Windy this afternoon, July sun, I really would have preferred to get out for the bike ride in the relative cool and still of the morning.  But no, a simple phone call turned into a game of tag and I hung around for three hours waiting to sort out a fifteen-second problem.  I hate it when that happens.

May be hauling Elder Son out to the nature center this evening, administering last rites to a Win98 computer and hearing its confession.  Some helpful soul tried to hook up a new "all-in-one" printer to the poor machine, complete with drivers and OCR software and such, and now it doesn't have enough memory for boot-up.  Or maybe it's something else.  Data should be retrievable, even if the machine isn't.  Problem is, of course, that the nature center, by its "nature", attracts a bunch of Luddite employees.  So such things happen.  "RTFM?  Is that some kind of exotic bird sighting?"

15.27 miles, 1:08:30

Comments

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

If that's really what is wrong with it, it should be fixable. Start Windows in safe mode, then start getting rid of the stuff that is causing problems. Feel free to ask me for help if need be. I'm pretty good at figuring out what is wrong from afar.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Elder Son fixes computer FUBARs for a living. However, the question became moot. We arrived at the nature center to find a new computer in the place formerly occupied by the corpse, and with files transferred. Naturally, I received the email message telling us of this development _after_ returning to the parental abode...

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

A new computer is certainly a nice fix for that problem. I'm glad they had the means to do that. The nature centers that I've had dealings with have never had much cash to play with, which makes getting new equipment hard.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

No, this nature center does not have such spare cash on hand. The new computer arrived as a donation -- and you need to apply a discount factor. It's a $299 E-machines "world's cheapest computer" unit, minimal RAM and processor and hard drive, sufficient for word processing but not much more.

But then, that's what they'll use it for.